[FM Discuss] FM futures

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

On Thu, August 4, 2011 7:16 pm, Tomi Toivio wrote:
>> --We can split by language, country, or certain kinds of projects. I
>> have
>> started a booki server for Replacing Textbooks at Sugar Labs, and there
>> are others who might be interested in an alliance.
>>
>
> I think that the smaller languages would have a lot of trouble getting
> started at all without having a lot of manuals available for translation.
> For an example only five million people read and write Finnish, which
> means
> the amount of potential contributors isn't huge. And there are even
> smaller
> languages in the world.

Entirely agreed. That is one of several reasons why I recommend below not
splitting by language, but having language managers working from a common
base.

> My point is that the smaller language communities probably couldn't create
> enough content by themselves without having the opportunity to translate
> manuals written by the larger language communities. And if the goal is
> something like a reasonable coverage of at least all of the most commonly
> used FLOSS programs the task of producing the original content would be
> huge.

Nevertheless language and country communities will need to create some
original content. This is an issue with Circumvention, which is different
in each country, and with IMEs for non-Latin scripts. It will be much more
so for textbook replacements, where substantial local content is needed
for health, agriculture, art, music, literature, history, geography,
business, and civics.

>> --Government by committee is remarkably ineffective. Having a committee
>> set policy and tell a manager to carry it out can work. In tech, the
>> benevolent dictator is commonly preferred, as long as it is possible to
>> fork out from under a dictator who goes off the rails. With GPLed books
>> and manuals, that is no problem.
>>
>
> I remember an important point of management advice from benevolent
> dictator
> Linus Torvalds: "First off, I'd suggest buying "Seven Habits of Highly
> Successful People", and NOT read it. Burn it, it's a great symbolic
> gesture." I don't know what he meant or if this has any relevance to the
> discussion here, I just had to quote that one sooner or later.

I found Up the Organization much more helpful.

> But I don't know if forking documentation projects would be a good idea.
> It
> would seem a waste of resources if different people were making different
> versions of the same original content. Technically it wouldn't be a fork
> if
> they didn't take the content with them. Are there any examples about this?
> And this cannot be compared to encyclopedia-like wikis at all. The process
> of writing a longer manual seems to be completely different from making an
> amount of encyclopedia-like articles about the use of computers.

Forking content is done all the time. Not so much in Free Software, but
certainly in Creative Commons. It is necessary to have the option of
forking e-learning materials in order to experiment with different
approaches to learning, and to permit adaptaption to local requirements.

> --We will have to discuss how to handle multiple translations from a
>> common source, without simply fragmenting by language. I would suggest
>> having a common server, with admins for each language section.
>>
>
> I think that the translation process isn't really very complicated. Just
> make a copy of the manual and then translate it. I noticed very small
> differences in procedure such as some people absolutely want to copy their
> section of the manual into a word processor in order to use their
> translation tools properly. Of course there are some huge differences
> between languages, for an example machine translation is pretty much
> completely useless with Finnish language, while it seems to work quite
> well with some bigger languages.

I just now asked Google Translate to turn part of the Wikipedia article on
Kalevala from Finnish to English. The results are definitely not as good
as for other languages I have used it for, but I wouldn't call them
useless.

> --
> Best Regards
> Tomi Toivio
> Open Source Coordinator
> http://fi.flossmanuals.net/
> tomi at flossmanuals.net
> +358445488856
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
>


-- 
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر
ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks