Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:50 UTC
Hello, Is it possible to add a mailing list "mediawiki-fr@lists.wikimedia.org" (on the same naming model that "mediawiki-sv@lists.wikimedia.org")? There are many French-speaking people who use MediaWiki and the all-English discussions around MediaWiki is embarassing for some/many? people. Between others, there are a lot of local-country-wikis like Wiki-Brest, Wiki-Rennes, Wikimanche, etc. and I've seen a lot of "professionnal" MediaWiki in France. I agree to be owner/moderator of the list. Thanks !
Can you show that there is a critical-mass to launch it? A help mailing list without enough helping people is worse than no mailing list, since they would have asked on mediawiki-l instead, hopefully getting an answer there.
Currently, I have not a formal statistic about the number of MW users and/or potential MW users, but each time I said I know the internals, configuration settings, etc of MW the people have a lot of questions. As examples, I regularly advise Gaelle (paid administrator of Wiki-Brest) on the technical aspects of MW; today I had questions of the paid admin of Wiki-Rennes; last year, at the Forum des usages coopératifs at Brest, when I presented MW to sysadmins, I meet a sysadmin who said I will not install MW because there were no french support. I add that, in France, a lot of people don't speak English or bad, and the creation of a French-speaking support list would certainly help to diffuse MW in France, and would be very helpful for current wiki-admins of small wikis, particularly for the city wikis [1,2]. So I don't think it will "remove" questions of mediawiki-l, but I think it will be complementary to mediawiki-l. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_wiki [2] http://www.wiki-brest.net/index.php/Wikis_de_territoires
And I hope that a such creation of a list will create a community of French persons who know configuration settings, extensions developers, etc. to have a healthy list (as much answers -- or more -- as questions).
Multilingual questions are welcome on mediawiki-l. Specifically French won't be a problem. There will always be someone able to understand/translate it. If French people post in mediawiki-fr instead of mediawiki-l AND they get answered there, fine. The problem is if they don't get answered, perhaps because you don't know, maybe because only you used to answer questions and now you are in vacances/hit by a bus/tired of doing that. That's why I asked if there was a critial mass, Sébastien.
Ok I didn't know mediawiki-l was multilingual, so I say MW admin I know to ask on mediawiki-l, even in French. Perhaps, if there is in the future a critical mass of French speakers, the creation of a specific list will be welcome.
In accordance with discussion, users can communicate in French on mediawiki-l.
