[OSM-talk] Voting for adding the Translate extension to the OSM Wiki now open

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 22.04.22 23:55, Seth Deegan wrote:
> Voting for the proposal to add the Translate extension to the OSM Wiki 
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Add_Translate_extension_to_Wiki> 
> has now started.

I see the voting has prematurely been aborted due to new information 
about the plugin.

My main concern for voting against this proposal was that, from what I 
understood, the underlying idea is that

* all information about all tags should ideally be the same in all languages

* if something diverges from "the global information" in one language 
that diverging information must either be translated to English to 
become part of the "the global information", or at the very least it 
must be clearly identified which is the differing part so that it can 
somehow be isolated in a language-specific subpage.

I am not sure if I have perhaps misunderstood something. One other voter 
who was in favour of the plugin has written: "I am voting yes so that 
the fledgling mapping community in Puerto Rico can more easily maintain 
Spanish-language documentation that recognizes their country-specific 
tagging nuances; so that developers in Vietnam don't need fluency in the 
wiki's particular dialect of English in order to interpret our data 
correctly; but most of all, so that we can try this out and see if it 
works for us. Unlike with a tagging proposal, we will have a very 
decisive solution if this turns out to be a terrible idea: uninstall the 
extension."

The way I see it, the "fledgling mapping community in Puerto Rico" would 
first have to analyse the differences between what their current 
documentation says and what the English version says in order to then 
produce a document that describes the differences. Where those 
differences are nunances (for example, where the English version says 
that something "is usually done" and the Spanish version says it "should 
be done"), people will often not go through the effort to actually 
retain these flavours because it would sound silly to write down 
explicitly "for Puerto Rico, replace 'usually done' with 'should be 
done'" or so).

In my mind, a move to this extension would massively impact the 
understanding of the wiki; it would cement the dominance of English, and 
every local information that diverges from the mainstream English would 
have to be explicitly asserted as a deviation from the mainstream, 
whereas currently someone can document something in their language 
totally independent of what is said in other langauges.

This, in my eyes, represents a cultural change and the exact opposite of 
what the voter above painted in rosy diversity colours.

Being a cultural, not a technical change, it will be impossible to 
simply revert it by deinstalling the extension.

(The same commenter said, in a different context, that a 50% majority 
should be enough to install the plugin and anything else was setting the 
hurdle too high, again claiming that you can simply uninstall the 
extension if you don't like it. I think this is assumption is naive at 
best - unless concrete plans are presented how all the changes made in 
support of the extension would be rolled back with little effort.)

In order for me to support the installation of this extension, I would 
have to have certainty that the aforementioned rosy language "the 
mapping community in Puerto Rico can more easily maintain 
Spanish-language documentation that recognizes their country-specific 
tagging nuances" is actually true and not just an excellent exercise in 
rhetoric. I want to see a concrete example how someone who speaks only 
Spanish, only German, only Polish, can go to their language's 
highway=path page and add some information there in their language...

... WITHOUT having to navigate to a sub-section or sub-page that is 
reserved for language-specific stuff ("you can't edit the stuff up here, 
please go down there to add your information")

... WITHOUT having to fear that something they added will be overridden 
by conflicting information a second person has added to the English page 
and a third person has translated to Spanish/German/Polish

... WITHOUT having to first mentally dissect what the international 
standard is and how whatever they want to add diverges or not from the 
international standard and then clad it in appropriate markup

I'm willing to be convinced but frankly, what I've heard until now seems 
largely marketing-speak and empty promises. "There will be some corner 
of the wiki where people can document special cases" is not enough. In 
fact, I even object to the idea that there is one standard documentation 
and then possible "divergence" from that. One voter in favour of the 
plugin writes "the LibreOffice wiki translation process is so much 
better now" and this explains quite well what I feel - I think there's a 
mindset that assumes OSM is some kind of software like LibreOffice and 
everything is about describing the features of this software. But 
tagging standards and conventions are the result of a social process, 
not the description of the capabilities of some software.

And I think that everyone who says "let's just try that, we can always 
go back" knows full well that it will only be weeks until it will be 
impossible to go back.

If we want to install this for a "trial" then we should clearly limit 
which pages it is to be used on (and those should not be tagging pages). 
Use it for a description of the API or the data model, or the history of 
OpenStreetMap or something. I can live with that.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"