International Communities

Question

Hi everyone!
I'm getting a bit of free time, and wanted to express some thoughts I've been having.
For some time now, the links to the international forums have been removed from the front page, and placed under a link called "Non-English Forums".
This was a move that (at least to the Spanish community) has not benefited us. I'm not sure about the others, but i think they weren't either.
The thing is that Arch Linux needs some localized communities, so it can start to grow outside English speaking countries. All the international Arch sites were founded with that idea I think, and lately, after meeting some more people in my country using Arch, i found out they didn't know about the Spanish (or more precisely Hispanic) Community, and so, they didn't contribute with documentation, answers or projects.
Just moments ago, i found a couple of post about someone trying to help with the translation of the wiki to Spanish (in Dusty's wiki volunteers post). He was about to start from scratch, because (it seems) he didn't knew about the Spanish community or Wiki. Even though this could be his fault, no one pointed out that there was such a community, and that he could use the articles there to bring them back to the official wiki. Or maybe, start contributing there.
I think Arch is not paying enough attention to their international users, and by not promoting the international communities, its hurting them and ultimately, itself.
So, I wanted to propose a couple of things, although not great ones, they at least should help a bit:
1) If the international communities links are going to stay under a page other than the front one, then, call this link "International Communities" or "International forums". Not the actual "Non-English".
2) Keep the links up-to-date. The German one changed quite some time ago.
3) Link to the sites, not directly to the forums (this is the French case, although i dont know if they requested it this way).
4) Make more accessible the templates and systems used for the page style. I noticed that the German and French sites have the (if not the same) look and feel of the original Arch site (at least in the Front Page and Wiki). How do you do that? Is there any page documenting this?
I hope some of this is taken into account, there are plenty of interesting things for the international communities to do (primary concern is localization), but we cant do it without the help of Arch itself. It would be nice if one of the developerts, TUs or manteiners would take care of the 'international matter' and start integrating the different communities for the common goal of promoting Arch.
Regards,
Leonardo Gallego
www.archlinux.com.ar

Answer 1

For the most part, I agree with all of this, trying to achieve equality among the languages is a high priority for me. However, I would like to propose a different solution: consolidating all the communities.
The international communities sprang up because interested users wanted to help support Arch in their own language. This is WONDERFUL. Arch itself has become more and more internationalized, and a lot of the devs are non-English, so they know the issues. This is not the case in the "official" Arch community.
However, I don't like that the international communities are all separated. They have very little in common and are all run by different people to varying degrees of quality. There is not much in the way of interlinking or interaction between the different communities.
To me, the ideal solution is to have only one wiki, and only one forum. The wiki can be internationalized so that each page is available in different languages, and the forum can either have a single subforum for each language (in the cases where there are not very many users of that language), or several subforums for each language if the language is popular enough. The benefits are that wiki pages can link to each other (so someone who knows three languages can find the page in one language and if they prefer to read it in another they can easily find the other translation), that multilingual forum users can get to know each other in a single place instead of frequenting different communities, and perhaps most importantly, only one set of software needs to be maintained, rather than duplicating effort to maintain forums and wikis by by members of different communities. I'm not a big fan of segregation.
I don't really know of any technical or social reasons not to do this (I'm sure they will be mentioned), but the political barriers may be pretty big. I know from experience that it feels nice to be ranked among the well known and respected heads of your community. Having all this integration can diminish that sense of self-worth. Plus managing smaller projects independently is most certainly easier than trying to coordinate and cooperate to manage a larger one.
I think its obvious that if the forums and wikis were consolidated, more forum advisers and wiki maintainers would be required to manage the larger project. The ideal choices for these positions would be the people that are currently doing them in the current international communities. I'm just not sure if many people would be interested in this kind of integration; I would like feedback from the other communities on it.  The response was slightly negative when we talked about subforums a while back (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=25959), but the main reason was that it would split the international communities. What I am proposing is that the community is already split (based on nationality) and that it would be nice to combine them.
Thanks for any feedback on the idea.
Dusty
PS: Regardless of response, I think sud_crow's suggestions are fair and should be taken into account ASAP, even if this bigger project is accepted.