A proposal for Multilingual Tagging!

in steemit •  8 years ago 

As some of you may know, I'm trying to promote Spanish writers in Steemit. It's not easy, but I think it can get done with a bit of patience and work... It'll take time but we'll eventually get there. The last post about this was... https://steemit.com/spanish/@webosfritos/a-pick-at-hidden-gems-spanish-version-3-una-seleccion-de-tesoros-ocultos-version-espanola-3 I do this in coordination with @dragonslayer109 who came up with original Hidden Gems concept, @serejandmyself who curates the Russian content, and @knozaki2015 who does it in German.

The idea is to share the revenue with post authors and have them make some money that way which they don't receive via their original posts. For some people in Latin-America what may seem like a ridiculous payout in the US or Europe can really make a difference.

There are two major problems regarding the adoption of multilingual content.

The first one may be only a Spanish issue, the lack of Spanish whales or Spanish supporting whales. I wrote an article about it, maybe you find it interesting. https://steemit.com/steemit/@webosfritos/on-how-to-solve-the-unfair-multilingual-whale-problem

The second one which I think is a general issue, comes from a lack of guidance, guidelines or a map for multilingual content, and has to do with how posts are tagged.

I'll explain myself, there's no consensus for tagging multilingual posts, it gets very hard to discover and promote posts in specific languages, thus building communities around such languages.

In putting some though on this matter, I humbly propose a solution which I think makes sense, we would have to structure a system relatively similar to those used by websites who publish content in different languages, this is;

a) Generic multilingual top level tag: We should use a tag which gathers all posts published in languages other than english, and it should be #multilingual

b) Language Specific: Further than what I proposed above, we should also use a tag for specific languages following multilingual.

Bearing the above in mind, tagging for multilingual posts should look something like this:

German: multilingual-de
Chinese: multilingual-cn
Russian: mullingual-ru
Spanish: multilingual-es
Japanese: multilingual-jp
...
n language: multilingual-n

...and so on and so forth.

I think this would help a lot in clarifying the multilingual mess.

I believe it should be community leaders doing this, people like;


@ned
@dantheman
@berniesanders
@smooth
@itsascam
@blocktrades
@wang
@dan
@rainman
@steemed
@abit
@pharesim
@rogerkver
@tracemayer
@charlieshrem
@ummjackson
@mrosenquist
@tatianamoroz
@tomz
@thebeachedwhale
@dollarvigilante
@rubenalexander

But if we don't give them a hand with ideas it won't get done anytime soon.... however, a proposal from them, an announcement from Steemit on this subject , or the whale support for this type of initiative and tagging would foster the adoption of multilingual content.

I believe the platform could benefit from it and if some "bulky" languages such as Russian, Spanish, Hindi or Korean gather an audience, then Steemit should grow in leaps and bounds and eventually benefit all active actors and Steem holders.

Any thoughts or ideas on the above?

I apologize for summoning the above whales, but I think their involvement in this type of issues is of paramount importance for the growth and evolution of Steemit. If any of you have a problem with me mentioning you please PM me in Steem Chat and I won't do it again. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

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Similar proposals have been discussed long before (for example this and this). The devs simply have to work on things with higher priority first (although we don't have a public road map).

Hello.... Thank you for your comment and the links.... I've gone through them. There's a lot of anxiety regarding this issue, although I understand there are other higher priorities for Steemit... Anyhow, I think its a matter of proposing solutions and trial and error, most people just rant but don't really get down to doing anything... I'm looking into working with a developer to propose a solution to this and see if it makes sense and gains traction. At the end of the day Steemit still is in its infancy, but people are so excited by the concept that maybe want to move too fast on this front (I include myself here). Anyhow, patience and work. It'll eventually get solved!

One month ago I did this post treating the topic of the tags, I think that it would be a way of arranging all the contents and acceding to them easier.

https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@amartinezque/steemit-filters-tags

The topic of giving more value to the languages is something difficult short-term unless some whale devotes itself to it, translating the post from others language or delegating in another user the search of post of other languages. That is of what I treat in this another post.

https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@amartinezque/the-seekers

Also much would help that the steemit staff and the whales speak about these topics that I think that they are important and make us see his point of view...

Thank you for your comment... I'll check the articles out

I already describe a solution and provide an implementation for feature like that:

How to make ~80% population of the World happy with 2 simple features and 1 line of code?

Nevertheless, upvote! This topic needs more attention.

BTW, take a look on project from @picokernel work:

https://steemit.com/steem/@picokernel/alpha-v2-introducing-screem-feeds-followers-settings-oh-my
Sources: https://github.com/NateBrune/Screem

He said today:

So far my impression is that some languages have already organized a trending tag, like /deutsch or /italia. Maybe those sponaneously established tags could be gathered rather than deciding it top down?

Thought about it, webosfritos. We have to come up with some creatives bottom-up solutions on own our and then go to the whales instead of asking them for help first.

I think that makes a lot of sense...!

it will be very hard to start many non english community just because we wont have whales.
the english is more easy since its worldwide and we have steemit/dan/ned and other whales there from the beginning of steem, as they may come from bitshares if i understand correctly..

how would you convince whales non english to come if no good content for them and no interest, it's only risky for them to power up

Idea to start with:
Could a bot with basic language recognition skill do the job and comment on non english posts ?
We would just have to go on the "comments" page of the FR-bot for French, DE-bot for German etc...
(The bot would provide the link in the coment to help followers)

It would help a bit non english speakers to get stories from their native language in a feed.

Just an idea.