# Equitable Governance in Multilingual Wikipedia


I have been thinking about the issue of "equitable access to governance
in globally distributed multilingual organizations" for several years
now. That's a mouth-full, but basically the idea is that you have
organizations like Wikipedia, the KDE project (an open-source desktop)
or iCommons. Although these kind of organizations are often legally
based in the US or another given country (KDE is in Germany), anyone are
invited to contribute from around the world, and they often also have
chapters based on language or nationality, where people can make huge
contributions without speaking English (Wikipedia is the classic
example).

However, even though each Wikipedia version has a lot of freedom to set
its own policies, it is still part of a much larger movement. The
decisions on movement-wide changes, on what the Wikimedia Foundation
should work on, etc, are mostly conducted in English. Whether it be on
mailing lists, discussion pages, or international conferences. This
excludes many people from participating, however solving it is a very
thorny question. When I was invited to the[Critical Point of View:
WikiWars conference](http://www.cis-india.org/news/wikiwars) in
Bangalore recently (see [my
tweets](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/01/14/tweets-from-critical-point-of-view-wikiwars-conference-in-bangalore/)),
I thought it would be a good chance for me to think more deeply and
constructively about these issues, and see if I could come up with some
suggestions.

This is doubly relevant because of the [Peer2Peer
University](http://p2pu.org), which is planning to expand to offer
courses in more languages. How can we ensure that the course-organizers
and students in those courses still feel like empowered parts of the
community?

With this presentation, I try to make two points. First of all, to make
people cognizant that there *is* a problem. Secondly, to realize that
there is no simple solution, but that we might be able to mitigate the
problem, if we put our best minds to it.

I have embedded below the presentation I gave (15 minutes), with synched
audio. You can also download only [the audio
MP3](http://reganmian.net/file/WikiWars-Bangalore-Jan2010.mp3) (5MB).
Video will be published later, and I'll link to it at that time. Below
the presentation (mostly below the fold) I've also included my detailed
"note of interest" for the conference. We are hoping to develop this
further into a book-chapter or a part of a book-chapter, so I would love
any kind of feedback, more ideas, or criticism from people!

[Equitable Governance in Multilingual
Wikipedia](http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang/equitable-governance-in-multilingual-wikipedia "Equitable Governance in Multilingual Wikipedia")

View more [documents](http://www.slideshare.net/) from
[houshuang](http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang).

**Equitable Governance in Multilingual Wikipedia***Detailed interest
note for WikiWars 2010 by Stian Håklev* Wikipedia began as an
English-language project, but rapidly became a very international
project, with editions in 270+ languages. Initially, each language was
hosted on the same website, but soon, individual wikis were set up for
each language. Thus, each language fostered its own community, with all
communication happening in the given language on a localized Mediawiki
platform. When visiting different Wikipedias, it is interesting to see
the different community norms and standards that have emerged, for
example different criteria for featured articles, notability, gaining
admin status, etc.

Thus we have communities around the world using Wikipedia in their own
language, spending large amounts of time and energy contributing to
articles, and also participating actively in governance and discussion
in their community. However, the different Wikipedias are also impacted
by decisions made at the central level, that cover all the different
Wikipedias. To what extent is this discussion and governance process
accessible to users who do not speak English well?

**Methods of communication for central coordination of Wikipedia
(Wikimedia)**Wikipedia is a part of the larger Wikimedia family of
projects, which also includes projects like Wikiversity, Wiktionary,
Commons, etc. Discussion for all of these projects, and across all
languages, is supposed to happen on Meta. Meta is supposed to be
multilingual, however as of 2004, 85% of the material posted there was
in English. I don’t have newer figures, but despite the fact that there
are facilities for translating Wikipages on Meta-Wiki, and some projects
and standards for promoting translation, anecdotal evidence suggests
that translation is very spotty, if available at all.

As an example, if I enter the front page of http://meta.wikimedia.org, I
will see a list of “Meta in many languages”. Let us assume that I am a
Japanese user - Japanese is the second most popular Wikipedia in terms
of hits, with 1,3 million hits per hour (as of Nov 30, 2009), and
English knowledge among Japanese is often limited. I would select to see
Meta in Japanese, and I receive a very deceptively nice Japanese page
with a number of links, to ongoing discussions about new projects,
requests for adminship, links to mailing lists and IRC channels, news,
etc. However, with very few exceptions, when I click on any of these
links, the resulting page is in English. Thus if I as a Japanese user,
who have made large an important contributions to both the content and
the governance of the Japanese Wikipedia, decide that I want to
participate in the central coordination, I have no venue except to learn
English.

