Monday, September 28, 2009

What benefit of translatewiki.net as a WMF project ,,


Translatewiki.net tweets. This recent tweet is more then interesting as it indicates that a future where translatewiki.net is a Wikimedia Foundation project is possible. It asks the question, what the benefits and what the drawbacks are of such a move.

Benefits:
  • It will make it obvious that the WMF cares about language support
  • Translatewiki.net will gain more recognition as a project
  • It will  make translatewiki.net more sustainable
  • It may attract more developers to translatewiki.net
  • It will attract more localisers to translatewiki.net
  • More open source applications can be localised at translatewiki.net
Drawbacks:
  • The WMF community may want to influence some of the translatewiki.net policies
  • eh..
The WMF itsekf is not in the habbit of determining policy for its projects, it is people from the communities who sometimes have their expectations. These people join translatewiki.net and once they understand what it is that we do, there are few problems.

It is exciting that translatewiki.net as a WMF project is being considered.. Do you see any other advantages or drawbacks ?
Thanks,
     GerardM

2 comments:

Mike Peel said...

Why not have it as a project of Wikimedia Nederlands rather than the WMF? Not all Wikimedia projects need to be hosted by the WMF.

One potential downside is that it could cause people to associate translatewiki.net entirely with the WMF, rather than something that services multiple projects run by different people. It would depend on how obvious the hosting provider was - whether it was just in the bottom corner, or whether it was incorporated into the logo.

Having single user login to translatewiki.net could bring big advantages, though.

GerardM said...

Translatewiki.net provides only for 1/259+ of functionality that is important to the Dutch projects. If anything this makes it an ideal global project for the foundation itself.

I do not know, do not think that translatewiki.net needs to make changes, it is already a great project in its own right.
Thanks,
GerardM