I was thinking about this some time ago, and I started thinking about it again due to a recent message in the Riot channel.
Would it make sense to have perhaps categories available for different languages so we can attract people/devs which are not that confident with discussing/posting in English?
I think there must be people out there who would be very interested in participating in the official forum but they cannot write good English, or even read it, so we are probably missing a big opportunity here to get talented people and good thinkers to join the community.
An answer to this could be simply āthere are forums in other languages they can join out thereā, but I think it makes a difference if they can join the official forum.
My guess would be this was already considered by MaidSafe team and postponed, so I thought we could discuss alternatives to make it happen and get more people join the community.
The main issue I see with creating new categories for other languages is that it wouldnāt be easy to moderate them unless the moderators of the forum are able to understand the language of each new category (e.g. Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Russian, etc.).
It would help a lot if Discourse had the ability to have ācategory-specific moderatorsā. that way we could assign moderators to specific categories. there has been discussion about adding this feature to Discourse (e.g. see this topic), but it hasnāt been implemented yet.
How about creating new Riot channels for each language? right now we have #safenetwork:matrix.org, but we could also create other channels such as #safenetwork-de:matrix.org (German), #safenetwork-es:matrix.org (Spanish), #safenetwork-fr:matrix.org (French), #safenetwork-ru:matrix.org (Russian), etc.
that way each channel can be managed independently. one or more community members (who speak the language) can moderate them.
Yes, I imagined that moderating it would be a problem.
That sounds a good idea as a first step and to test if it is really true that there are people out there willing to participate in other languages. If we see good interest we can then work out on the solution on Discourse.
yes, with the real categories on this large forum being the end goal.
Hope we donāt forget about that!! Thatās where the real long-term support will come from. Will give us lots of permanent, informative duscissions in many other languages that people around the world can refer to and learn from, thus starting SAFE Pods everywhere and decentralizing!!!
tl;dr riot channel is definitely not sufficient in itself!
we have so many people here that speak many languages, Iām sure we will find people when we need them. Havenāt we had this argument before?
I remember saying that the other language sections will start out very small (if at all) and therefore will not need moderating until they get larger (which by that point there will be enough people to find moderators)
and we also have a backup (chrome ^^^ HAS AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION BUILT IN!!! JUST RIGHT CLICK ON YOUR PAGE!!!). but like I said above, itās all about the numbers so AS SOON AS THIS IS ACTUALLY A PROBLEM, it will solve itself .
so the problem solves itself! Please donāt continue to let this be a roadblock! It solves itself!
Yes, I know we could easily translate the posts to English. My concern is that adding new categories for other languages would create more workload for moderators (some categories might be very active and have lots of topics). One solution would be to have a category called āother languagesā and only have 1 topic per language. I think that would make it easier to moderate. @moderators what do you think?
Itās perfect because they will undoubtedly start out small, so thatās the perfect solution for the size.
If they do get larger (which makes it easier to find mods too!) then we can maybe weigh the need for multiple topics per language. But that is not a bridge we are anywhere near yet
Yes, but itās in # staff only at the moment. We are looking at how we could implement this the best way. Also want to contact folks that do speak a certain language. So we will update here in the coming days. It probably deserves itās own category etc.
Hey @anon40790172 Can you move that guyās Chinese post to #local for him? I donāt think he understood you. Would be great to have that post exist though, maybe you can help him out
We actually donāt allow any other topics than the standard language topics there. Iāll move the topic to #meta though and open it. Google translate can be used for him to understand, maybe we can find someone who does good translation from English to Chinese and open a Chinese topic in #local.
One question for each non-Latin language will be the preferred translations of āSAFEā and āSAFE networkā. Is there already one known for Chinese?
Thereās perhaps a risk of choosing the wrong inference, though I wonder with some though the better option for reverse translation usually becomes apparent.