As mentioned above, there are also IRC channels, and a large number of
mailing lists, including foundation-l, which discusses the legal and
organizational issues facing the Wikimedia foundation, and wikitech-l,
which is the main forum for coordinating development of the Mediawiki
platform that all Wikipedias run on. These international mailing lists
are all in English. There are also local mailing lists for each
language, and in a few cases, regional mailing lists covering adjacent
languages (there was a Scandinavian mailing list, for example, but it
seems defunct).

**Physical meetings**Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation hosts an
international conference called Wikimania. This is a place for all the
different projects to come together and discuss their experiences, learn
from each other, and also discuss issues facing Wikipedia and other
Wikimedia projects going forwards. The official presentations at these
conferences are usually all held in English, although sometimes there
are parallel tracks in one other language, reflecting the location the
conference is hosted (for example, Spanish in Latin America, and Chinese
in Taiwan).

The informal communications happening outside of the planned tracks can
of course be in any language, but for monolinguals, that is not of much
help. An added challenge is that listening comprehension and ability to
express ideas coherently orally is typically much more difficult to
attain, than an ability to follow an argument in a written format. This
means that even people with medium English-language skills can feel
excluded from these discussions, may lack the self-confidence to speak
up and contribute to a discussion, etc.

Problem statement

Thus, let me summarize. Wikipedia is a community project that strives to
be democratic and participatory, both in the day to day minor decisions
and management, but also in the larger policy issues. It is also a
thoroughly international community, with a large percentage of users who
do not speak English, or do not speak English well. Currently those
users are able to participate fully at the individual Wikipedia level,
but for all global discussions around the project as a whole - whose
impact may often be felt in the day-to-day operation of the individual
Wikipedias as well - are almost entirely conducted in English.

Wikipedia management and governance is a complicated issue, and there
are certainly many who speak English perfectly, and still feel that
participating is very difficult. It can be difficult to keep track of
all the Talk pages and discussions going on at any point, many cannot
afford to travel to Wikimania, or just prefer to spend their time
contributing to the actual contents, rather than on long debates that
might not lead to anything. Thus, this paper is not at all arguing that
language skills present the only barrier to realizing full community
participation. Much work should be done on discussing Wikipedia
governance (and governance of large volunteer online projects) in
general. However, language presents an additional obstacle that is
almost insurmountable, even for the most savvy local administrator.

**Solutions**It is not the intention of this paper to propose any
finished solutions, because this is a thorny problem that can probably
never be solved to a hundred percent satisfaction. Thus, the goals of
this paper are two-fold. First of all, to raise awareness of this
important issue, and second to begin a discussing, and propose some
tentative ideas for ways to mitigate the issue.

To discuss this topic in a systematic fashion, it would have been useful
to have some kind of a map of the different Wikipedia
decision/participation processes. We would need to separate between
day-to-day decisions (many of these occur at the individual Wiki-level,
but there are others that may occur at a more global level - for
example, which new Wiki to approve, who should be given admin, etc) and
participating in the larger policy debate about Wikipedia’s direction
(such as whether to shift to the Creative Commons license, whether to
allow non-commercial pictures in Commons, whether to allow ads, etc).

It would also be very helpful to understand more about the demographics
of those active in the local Wikipedias. Some of the people active in
non-English Wikipedias speak excellent English (for example many people
editing the Hindi Wikipedia might be students and professors in the US,
but even Norwegians living in Norway will typically have little problem
speaking English). Another large group have some ability to read/write
English, but might still have problems participating fully. A third
group have extremely limited or no English skills at all.

Below I will try to sketch out two categories of support that can be
given to the two last categories, first for online communications, and
then for conferences. This is very preliminary, and I am hoping for more
feedback and ideas in this area.

