Streamlining Ask in Other Languages

I am looking at Ask Fedora - Fedora Discussion and notice some inconsitencies:

Ask in English does not have the Welcome or Start-here post that it used to have and that the non-English category has (maybe the post needs an update before it can be pinned, @ankursinha ?)

Ask in Other Languages has several pinned topics but the selection doesn’t make much sense to me:

  • The welcome posts are certainly nice, however they only exist in Spanish and Italian. Also, just like the equivalent in English they may require an update of information regarding Communication (matrix, …)

  • No other language has the Welcome post - should we try to create them?

  • Then, there is a Trust Level post in Spanish, top of the category. Is that really important enough to have it pinned?

  • What about the Persian posts? Do they really need to be pinned? They look more like specific questions rather than general posts.

  • should we move About the Ask in Other Languages category to the top of the pinned topics, if possible?

Also, and this one is more general, should we define which languages can be used to ask a question? Or if we don’t define it, should we call the category Ask in Any Other Language?

@hedayat has unpinned the posts Persian language.

Maybe all of those should be unpinned since the category is now merged?

In context, “Ask in other languages” and “Ask in any other language” have the same meaning.

While I suppose it is possible to interpret “Ask in other languages” to mean only certain languages that would be a strange interpretation contextually.

in the context of being greeted in Spanish and Italian (pinned posts), I’d say no, not a strange interpretation at all.

I would argue that this is what should be fixed. The name of the category is not the problem.

If we keep Ask Fedora as a separate top level, all of the various language faq and intro posts could be moved there.

Otherwise, it’d be nice if we could pin topics per tag but that’s not available.

Hmmm. We could make a subcategory of Ask in Other Languages for the these posts.

Or, we could have one for each subject, with the translations as replies?

I wanted to mention that for other English only forums for narrow specialties, people use online translators to post in English. Because the translators are not aware of specialized technical meanings attached to some English words, it posts that include text in the authors native language allow others to correct the translation mistakes (and these corrections can be helpful in their own right for users having difficulty with English documatation). Online translators may do a better jobs with linux than they do with, say, SAR (synthetic aperture radar) topics.

We can tag the intro posts and include the respective tag in the category description and in the notification for new users to avoid excessive pinning.
Otherwise, I’m afraid the the top level category will be covered with moss and mostly wasted because unpinning is a counter-intuitive operation.

Oh, this reminds me — we can use the tag sidebar feature to collect the faq posts in each language tag.

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