User:Bggoldie/Мнения/Anglo-American stewards

Поради щото англоговорящите са достатъчни тъпички да разбират други езици, се налага да им го напиша на техния си език. Драги читателю, ако не ти се занимава с ингилизкия, питай и ще ти се отговори. И моля да ме извиниш ако не пиша идеално на чуждия за мен език!

In the second 2006 election for stewards I voted against all candidates having English as main language. Obviously single-line justification was hard to understand to some people, so I have to explain it in detail.

I have nothing personal against those people. It is not about past conflicts, edit warring, etc. It is all about the principles of mine!

Background

In the beginning St. Jimbo created the experience and the knowledge. And the knowledge was without form, and void; and the ignorance was upon the face of the mind. And the Spirit of Thought moved upon the face of the reason. And St. Jimbo said, Let there be encyclopaedia: and there was encyclopaedia. And St. Jimbo saw the encyclopaedia, that it was good: and St. Jimbo divided the encyclopaedic from the non-encyclopaedic. And St. Jimbo called the light Information, and the darkness he called Sources. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And St. Jimbo said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the reason, and let it divide the reasons from the reasons. And St. Jimbo made the firmament, and divided the reasons which were under the firmament from the reasons which were above the firmament: and it was so. And St. Jimbo called the firmament Nupedia. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And St. Jimbo said, Let the reasons under the Nupedia be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And St. Jimbo called the dry land Wikipedia; and the gathering together of the reasons called he NPOV: and St. Jimbo saw that it was good.

One may ask: where is the problem?

Anglo-American focus

Only one of the reasons that Wikipedia and all projects along it have Anglo-American focus is that Jimbo Wales is an English-speaking citizen of U.S.A. Obviously as result of that simple fact Wikipedia started first as an English-language project and only afterwards reached the deep international waters.

OTOH the English-speaking population of US+UK+Canada+Australia make in total less than 400 mln. people. This makes slightly over 6% of the Earth's population. Let overestimate the size of British Commonwealth and make it 7%. Even if someone tends to assume all India population (1110 mln., quite impressive) as English-speaking, it would still be under 23%.

So it comes to one's mind - what language are all those other people speaking? The answer of course is "a lot of languages".

Translation

Then comes the translation issue. Many people (including me) tend to overestimate their capabilities, and language skills is not an exception. A person might consider him-/herself rather fluent in particular language but it is only one of the prerequisites of being a good translator. All babelfish programs are good translators in that sense (not to talk how many people rely on babelfish for reading otherwise uncomprehensive languages).

However a real translation also needs knowledge of the culture developed around the target language. Babelfish cannot be of any help there, someone from Homo sapiens species have to help.

Culture

If one dares to dive deeper in the Wikipedia and Foundation Wikimedia world, (s)he will see en.wiki filled will information about English-speaking countries, sometimes reaching as far as absurd nonsense. At the same time it lacks sufficient information about the pillars of many major cultures. Similarly fr.wiki is covering French topics, ru.wiki is preoccupied with Russian topics, etc. For example how could a Texan understand the difference between "a Russian" and "a Rossiyanin".

And that's all I am talking about! The cultural background contains all those very well known things which are out of question. If one is not familiar with other party's culture, knowing the language will miss the unsaid context. We can talk about the weather, we can gather around the table, but for example will be unable to understand non-international jokes, or solve crosswords in the daily newspaper - the communication is lacking depth.

People born across The Big Puddle simply cannot understand what it really means multi-culturalism.

Stewards

How all of the above is affecting the stewards? The answer is hidden in one's personal perception of the best answer to the question "what are the stewards for?". The whole definition here on Meta is one and a half rows long: "Stewards can give and remove arbitrary user access levels, including sysop, bureaucrat, steward, checkuser, and bot, on any Wikimedia wiki. An additional level, oversight, is available at en.wikipedia." I can see few options:

• Taken lightly, that seems to be some sort of super-admins which have nothing to do beyond assigning admin priviledges based on community vote. I doubt it is so but if it is indeed, the current ammount of stewards (16) ought to be more than enough.
• Maybe it is "Who will guard the guards" (the administrators). It such case one has to evaluate the steward's possible actions if involved in a conflict. If they are more than just well equipped admins, we have two more subvariants:
  • it is about stewardship on en.wiki only. Already most English-world topics are covered, so the new conflicts more likely would be around non-English concepts. Therefore knowledge on English is a must but people with more open mind are highly desirable;
  • it is about generic stewardship over all projects in all languages. In such case who is going to assist for all those unrepresented languages/countries/cultures.

Vote justification

Here is my biggest concern - looking for main language/culture/mindset in the current list one can find 6 with English, 2 for Dutch, French and Italian, and only one with Chinese and Japanese. None with Spanish, none with German, none with Russian (I doubt the Polish kid can understand it), what to talk about Arabic, Hindi or other Indian languages (theoretically there is one claimant with a rather useless hi-2), Indonesian. Africa is underrepresented in the real world, and there is nothing one can criticize about Wikimedia projects.

So here is my approach - I vote against people with redundant knowledge. The current English-speaking stewards are more than enough to cover English Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, etc. (and even have spare time for Wikia). Thousand thanks to all those candidates for all their effort but I might support any such candidate if and only if the amount of English-speaking stewards falls under 20%. As of December 2006 this means if the number drops to 3 out of 16 (+3 inactive) - not any time soon.