I would like to see forums and also wiki with different languages (at least with all official languages in maemo devices). There are a lot of people who don't understand English well enough or at least discussing with English is way too big barrier for them. Having forums and wiki with their own language would bring them in for discussion and we would most probably see many interesting ideas from them. Each language should have it's own forum so there can have enough sections for software, hardware an so on.

This all should also happen in maemo.org scope so that there is no any unofficial sites for every language. Doing it like this we will have only one official maemo site for all languages and this all should work such a way that when user comes in maemo.org address, site then checks which browsers locale is in use and then shows whole site with that language (intro, wiki, talk etc.). There should be also possibility to select different language site if user wants so. This all should be doable as vbulletin, media wiki and midgar seems to have support for different languages.

Finnish language is the one I'm interested.

I'm still holding with the Idea that separated websites with official support from Maemo.org will give credibility to those websites . Those websites will be easy to control too .

On the other hand, I think that Nokia and maemo.org should be more involved in efforts to local communities. Meetings, support for Maemo promoters in other countries. My adventure started with Maemo N810 to buy in Portugal because she was not officially available in Poland, but it does not change the fact that in my city (Wroclaw) is the number of people who have a N800 or N810. N900 is now, officially - but so far I only saw one review N900 Polish. I think it is just as important.

At the beginning we should have at least a wiki and a forum to ask questions - a place where you can ask questions (and get answers) in your own language. And most importantly, we should notify all of their languages. It probably would be the first time that such a product would be promoted under the slogan "In your own języku (language - here insert the name of their language)"


Polish version of this text,sorry if anyone considers this to be not appropriate, further entries will be in English only (for now :



Z drugiej strony uważam iż Nokia i maemo.org powinno się bardziej zaangażować w działania na rzecz lokalnych społeczności. Spotkania, wsparcie dla promotorów Maemo w innych krajach. Moja przygoda z Maemo zaczęła się od kupna N810 w Portugalii ponieważ oficjalnie nie było jej dostępnej w Polsce jednak to nie zmienia to faktu iż w moim mieście (Wrocław) jest kilka osób które mają N800 lub N810. Teraz będzie N900, oficjalnie - lecz jak dotąd widziałem tylko jedną recenzje N900 po polsku. Myślę że to jest tak samo ważne.

Na początek powinniśmy mieć co najmniej wiki i forum do zadawania pytań - miejsca gdzie można zadawać pytania (i uzyskać odpowiedzi) w swoim własnym języku. I co najważniejsze powinniśmy powiadomić o tym wszystkich w ICH językach. To chyba byłby pierwszy raz gdy taki produkt byłby promowany pod hasłem "W twoim własnym ${języku - tu wstawić nazwę własnego języka}"

Alright, we seem to have here a point of clear non-consensus. I was about to file a Brainstorm proposal with several solutions exposed here but the server is too slow at this time.

One additional problem is that people not fluent in written English (the primary target and beneficiaires of such local forums) are precisely the ones more disadvantaged in any discussion here. At least voting is easier.

As one of the very few Frenchies on board, I have *very* mixed feeling about this.

On the one hand, I understand the motivations : extend, embrace (pun intended , and at the same time bring into the fold and avoid fragmentation.

On the other hand, all the similar experiences I've seen of specific French forums for local "subcommunities" have been dismal failures. It was true some time ago for the Sharp Zaurus , it is even worse right now for the maemo devices, and it can even be seen in unrelated but similarly specialized categories like the BMW C1 "scooter".

The trend seems quite clear to me, the reasons less so. Maybe it is a "cultural" thing, as German forums seem to fare much better (as far as I can judge with my own limited grasp of the language). Maybe it's because we're a less geeky or more conformist society as a whole, so cutting-edge and/or non-mainstream items have even smaller niches than elsewhere, and the user base never reaches critical mass. Maybe, as has been implied here, there is a correlation between not wanting to bother with even *reading* vernacular English, and not having much of value to contribute in the first place ?

