Communications committee/Multilingual mailing list posts

Statement of purpose

The Communications Committee is comprised of representatives from Wikimedia Chapters, active press volunteers and others who help coordinate press and media outreach in their respective regions all over the globe. As such, we want to encourage as much communication as possible, no matter the language. When speaking/writing in English is an impediment, we want to encourage posts in one's native tongue. With translation tools like Google Translate, it should be relatively easy to understand the basic premise of the message. ComCom can and should support multilingual communication.

Non-English posts

Because English is the lingua franca and the most common language spoken by the most people on the list, we suggest the following guidance for non-English posts

• In the subject line, demarcate the primary language of your post or link with two letter abbreviation:
  • [xx] - Subject
• Consider include a short summary at the beginning of your post in English to contextualize or introduce the concept of the link or of the thread.

Example post

From: Bence Damokos

Date: Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 7:29 AM

Subject: [Wmfcc-l] [hu] Is Wikipedia in danger?

To: Communications Committee <wmfcc-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

Hi all,

Here is an article from Népszabadság, one of the bigger Hungarian broadsheets: http://nol.hu/tud-tech/20120806-veszelyben_a_wikipedia_

The article is about the decline in editors on Wikipedia, but for once it is not a translation from English, but based on genuine journalistic work and an interview, with our former board member Gergő Tisza. It goes through the usual demographics (few women, etc.) and mentions that the process of older editors leaving is natural in most communities, the problem lies in them not being replaced by new ones and speculates a bit about the reasons for it (more hierarchy, more rules). It states that the goal of Wikipedia remains to be as usable to as many people as possible, which is going well with more "popular" topics, but less well with the traditional encyclopedic topics, like technology, medicine or law.

It has been republished in a few other online papers.

Best regards,

Bence