Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Transition Team/2016/Updates/CW20 update

As a member of an emerging community, the Bulgarian one, I disagree that anyone wants "to invite also emerging communities". Translating the survey into "the 9 major languages of our projects" is not enough. Letting emerging communities participate, and in my region there are quite a few active ones, who collaborate on some of the largest projects in the wikiverse like Wikimedia CEE Spring and Wiki Loves Earth. We might not have large communities, but together we build a very large and strong one and we work hard for bringing free knowledge to the world. Depriving those of our members, who do not know those "9 major languages" of the right to participate in the discussion about the future of our global movement, does not make me feel that the wished change in direction transparency transparency is on track; this rather makes me feel as in a large corporation where a small group of people decide about the future of the organisation and pretend to engage the masses by populistic pseudo-measures.

The only two languages of the 30 countries of Central and Eastern Europe among those in the survey are Polish and Russian. 838 active Ukrainianian editors, 658 active Turks, 638 active Czechs, 419 active Serbs, 418 active Hungarians and 5501 active editors from the region in total will not be able to answer in their own language (reference: Wikimedia CEE Spring 2016/Goals). I plead that the money that we donate be used for translating the questions at least in the languages with more than 200 active editors, or at least that volunteers are allowed to translate the questions. Furthermore I request that in order to get more input the survey runs for a month instead of a week. Important decisions should not be taken in a hurry. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 21:02, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

(reposted from wiki-l, where this question was raised) I agree in principle. I think we should have more than just 9 most dominant translated languages, and as the bottom line we should allow for additional translations to be made.

However, the most important principle that the ED search committee assumed was speed. For quite a while we have been considering if we can afford several weeks for the survey (with translations, before and after, adding about a month to our search, over just 1 language version). We decided that we definitely need input from the communities other than just the English one, but we made a hard choice to go just for the ones we could have had speedily translated.

This is highly suboptimal, and I understand your disappointment. From my point of view, this is something we need to improve in the future - perhaps by finding a large, multilanguge translation agency (especially since the quality of raw output varied and we had to make serious proof reading with the help of ad hoc volunteers), and also making translating into some 20-30 languages a default in important cases. This time we wanted to go with a quick general survey, hoping that the choices we're asking about will not differ radically between languages (since our culture is very specific). We will know from the results if this intuition was more or less right (that is, if there will be significant differences between the languages we went with). Pundit (talk) 15:45, 7 June 2016 (UTC)