[FM Discuss] FM futures

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

On Mon, August 8, 2011 12:53 pm, Tomi Toivio wrote:
> 2011/8/8 <mokurai at earthtreasury.org> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Seems like approximately 20% of Finnish manuals have been written here
> instead of just translated.

My only prior experience with Finnish users was with the I-APL project in
the 1980s. The FinnAPL people told us that Finnish manuals would not be
needed, since Finns learned English. I didn't understand that position,
but I didn't argue with them about what they needed. ^_^ There is now a
more advanced APL under GPL3, so the question arises again.

Have the manuals written in Finnish been translated to other languages?

> But some of the translated manuals have been
> updated into new software versions - I don't know if this would need to be
> centralized somehow as well, so that the updates wouldn't be done
> separately
> in each language... And even then there is a need to document the version
> of
> the software that has been fully localized, which isn't always the latest
> available version... It might be impossible to synchronize the updates.

That's the value of maintaining history. Manuals can be available for each
version in use. But you raise an interesting implementation question. Can
we link versions in different languages for a particular version of a
software package? I am not aware of any such function in booki.

> Circumvention is kinda funny since it seems like we don't have any
> censorship right now,

Not even in schools? If not, congratulations.

> so it would be a bit too early to translate that
> one. Maybe it should be available pre-emptively. :)

It should be available in languages of countries without censorship for
the benefit of those helping people in other countries. Anybody can run a
Tor router, for example.

> But one thing that should be considered is what to do when there is
> another wiki focusing on the same area.

A very large question. Not only other Wikis, but any other form of
documentation, FAQ, help site, forum...

> Like there already is one wiki doing Linux
> command line documentation and they don't have a long manual like FM has,
> but on the other hand it doesn't seem like they are going to edit the FM
> manual either... Would it be possible to kind of share the manual between
> two wikis? Ie. copy the manual into the other wiki and then copy the
> changes
> back to FM every 6 months or so?

Normally I would say to post our URL into the Wiki, and invite cooperation
on getting Wiki changes into our manual continuously.

> This is more important for a smaller
> language community, since it seems like there necessarily isn't a huge
> amount of potential contributors to FLOSS documentation, and even these
> are splitting into various overlapping documentation projects.

Some small language communities are strongly active in Free Software. It
isn't the size of the population that determines levels of contribution.
Let us turn that around, and talk of very large language communities with
small groups of contributors, and how to recruit more. For example, it
would be quite difficult for users of Simplified Chinese characters in
mainland China to contribute to a Circumvention book, but we have enough
volunteers originally from China, but now living elsewhere, to do a
translation. There are parts of Africa that have only gotten fiber optic
Internet in the last year, where visibility of Free Software is still
quite low.

> --
> Best Regards
> Tomi Toivio
> Open Source Coordinator
> http://fi.flossmanuals.net/
> tomi at flossmanuals.net
> +358445488856
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>


-- 
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