WiserEarth Editors
Collaboration in serving the greater WiserEarth community
As active community members, we would like to make this group into a gathering point where we can work together to transform WiserEarth.org into an effective platform of support for the global community of concerned citizens and organizations who are working to create a more just and sustainable world. ...learn more
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Nov 20, 2007
Updated: Nov 27, 2009
Membership: Invitation Only
Semi-Private
Topic: Localization of WiserEarth Editors group
Posts (1 - 9 of 9)
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A collaboration with GLobal Voices Online (i proposed this once before) ... they have an incredible translation project going on...
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Thanks for the suggestion Deborah. Can you tell me more about Global Voices Online and where you think the collaboration could be? We already are using Launchpad for translations and have a lot of the site translated already. In terms of my original idea, I was asking whether everyone agrees that we need different editors group per language. |
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Global Voices makes sense if we have specific content we want to translate (and probably not the WiserEarth interface). But I'm guessing that most people are going to be happy with their content in their native language and relatively few people are going to want to translate wikis etc into other languages. WiserEarth Editor groups in different languages is not so much about translating as it is moderating, supporting and connecting in a specific language with a specific language community.
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I'm thinking that most of the editors group processes and pages need to be put in separate editors group (in other languages). That would facilitate usage, translation and monitoring of those pages better.
However, I see the benefit of centralizing the discussion forum in the main editors group and having all editors be part of it. Even if discussions are in different languages, having it on all editors' watchlist and using tools like Google Translate would help us collectively solve an issue and diffuse better the knowledge gained among all editors.
So, I propose that:
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totally misread your q, peggy:)
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In fact further to Deborah's suggestion, it would be good if we could use a translation tool to help us translate the WikiPages (I don't think we can do it on Launchpad) as right now we have no way to track changes made to each WikiPage by looking at the history which is time consuming and not that user friendly.
So going forward I recommend that we use some software to help us maintain consistency of content across all the different language versions for the Wikis - right now it is very manual (I see something has changed and then edit it on the language group) which is Ok if we have a few languages, but starts getting very complex when we have 4 or more different languages to translate and we need to get translations done quickly.
To Peggy's question, I think it is important to have an editors group in each language, but maybe our restrictions as to who can join this group have to be slightly less strict ...maybe more of a 'super user group'...and that we invite the initial most active members to automatically join this group (just as we did in the early stages of the English editors group). |
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Here's what Global voices used - they created a project called Lingua
Project Lingua seeks to amplify Global Voices in languages other than English with the help of volunteer translators. It will open lines of communication with non-english speaking bloggers and readers of GV by translating main GV site content into other languages. |
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@Camilla: Assuming we have a chief editor / community manager for each language that is recruiting and managing the Editors groups in each language I would go with the more formal process for accepting Editors into the community - i.e. as is now. Editors need to have a grounding in what WiserEarth is about in order to be effective. Plus it seems to me we don't need to have too many per language. Probably a ratio of 1 to 250 active users would be sufficient.
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As you all know, WiserEarth is getting right now translated in Spanish, French, and many other languages. We want to start ensuring that we replicate the governance of the Editor's group in those languages.
I propose that each language has its own editors group (We need to assume that a lot of editors in those languages will not speak English).
The idea is to have the Chief Editor of those languages be part of the current WiserEarth Editors group, and of course be close to Bowo.
Any thoughts? Suggestions?