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?
I sent emails to
a user who is a Tech/Ambassador
and others who’re interested in machine translation on this.
A bit late to share it here, but still relevant:
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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.
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Does the Foundation have an open meeting rule? If not, maybe I should suggest to establish one.
What do you mean by an open meeting rule?
It’s about ensuring transparency and inclusiveness of communication between the Foundation and users.
The idea is stemmed from open meeting laws, aka the Sunshine Law in the United States.
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.
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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.
I hope this helps. 
Greetings,
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.
If you are interested, or know someone who may be interested, you can read the job description and apply at the following link: Job Application for Community Facilitator, Movement Strategy and Governance (Japan) (Contract) at Wikimedia Foundation
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This was just posted at Diff:
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Sharing a blog post from today:
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Dear friends from the Japanese community, writing to share again that the 2022 Board of Trustee election community voting has started. 
Have you given the election compass a try? You can use this tool in Japanese - click the menu bar on the right and change the language setting.
There is also a short video on this meta page introducing more about what Board of Trustees do; it has Japanese subtitles as well.
Please do not hesitate to let us know if you have any question!
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!
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Any latest statics, Thank you for asking! I replied on The 2022 Board of Trustees election Community Voting period is now open - #11 by Qgil-WMF.
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:
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Btw, Movement Communications team is now recruiting translators for Japanese 
. If you are interested, please write to movementcomms@wikimedia.org to apply!
皆さん、こんにちは。
ユニバーサル行動規範執行ガイドライン改訂委員会は、改定版執行ガイドラインの下書きについてコメントを求めています。これはユニバーサル行動規範 (UCoC)のために設置されます。再検討期間は2022年9月8日から2022年10月8日までです。
委員会では2022年3月に終了したコミュニティーの投票と同じく5月から7月までのコミュニティー討論から集められたアイディアを基にこの下書きのガイドラインを改訂するのに協力しました。
- UCoCコンディションの種類や目的、適用可能性を確認する。
- 専門家でない人々が取っ付き易い翻訳や知識のための言語を単純化する。
- 賛否などの決定の概念を調査する。
- 告発者と被告発者のプライバシーのバランスを再検討する。
2022年10月8日まで、委員会はこの改訂版に対するコメントや提案を求めています。ここから、改訂委員会はコミュニティの意見をもとにした、将来のガイドラインの改訂を期待しています。
誰もが、さまざまな場所でコメントを共有できます。ファシリテーター（進行役）は、どの言語ででも、改訂版ガイドラインの会話ページやメールでコメントすることを歓迎されます。コメントはまた、翻訳の会話ページ、ローカルでの議論、あるいは円卓会議、会話の時間にも共有できます。 UCoCの執行ガイドライン下書き案については、生中継での議論が計画されています。メタで時間と詳細を確認してくださ: 会話の時間
ファシリテーション（進行役）チームは、この再検討の期間中に、コミュニティの多数の人たちに手を差し伸ばしてください。もしあなたが、コミュニティで会話が起こらないことがわかれば、議論を主催してください。ファシリテーターはあなたが会談を設定する手伝いをするでしょう。議論は取りまとめられ、2週間ごとに起草委員会（下書きを書く委員会）に示されます。要旨 はここ（英語) で公開される予定です。
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The Asia-Pacific call, scheduled for Friday, September 16, 10:00 UTC (your local time), will have Japanese interpretation set up. Looking forward to see you there – sign up to attend!
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