[wp-forums] Language of Plugin

[Patrick Nommensen]

 Those are all good points. [*By the way, I am from Germany and do speak it
at home*].

I get that the world is bigger than the US and UK . However, I also know
that English is the official/co-official language in 60 countries and 28
non-sovereign states. This does not include countries like the US where the
dominant language is English, but not officially. There are also many more
that have a quickly growing percentage of English speakers. Yes, "official
language" doesn't mean that it's the majority (yet).

I went through the first 20 pages of "Most Popular" plugins, total 300
plugins, and all were in English. For aspiring WordPress plugin developers
this is probably enough from them to think that in order to have a
"popular" plugin it ought to be in English.  If WordPress wants to
encourage amazing developers who don't speak English to develop and publish
into the repository then perhaps there could be a *clear note stating that
there is no pressure for them to use English?* Is there currently something
like this?

*If we went on usage alone, then most likely the entire directory should be in
Chinese.*

I find it interesting that the Chinese support forum (
http://zh-cn.forums.wordpress.org/) has just ~1,500 posts vs. 3.68 million
in the English forum. Therefore I assume that the majority of Chinese users
go to the English forums because it is more convenient in one way or the
other.

As a side note, I'd also like to say that it's not totally straightforward
for new Wordress plugin developers to find information about creating and
publishing plugins. If you start from WordPress.org and go to Get Involved
--> Plugins all you see is the P2 blog. Perhaps a link to
http://make.wordpress.org/docs/plugin-developer-handbook/ in the secondary
nav bar would be helpful. This would make it similar to the "Contributor
Handbook" link on the Get Involved --> Core page. I think that being able
to find all needed information in 3-4 clicks from the homepage is a good
idea. Sure, there's Google but it wouldn't be too difficult to make it
easier accessible directly on the website.

Anyway, sorry for not properly searching the archive....as this same
question was asked earlier. However, I do think there's a bit more that
could be discussed here ^^^.

-Patrick


On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 12:27 AM, Joost de Valk <joost at yoast.com> wrote:

> I don't want to offend anyone, but yet:
>
>
> Anyone who wants to force people to write stuff in English, should be
> forced to take a geography class or two. There are 80 million people in
> Germany alone who have this other language called German. Loads of them use
> WordPress, you want to force *your* language on to them? Don't even get me
> started about Spanish, Chinese, etc etc.
>
>
> It might surprise you but the world is bigger than the US and the UK and
> WordPress' growth is down in large part to us having a good
> internationalization strategy. Telling other people that their language is
> nice but not as important as yours should not be a part of that.
>
>
>
>
> —
> Sent from Mailbox for iPhone, please forgive typo's and brevity.
>
> On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Daniel <danielx386 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I did bring that up before and I got told that they didn't need to be
> > in English but I do agree that they should be.
> > On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Patrick Nommensen <patrick at nommensen.us>
> wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I came across a (neat) plugin that is 100% German. See
> >> http://wordpress.org/plugins/cachify/
> >>
> >> I believe that the plugin information page(s) should be in English so
> that
> >> the majority of users can understand. Should the information page for
> all
> >> plugins be in English? I couldn't find any policy / FAQ about that.
> >>
> >> Best,
> >> -Patrick
> >> ---------------------------
> >> Patrick Nommensen  ||  twitter.com/pnommensen
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