Whatever the truth, it remains that our maemofr.org is really nothing to be proud of, despite the best efforts and intents of its creator. Traffic is minimal at best, the less dismal conversations hardly reach the level of pissing contests on TMO, and to add insult to injury, the noisiest contributors can't even be bothered to write in their own language with less than a spelling/grammar mistake per word (think: frank.wagner = Shakespeare :-).

A few of us here have tried acting as go-betweens there, but it got old real quickly.

On the gripping hand, it might be worth a try, but I'm not sure there's much to be gained, our case sounds desperate :-)

I think one or two test sub-forums should be started.

In order to start these sub-forums, we need a high-karma speaker of the sub-forum's language who can moderate that forum and keep things sane there.

If the sub-forum fails to thrive, we can remove it, but I don't think it would.

So two criteria: a big base of users who would use the forum, and at least one or two high-karma moderators.

I know German is spoken by many users here, and there are several high-karma forum members who are German / Austrian...

I wish I could read and speak other languages well. I am so jealous of those of you who are native speakers of other languages and yet can write such nice English.

There was a long discussion about German subforum some time ago...

People without english skills will splinter anyway from here in any case. Offering people opportunity to communicate is allways better than driving them away.

(IMHO) One of key elements in Nokia's rise to becoming marketleader was it's ability localize it's devices and services better than the competion. That's propably due to having roots in small country where most of the people speak obscure Uralic language. I simply can't understand what harm can come from allowing people to use their own language.

This propably sounds trollish, but I'll say it anyway. Reading this thread reminded me of similar discussions I've seen on other english speaking discusion forums--->Native anglos imploding just because some people prefer to use other languages. The strange foreigners will surely start spreading wild rumours, forming splinter groups and even spreding swine flu. We won't be able to control what they say.

We have multiple Russian forums for Maemo created over few past years. N8xx.com is one of them where relatively active hacking community is. Mobile-review.com forums have one dedicated to N900 in Rumours section which is still one of most active ones even after N900 coming out shadow. People there are doing a lot on Nokia's RDA (remote device access services) for N900, playing with packages, re-partitioning devices and similar things. Even with that, I doubt many users would follow to <lang>.talk.maemo.org as there are already established communities on other forums and they also discuss other devices as well.

The point of having non-English forums is to lower the barrier for end users. At least that's what I think. (Or, to put it differently, to get rid of one of many possible barriers that keep somebody from being active in an online community.)

I'm not sure how well this is going to work if the German/Turkish/Frensh/... forum is embedded in a site that otherwise is English. It's a little bit like putting the basic instructions for your computer into a compressed archive on disc. Yes, most of us will find them, but those who need basic instructions (like turning on the PC)....?
Also, think of voting for a new community council. Somebody will post a new thread here. Somebody else will translate it to German. German speaking users might want to vote but find all the voting pages are English, as are the places they need to go in order to sign up for a maemo.org account... It's not only a forum here. A non-English subforum is an open invitation for people who don't speak English at all to join the community, so we should have an answer once they find out they are members of something bigger and want to exercise their rights within this community.

So while I do support language specific forums (and wikis and planets and news sites...), I'm no longer sure if maemo.org is the ideal place to host them. (Although interlinking heavily with external sites and counting karma for activity in a Chinese wiki might be worth the effort.)

OTOH, one could just try and see if it works. Make a sticky thread in the respective sub-forum that this is beta and that users should be prepared to find it gone one day - and see what happens.

About some of the concerns people have about non-English information sources:

Yes, there will be wrong information posted there. We have wrong information posted in English now, and there's wrong information posted all over the web in each and every language. This is the internet. That's how it works. - Also, if the forum reaches a critical mass of users, there will be experts to correct this wrong information the same way they do now. If it fails to reach this critical mass, it's irrelevant and will die, anyway. (Besides, nobody will have read the wrong information then.)

And yes, communication will be less concentrated and there'll be cases when a French question remains unanswered, but the English part of the forum contains the answer etc.
So what? Those who speak more than one language can search more than one source. The others can't. Same situation you have on Google today. And maybe it's healthy for this (English part of the) forum in the long run not to be the first and only place where Maemo users around the globe ask for help.