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[edit] Progress

[edit] Progress in general

January has been a good month for the Russian Wikitravel, as anyone watching the Multilingual statistics has probably already noticed. We've had very high counts of new edits, the majority of which were not mine, and which were quite focused and productive towards building a really good site.

[edit] New contributors

In the past month anonymous contributions dropped off, but registered accounts expanded by 10 users, five of whom have made significant contributions. Shamil has been a great and enthusiastic new contributor, who has written a ton of new content and, crucially, has been helping with policy translations. We now have a solid base of regular contributors (all native Russian speakers), each of whom would be a good candidate as an administrator, after becoming a bit more familiar with policies, gaining more experience interacting with each other, etc. So I'm still basically the sole administrator, and there isn't yet a great need for much more, but I can envision a time not too far in the future where we could quickly add 3 well-qualified sysops.

[edit] Focus since last report

I finally got around to setting up a project page, and we've made great progress on two of the three big tasks: policy translations and creating a good collection of high-quality (basically guide-status) articles that new contributors can look to as exemplars. Some that are filled out quite nicely include Florence, Bruges, and Yakutsk. It's also heartening to see Russian Wikitravel developing good information on destinations that are barely or not at all covered by the English version like Dogon Country, the Isle of Man, or destinations in Kaliningrad Oblast. Russian Wikitravel is expanding our collective travel knowledge base, and other versions will be able to take advantage of this by translating articles from the Russian.

On the policy front, we're nearing the completion of translations of all the most important policies from the English version. As a result, I'd venture that Russian Wikitravel will be better coordinated and integrated with the flagship version than most, and this excellent policy structure will save a lot of time trying to coordinate contributions on the Russian version itself.

The third focus is to build a skeletal geographical hierarchy of countries, continents, and continental sections (I'd also like to see one set up for Russia, but am waiting for more input on how best to do it). Less progress here, and it's mostly been my own project, which will hopefully catch on with newer users. But the reality of less progress on this front means that the significant increases in article counts over the past month have had relatively little to do with quick outline articles—those are real travel articles being written (and that doesn't even include the huge work that's been done on policy translations)!

[edit] Focus during the next month

More of the same really. If I get around to it, I was planning to create a Russian language portal to shared to facilitate inter-lingal coordination on images. But since the emphasis among English-language contributors has been to make Wikitravel less compatible with projects who share our basic goals, and to delete non-CC-by-SA-1.0 files, I'm more tempted now to simply fork image projects on the Russian Wikitravel from :en, so that we can pursue a more flexible and open approach to collaboration with other image hosts like Wikimedia, Flickr, and Open Street Maps, etc. So I'm now contemplating building a separate, unintegrated structure.

Hold onto your horses a little for this one — I don't think we'll be deleting non-CC 1.0 files any time soon. Jpatokal 00:06, 2 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] Special issues

The number one technical issue remains and will remain the introduction of the listings editor. From the perspective of the Russian version, there is no technical issue (that we can't resolve ourselves) that is even comparable in importance. We'd really like to hear about what progress has been made on this feature, and frankly, would be perfectly happy to use a beta version after translating the visible terms.

[edit] Conclusion

Things are developing quite well, even better than I had expected for January, and I think we'll see at least the same level of progress in the next month, if not more so. --Peter ^Talk 14:39, 1 February 2008 (EST)

[edit] Comments