What should the short names be for "Ask in English" and "Ask in Other Languages" categories?

This is what appears in the URL, and can also be used like this: #english

On the merged site, the top-level category is “ask”, and the URL will be https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/ask/6. A subcategory english would look like https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/ask/english/80 (although not necessarily with that number).

I think “English” still makes sense — let me know if you don’t! But what about the other?

I lie…
  • other
  • non-english
  • other-languages
  • global
  • world
  • l10n
  • something else (explain in a post!)

0 voters

I’m going to pick “other” temporarily, but we can always change that (best before the merge is finalized, of course).

Everything other than non-english seems strange to me since the alternative isn’t clear from context.

i.e. How to you know “other” means languages other than english or that “world” means the world outside of english speaking countries.

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And sorry for the “lie” typo — too late to edit without destroying the poll. That is meant to be “like”, of course.

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Yeah, looks like that’s the current most-preferred option. My hesitation is that it defines everything in a negative – by what it isn’t. But… maybe there’s really no help for that here.

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I do understand that hesitancy, you don’t want to create a negative perception to community members about their own primary language…but “Non-English” is such an accurate yet succinct way to term it, it’s so useful in this particular context.

FWIW, using “Non-English” seems to be a pretty standard thing across technical writing / other disciplines - just some example links below of entities that would be pretty sensitive to language choice concerns using that term:

Immigration and Language Diversity in the United States - PMC || Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity || Do You Speak American . Words That Shouldn't Be? . Sez Who? . Social Setting | PBS

Not that that should necessarily determine what we do, but, it’s at least reassurance that even in longer-form writing, many folks haven’t found a better way of describing the dichotomy than “English” and “Non-English”…

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negative ≠ derogatory. The former is more of a math term. :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe a ridiculous question, but…do we know that the Ask in Other Languages section is working for its userbase? I imagine it’s tough to know the actuals, but conceptually there are certain %s of folks coming to Ask Fedora with questions who are: 1) native English speakers; 2) fluent in English; 3) uncomfortable with English but could maybe get by; 4) non-English speakers w/no English knowledge.

I’d guess that given the higher activity level and what would appear to be more eyes on it, folks in at least 1 and 2, and probably even 3, would prefer to post in Ask in English to have a broader potential audience…does that leave folks in 4 with a subpar experience? Probably a dumb question but honestly wondering, would commonly available translation services produce passable enough output for English-speaking members of the community to give assistance to non-English-speakers?

Basically…does it make sense to divide discussions into English and Non-English, or could there maybe be one forum in which questions asked in another language could be tagged with that language, so that anyone available to help in that language directly could do so, or folks could use translation to get by?

(All might be ridiculous thoughts on my part, apologies if so!)

It’s not ridiculous. We could try combining completely, and just ask that those tags be used. I think it’s easier to make that clear with a specific category.

Maybe not!

This already is a change, though — until just now, we had separated categories for each of several languages, and they got very little activity. So, this is an experiment. If in a little while we find that it’s still not working, we can try the total merge.

Ahh, my bad - I hadn’t paid close enough attention / didn’t realize the recent history there. It makes total sense to give the new approach a chance to work!

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@mattdm Good reorganization but, to muted a category for example Persian is very dificult for non persian speaker.

you should go here and copy paste the translation:

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tags

Why you don’t chose persian like italiano or chinesse (simplified or traditiona) as description?

Regards.,

2 posts were split to a new topic: Posts from muted tags still showing up as “suggested”?