Recently the Wikimedia Language Engineering team met a couple of volunteers from Japanese Wikipedia to discuss the use of machine translation in this project. The main request of the team was the creation of a request on Phabricator, to make this request official and have at least one designated place to discuss it. Does anyone one whether this Phabricator task has been created, or whether there are plans to create one?
Someone sent me this link with a report about this meeting. Bottom line, if the Japanese Wikipedia community wants to change the Content Translation setup, the first step is to communicate this officially through a Phabricator task. Discussions on-wiki, here, and in video calls are useful to that end, but as a competent to the request on Phabricator.
Since the WMF is a private entity, not governmental, we don’t have to go that far. However, we elect BOTℍ members. Thus, we should have an opportunity to observe and educate ourselves about elected officials’ and their administrative arms’ operations as well as promote informed decision making. We cannot learn from unnecessary closed door meetings, and that would add up to distrust between the WMF and communities.
It’s also about sharing knowledge and empowering and engaging people, the Wikimedia’s very fundamental missions, albeit the knowledge is internal administrative/operational information in this case.
I asked the proponents of this meeting to have a public community meeting instead, and they explained why in this specific case it was better to have this conversation first. For us, community conversations with everyone involved are way simpler and scalable than separate and private discussions. If we accepted this exception it is because clearly there are some topics that are very important to the Japanese Wikipedia community, but for [historical reasons] there hasn’t been much dialog until recently. We wanted to be respectful of this fact.
We made very clear in that meeting that all we can do in such a situation is to inform and clarify, not to decide anything. Just like in this forum thread we can inform and clarify, but not decide anything. This is why we insist on the importance of creating a Phabricator task because that turns many conversations into a community request.
In case there are interested Japanese community members, the Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a contract job working with the Japanese community on Movement Strategy and Governance.
Wikipedia in Japanese is currently the most underrepresented community in the vote – see this statistic. On the other hand, the current number of voters (51) is almost double than the number of voters at this point of the 2021 election. Bad news? Good news? Let’s see how the trend continues!
Dear friends, writing to also let you know that for the board of trustee election, you can also find the videos of candidates’ responses to community questions on Youtube; therefore you can also use auto-translation to Japanese to watch them. Please see the links below: