{"id":1134,"date":"2009-08-23T15:27:18","date_gmt":"2009-08-23T19:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2009-08-23T15:30:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-23T19:30:00","slug":"language-representation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2009\/08\/23\/language-representation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tower of Babel : normalizing language representation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center\"><em>Part of a series on difficult topics from the Wikimedia community<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">There are some perennial projects that take more than a single <strong>barnraising<\/strong> to understand and plan for. One is the issue of supporting different languages equally &#8212; the world&#8217;s largest and smallest languages are both <a href=\"http:\/\/meta.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Table_of_Wikimedia_Projects_by_Size\">underrepresented<\/a> among the projects.\u00a0 While I would like to see Wikimedia become a <strong>model<\/strong> for the rest of the online world in this area, how a global community can provide <strong>support<\/strong>, bugfixes, and advice to different\/new language groups is an issue for many multilingual projects.\u00a0 So I offer these questions to all readers &#8211; feel free to answer them for the projects you are most familiar with.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What technical and other support do various language projects need to become <strong>awesome<\/strong>?<\/li>\n<li>What variations are needed for projects whose main goal is language and cultural <strong>preservation<\/strong>?<\/li>\n<li>What sharing of advice or practices would make <strong>starting<\/strong> new projects easier?<\/li>\n<li>How can established projects help new projects with outreach, <strong>communication<\/strong>, and planning?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Let me offer one example of how this has been difficult to grasp within Wikimedia: discussions on the early <a href=\"http:\/\/marc.info\/?l=intlwiki-l&amp;r=1&amp;b=200110&amp;w=2\">international list<\/a> were generally in English.\u00a0 This led to a certain founder effect among participants, and in how the projects are today framed to the world, from elaborations of the vision to interface design.\u00a0 And this has forked discussions of what language projects need &#8211; those in the language of the project, which can happen easily and <strong>fluidly<\/strong> among its participants and contributors, and those meta-discussions in one or two shared languages with the potential of setting Wikimedia-wide <strong>policy<\/strong> or affecting all projects.<\/p>\n<p>As another example: non-Latin character sets, and cultural differences about editing and participation across different parts of the world, have always been part of discussions about how Wikipedia and its sister projects should <strong>advance<\/strong>.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the early language communities drawn to the project were <a href=\"http:\/\/nostalgia.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/International_Wikipedia\">largely European<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.wikimedia.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=745\">issues<\/a> that only affect non-Latin readers can still take a while to fix (<a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.wikimedia.org\/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&amp;short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&amp;short_desc=rtl&amp;long_desc_type=substring&amp;long_desc=&amp;bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&amp;bug_file_loc=&amp;keywords_type=allwords&amp;keywords=&amp;bug_status=NEW&amp;bug_status=ASSIGNED&amp;bug_status=REOPENED&amp;bug_status=RESOLVED&amp;bug_status=VERIFIED&amp;bug_status=CLOSED&amp;resolution=WONTFIX&amp;resolution=LATER&amp;resolution=---&amp;emailassigned_to1=1&amp;emailtype1=substring&amp;email1=&amp;emailassigned_to2=1&amp;emailreporter2=1&amp;emailcc2=1&amp;emailtype2=substring&amp;email2=&amp;bugidtype=include&amp;bug_id=&amp;votes=&amp;chfieldfrom=&amp;chfieldto=Now&amp;chfieldvalue=&amp;cmdtype=doit&amp;order=Importance&amp;field0-0-0=noop&amp;type0-0-0=noop&amp;value0-0-0=\">for<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Commons:Bugs#Internationalisation\">instance<\/a>, replacements for Roman-alphabet <strong>captcha<\/strong>s, or fixes to javascript and css layouts in corner cases).<\/p>\n<p>What are your examples? What am I leaving out?\u00a0 How can the global community and the Foundation better support small and underrepresented languages?\u00a0 Feel free to leave links to current or historical discussions about problems and opportunities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Part of a series on difficult topics from the Wikimedia community There are some perennial projects that take more than a single barnraising to understand and plan for. One is the issue of supporting different languages equally &#8212; the world&#8217;s largest and smallest languages are both underrepresented among the projects.\u00a0 While I would like to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[210,211,209,217,709],"tags":[1675,13057,3,708,13058],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chain-gang","category-international","category-popular-demand","category-sj","category-wikipedia","tag-language","tag-outreach","tag-support","tag-wikimedia","tag-wikitech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-ii","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1136,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions\/1136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}