On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Raymond Jennings wrote:
> I'm getting a few messages in foreign languages. Could the xfree86.org
> people fork into .fr, .uk, .ru, .it, and so on?
>
> I think we need to split the mailing list by language because not a whole
> lot of us speak french, italian, or whatever other crazy language you can
> think of.
>
> This may need to be relayed to the xfree86.org sysop, as it may involve the
> entire site.
I'm not at all sure that this is a good idea.
There are areas of XFree86 understood by only a few people.
If we have lists for different languages, people will think they
can get help in that language, but will anyone who understands
their problem understand their language well enough to be subscribed
to the list in that language ?
I don't read French well enough to subscribe to a French XFree86
list, but the reasons I haven't replied to the two latest posts.
I've seen in French have nothing to do with them being in French
(The first was off-topic for forum@, and I understand that
"please don't send technical requests here, send them to ..."
messages are handled offline by someone else.
The second appeared to require no action, although I've just
double-checked with babelfish, and maybe I should do something...)
Six months we "rationalized" the mailing lists, combining traffic for
lots of lightly-used technical topics into one or two lists.
Users are likely to be better at choosing the right language-based
list than they were at picking the relevant technical topic-based list,
but even so I don't think that the traffic (at least the non-spam traffic)
justifies splitting the list by language; at least not yet.
Bottom line, I'm happy to continue seeing messages in languages
I don't read, and may even use babelfish or similar to reply to
the odd post that contains enough keywords to catch my attention.
Maybe if we publicize a decision to allow postings in any language
the number of non-English posts will grow to the point where I'll
change my mind.
--
Andrew C. Aitchison Cambridge
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