Re: [gentoo-project] wiki: bad top-down localization approach

On 10/19/11 9:34 PM, Peter Volkov wrote:
> Funny ... those who are most interested in having language-specific
> pages are unable to take part in our discussion due to language
> limitations ;) But still they ping me in IRC/xmpp so partially they
> pushed me onto this topic.
>
> В Срд, 19/10/2011 в 15:43 +0200, "Paweł Hajdan, Jr." пишет:
>> On 10/19/11 3:31 PM, Christian Ruppert wrote:
>>>> Hello. While it is not tool late, could you guys reconsider top-down
>>>> localization approach decided on last meeting[1]?
>>>>
>>>> There are language specific things that will be be kept out of wiki
>>>> only due to this policy. For example I don't see any reason to write
>>>> article about use of Russian cryptography algorithms in Gentoo in any
>>>> language but Russian. There is no need to have this article in
>>>> English since nobody will read it.
>>
>> Maybe those rare cases can just use the unofficial wiki? It seems to me
>> that it would support that scenario.
>
> Why?

Why I think the unofficial wiki would support the scenario? I don't
know, this was just a guess, but I think someone wrote in the thread
that it would.

Why do I think people who want to write say Russian-only articles should
use the unofficial wiki?

1. Because they can, and it works, and official wiki at least initially
wouldn't.

2. Then you have something, and you can move this over to official wiki
later when it supports it. It's easier to convince people to start
supporting this when you have an existing high quality set of articles.

> Well, I don't have statistics for now and I can start poll on gentoo.ru
> to get back with results, but my guess is that about 90% of Russian
> community users are unable to write English documentation. Still there
> are active users who share their solutions fixes/ideas.

That's good,

> Last week my co-worker installed Gentoo based on "misleading and
> partially wrong" but still Russian only documents. He is practically
> unable to read English well but uses Ubuntu for many years and now I've
> forced him to use Gentoo (Yay! :) ) Also he programs php and yet there
> are lots of technical books in Russian.

Why don't we have an official Russian translation of the Handbook then?
IMHO it's even more important than having Russian-only articles on
not-yet-existing official wiki.

>> I think for non-technical users it can make a difference.
>
> I think vice versa. In technical literature the number of words is very
> limited so it's possible to learn some basic words and be able
> understand a "general" idea of the document. Code examples or listings
> helps here very much. But this "understanding" is not the same as
> writing English. Reading != writing.

Right, good point.

>>> We also use English for our Mailinglists, IRC, Forums, Bugzilla and so
>>> on, why? Because everybody can read it.
>>
>> Yeah.
>
> Bad example since there are Russian mailing lists, IRC, forums and users
> requested me many times to create Russian bugzilla :)

Nobody prevents anyone from creating an unofficial one, but I'm not
going to fix bugs reported to it. ;-)

>>> Another *bad* example are translated error messages.
>>> Do you like to get bug reports with German error logs?
>>
>> +1
>
> np here. If error message is unreadable I just request additional
> information.

That introduces some delays, and sometimes reporters fail to post the
requested info. It's generally much easier if you get the right thing
from the start.

> That said I see that you already set on this. Well... Let's see how it
> goes in real life but it'll be great if there will be no such
> requirement "hardcoded". It'll be cool if you provide mechanism to allow
> easy extension for language specific pages in future.

My understanding is that it could possibly be changed in the future.