Online communications **Crutches**For people who do have some knowledge
of English, but still have problems fully participating, we might be
able to provide some “crutches” to help them participate more fully.
This is exactly my position in Chinese -- I speak Chinese, and can
read/write it, but read very slowly, and sometimes have problems
formulating myself, etc. What would these crutches look like -- what are
the issues people with limited English skills face?

Reading comprehension is one, but the Internet has done a lot alleviate
this, with all kinds of online dictionaries and reading aids, etc.
However, another problem that I constantly run into, is that my reading
speed in Chinese is so extremely much lower than my reading speed in
English. In addition, I am not able to “skim” in Chinese. Only when you
loose this ability, do you realize how much information you process
habitually when scanning websites looking for interesting news, etc.

Thus, things that might be helpful to enable this category to
participate more actively online, would be providing summaries of
discussions in different languages, translating headlines of debates,
etc. If someone can quickly scan through a list in their own language to
see if there are any issues that interest them, they can then spend the
time it takes to work through the text in English on that topic, using
the online tools to their disposal. But without such an “indexing”
service, it can seem almost overwhelming to even begin reading through
the page.

**People with low or no English abilities**For these people, it’s not a
question of helping them to read English, it’s offering an alternative
-- ie. translation. However, how can this possibly be done by an
organization that depends on voluntary labor, given the amount of
languages to cover, and the amount of text that would need to be
processed (much of which, it can seem, just consists of endless
back-and-forths, that might be less than inspiring for even a motivated
translator). There are a few possible ways of making this easier: we can
reduce the amount of languages, reduce the amount of text, or make the
translation work less demanding itself.

**Reducing number of languages**Although there might be thousands of
languages in the world, and several hundred represented on Wikipedia,
many of these languages are closely related. To take my own language
Norwegian, most Norwegians would be quite comfortable reading in
Norwegian, Swedish or Danish, but would only themselves be able to write
in Norwegian.

If we could thus determine that these three languages never had to be
translated into each other, then everybody could write in Norwegian,
Swedish or Danish, and content in other languages would be translated
into one of these three. That already lightens the load considerably.
There would need to be a lot of discussion about which languages this
were possible for, some obvious that come to mind are Lao and Thai,
Malay and Indonesian, Serbian and Croatian, Finnish and Estonian.

The North-Indian languages are written in different scripts, but using
Google’s great transliteration engine you can now transliterate Bengali
into Hindi (the words will still be somewhat different, but it’s
possible that educated Indians would be comfortable with it). Perhaps
Italian, Spanish and French (and Rumanian)? could be folded into one,
etc. As I said, this is something that would have to be determined in
consultation with all the language communities, although one would have
to try to avoid too much politics interfering, people who refuse to
understand their neighbours language for nationalistic reasons, etc.

One could probably also exclude a number of languages of countries where
people are known to generally speak very good English (although we have
to be very careful with this to avoid including only the elites). This
is not a perfect or fair system, but we are not the UN and cannot hire
thousands of translators, this is an attempt at ameliorating the
existing sub-par situation.

**Reducing amount of content**Even if there were people that were
willing to make a contribution in translating a certain amount of
material - how to choose? How to determine what is important and what is
not? This is related to the above point in crutches, and figuring this
out, might make participation in governance easier for everyone. We
could also be better at parsing out important discussion questions into
the various linguistic communities for them to discuss within
themselves, and then have a summary brought to the international stage
(although this could also be criticized for not enabling direct access
to the international discussion.

**Conferences**Conferences are in many ways more difficult than online
communications. However, there are certainly many possibilities for
“crutches”, whether one gets the Powerpoints translated ahead of time,
and lets people download them (it’s much easier to follow along if you
know what someone is talking about), or perhaps someone is typing
summaries of what is being said on IRC in realtime. There is a lot of
room for experimentation here. A final possibility would be to better
integrate all the different local and regional conferences that are
held, by trying to have the results or summaries published, and
translated, having people blogging in different languages about what is
going on, etc.

**Conclusion** I hope I have convinced you that this is a really
important question, and that although it is very thorny and does not
have an easy solution, there are many ways in which we could improve on
the existing condition. However, it’s imperative that we do this in
consultation with all those who need this facilitation, and don’t
“assume” what their needs might be. I look forward to meeting everyone
at the conference, and hearing all of your ideas and feedback!