I agree with what you said in this comment except for:
This could work simply if there were only one admin and the forum was centered around the languages that said admin could understand. However we have various admins with presumably varied knowledge of different languages.
If a topic were started in, let’s say for instance, Greek. If we have one admin who understands Greek and determined the topic to be suitable, what’s is stopping other admins who don’t understand Greek from deleting it because they don’t understand it. What if it were a suitable topic in a language that none of the admins understood, even if multiple users could? There would need to be a mechanism of communication to prevent wrongful deletion of suitable topics.
I’m with you on critical mass. It just hasn’t been reached. As it currently stands, imo, the system works fine. I even make it a point to look at topics in languages I don’t understand. More often than not, I either learn something, or have something to provide to the discussion.
If we’re routinely participating in conversations in random languages, that reinforces the proposition that Subject be stated in English. I think that might be at least a little help to admins, too.
I don’t think so. As moderator I have to look into a newly posted topic and the comments on it. At least to determin if it includes any links that are problematic or obvious spam.
As a user, it’d be annoying to see a potentially interesting topic and then find that it’s in a foreign language when opening it.
I’m still for having one “International forum” where anyone can post in a non-english language. Preferably by adding a “[PL]” for Polish, for example, as Nerd edited for his threads.
The upside of Discourse is we can have sub-categories of categories that appear in the categories’ list. I.e. we can have an International forum and then an International -> Polish forum, and upon vising the International forum the Polish posts also appear. That way we don’t need to resort to bracket-tagging the titles.
It seems this solution will be the best for now; so I’ll start configuring Discourse for it.
OK. And people posting in a language you haven’t created a subforum yet just post into the International forum directly, and if enough people do that, they get their own subforum?
OK, done. There is now an International category and I’ve filtered the recent Polish posts into it.
As of now there are no subforums; I guess after about 5-10 posts in a short (?) period of time, we can create a subforum.
Posts in it are set to not appear on the main page by default. I think there’s a way users can change this for their own front-page, but I’m not quite sure how…
What you did with ‘international’ and ‘main-english’ is other than english language discrimination. In your view ‘international’ world is subdivision of ‘english’ world? How anlgocentric of you!
There must be ‘main international’ and in it subdivision ‘english’ and ‘german’ and so on.
‘Main international’ must be mix of languages with equal rights.
No, that is not my intent at all. In fact of all the people who replied in this thread, including moderators, I think only one other is a native English speaker besides myself. In fact the person who started this topic requesting everyone use English is not a native English speaker.
It is just that English is the general language of the project. Official discussions, bug reports, code comments, developer documentation, etc. all take place in English; those contributing bug reports in non-English would probably be assisted, but in code comments and technical discussions we would probably request they at least attempt to use English, or go through an interpreter.
This is the issue, though: currently this forum’s posts are, thus far, 99% English. We didn’t mandate this, it’s just how things have happened. And so those languages are not “equal” in a de facto sense, and so making them equal de jure does not seem to make much sense.
In the future, if there starts to be significant use of non-English languages (i.e. > 10-20% I guess), we can switch to using “tags” instead of categories. As it stands, the vast majority of users on this forum would prefer to use English it seems, so if and when the status quo changes we can revisit the organization.
I am really not trying to offend anyone here, but set up whatever makes the most sense organizationally given the status quo, and it seems this system of “categories” is it.
Ok, I will say my position in other words:
People must decide language in which they want communicate, this is must be not enforced autocratically from web site administration.
If some one do not know how looks international communication can look at Youtube comments. I’d like to see this style of other language (other people) tolerance here in Haiku’s main web site.
Sure, you can communicate in non-English languages. It’s just that most users and posters on this forum prefer English, even if it’s not their native language, so that we can all understand each other.
YouTube comments do not behave quite the way you might expect, I think. When I look at YouTube comments I see only English ones on the most popular videos; only on less-popular videos where Google cannot find enough English comments does it put comments from other languages at the top. I expect when you look at the most popular videos, you will see comments from your language first. So this is more than a little deceptive on Google’s part.
As I said, in the future, if there are a large portion of users posting in non-English languages, we can rework the forum to support it better. But as that would be a lot of work for very, very little benefit as there are less than 1 non-English post per week on average, this categorization system makes more sense.
Klingon! what a great idea for my new locale efforts for Haiku!
back on topic, I generally disagree in mixing languages in topics. Subforums could works better.
But IMHO just one for all non-english languages (which could be prefixed by ISO code in topic maybe, or sorted automatically by the software depending on users’ locale if possible). This because I’m not sure we would have many topics and traffic (with the notable exception of german perhaps). It would depict an inactive, almost vapourware community, or the well-known “white sheet effect”
I’ve never thought about this before (don’t have any concern about posts or topics in other languages) but it just occurred to me that it effectively segregates the information when trying to search for something. It’s a shame if a solution is found for some issue but is inaccessible to users in other languages, but I guess it’s not easily avoidable…
Hi. Please change International to Non-English or Other Languages or sth. International is if two or more guys from two or more different nations have a conversation, regardless used language. International makes me not think, this is where to post my non-english words.
My 2 cents on the topic, hope I don’t offend anybody, because I don’t intend to
I think we should try to stick to English whenever possible. For the simple reason that I think there would be an overall loss or fragmentation of valuable information if it is split across different languages that some of us may understand and some not. The proposed changes in the forum categories can counter that to some degree but not entirely.
Besides that, when you play around with operating systems and/or develop software (and I doubt there are many real “end users” around here), you need to have at least a basic understanding of English anyway. It doesn’t have to perfect, mine sure isn’t (my native language is German). But I hate having to copy/paste text into Google Translate and then wonder if the translation is correct or not…
I second this emotion. I vote for “Non-English” as “Other Languages” sounds rather exclusive and possibly demeaning to those who prefer communication in languages besides English.
