Feedback And Initiatives On International Sites

Question

Stack Overflow's ultimate goal is, with our community's help, to build a library of detailed answers to every programming question. Together with our brave users, we've gone on an amazing adventure as we've launched Stack Overflow sites in different languages over the past few years.

And it’s going well so far! If we look at the sites as one united international site, it is the second most active community after Stack Overflow in English (based on the question per day metric). Looking at our international sites and the rest of the Stack Exchange network, I clearly see a very important thing missing that every site on the network has except the international ones. I’m referring to the “Bidirectional communication channel between the company and the community”.

How do communities and the company communicate currently?

Since 01/01/2018 (up to 06/15/2018) the following have been posted by employees of the company:

• Meta Stack Exchange: 282 answers.
• Meta Stack Overflow in Russian: 48 answers.
• Meta Stack Overflow in Spanish: 28 answers.
• Meta Stack Overflow in Portuguese: 10 answers.
• Meta Stack Overflow in Japanese: 1 answer.
• Meta Stack Overflow in English: 412 answers.

It seems to me that if someone from the company does not speak the language of a community, it becomes isolated from the rest of the network. We do not want that to happen. Our philosophy of success relies heavily on our community. We gradually make our sites the best place to ask and answer questions on the Internet based on your feedback. Without a way to talk to a community and listen to our users there is little chance for improving anything.

What was the process?

At the start, there was one dedicated bilingual community manager for each international site. The way those community managers worked with communities differed from site to site. Each international site had different initiatives and different focuses which have almost never intersected. That means CM’s often did the same work in solving similar problems across the international sites. A lot of energy could have been saved by working together.

Improvement of communications

What if we did things another way? What if we were able to share initiatives between international sites, reuse the experience of other communities, and act based on feedback from all the sites? The first step towards this goal is to set up a communication channel for exchanging ideas, initiatives, and feedback between the company and communities as well as between the communities themselves.

The biggest challenge in the situation is the fact that all of the communities, including the company, speak different languages. It's nobody's fault but that's the reality. Because of this, I'd like to share some thoughts about how the communication channel might work.

Feedback And Initiatives On International Sites

TL;DR

• We need a channel for communication between the company and international communities as well as for international communities with one another. Currently, the best place for this is MSE.
• English will be used on MSE discussions and international sites will keep discussions in their own localized languages.
• Company initiatives will be shared in English on MSE and we will need the help of volunteer translators to post translated versions on their respective meta sites.
• Community initiatives will be shared on their respective meta site and will need to be translated for MSE. Then, they can spread across all other international metas as mentioned above.
• We will keep discussions on all meta sites synchronized.
• When a discussion on an international meta site is almost completed we need the volunteers’ help again to make a summary of what the international community said and post it as an answer on MSE.

Over the last few years on SOru we have tried to implement a lot of interesting initiatives (for example), we started a lot of social initiatives (for example), we integrated / activated some interesting engine features (for example). It bothers me that most of those initiatives have not been even suggested to other international communities. I tend to believe that the situation is the same on the other sites: each site has its own set of initiatives that nobody knows about except the users of the site.

That might lead to a situation where very important features for international communities do not get implemented in the engine because the initiatives seem to be needed for a relatively small number of users (if we look at them in the context of individual international sites). Each of our international sites is not big alone, but, as it was said, together we are the second most active community in the network. If all communities need one feature in the engine, my hope is that it will get the right priority. The first step, however, is to start discussing initiatives together.

How can we propagate an initiative across all international sites?

When we think about ways to communicate across the sites we need to consider the following:

• The process needs to be scalable. Imagine, that we had one hundred international sites. The process should work for any number of sites with no difficulties.
• The author of an initiative does not speak all the languages of our international sites.
• We want to have as many people looking at an initiative as possible, including our users from various English speaking communities and employees of the company.
• There should be a way for international communities to discuss an initiative in their own languages.
• The outcome of the discussions on international meta sites need to be shared with the rest of the network, and particularly with the other international sites.

With that in mind I’d like to share some thoughts about what the process might look like:

1. The author of an initiative (a CM or a user) needs to post a question on MSE with a special tag (let’s say international-sites). The language of the post should always be English.
2. Users who know two languages can volunteer to translate the question and post the translated version on an international meta site.
3. When the translation gets posted on an international meta site, the volunteer adds a link to it to the question on MSE. Also, please add the link to the MSE question to the translated one. It should help us keep the discussion over metas synchronized.
4. After a community discusses the initiative, we need a volunteer who will post a summary of the international meta discussion as an answer to the question on MSE. The summary should be in English. I think it might be a good idea to have one wiki answer where there will be summaries of all international meta sites. In this case, we are able to keep the answer on top of other replies by accepting it.
5. If anyone has any thoughts about the initiative they can answer on any metas, including MSE.

In case of a community initiative, the process is almost the same with only one difference: the initiative gets started on an international meta site and needs to be translated into English and posted on MSE. After that everything is the same.

Having this process allows the company to understand what all international communities need. Also, the process should help our international communities exchange ideas about their own specific issues, share initiatives, and look at the amazing things that are happening with the International Stack Overflows.

Please, tell us what do you think

We want to make our international sites the best place on the internet to ask programming questions in the users’ first languages. The first step is to create a way for communities to communicate with each other and with the company. If you have any ideas for how we can improve processes in regards to this goal, please share your thoughts!

The initiative on international metas

• Discussion on SOpt: Feedback e Iniciativas nos Sites Internacionais
• Discussion on SOes: Comentarios e iniciativas en sitios internacionales
• Discussion on SOja: 多言語サイトにおける機能提案とフィードバックについて
• Discussion on SOru: Обратная связь и инициативы на интернациональных сайтах
• Discussion on Русский Язык: Обратная связь и инициативы на интернациональных сайтах

An update about tag naming

• Internationalization and localization are quite standard terms with well known meanings, which I think are not very suitable for this initiative.
• Stack Overflow international is a narrow term. The initiative is about international sites. In my understanding international sites are sites which UI is not in English. Today we have international Stack Overflows and Русский язык.
• It seems to me that the shorter a tag name the better. I think, it should be "international" (or may be "internationals") because of the same reason we do not use "stack-overflow-site".

We still have a lot of questions about naming. If you have any ideas how to improve tag names, please share what do you think!

Answer 1

The first step towards this goal is to set up a communication channel for exchanging ideas, initiatives, and feedback between the company and communities as well as between the communities themselves

The first step - convey the idea that there are sites besides sites in major language (c). A lot of requests from localized sites are ignored and postponed for later. And sometimes it seems that local sites aren't taken seriously.

Community initiatives will be shared on their respective meta site and will need to be translated for MSE. Then, they can spread across all other international metas as mentioned above.

By whom? Many of the MSE conversation comes to ru SO too late (if at all). For example, the discussion about the CoC. We didn't have a chance to say anything. Yeah, you can say that "it's our fault, we have to monitor MSE", but I thought that a CM should do this.

Right now there is no CM anymore. So, who will be responsible for this?

We will keep discussions on all meta sites synchronised.

When a discussion on an international meta site is almost completed we need the volunteers’ help again to make a summary of what the international community said and post it as an answer on MSE.

Already mentioned, but, people are scared to speak English (especially Russians). So, even if we translate MSE questions on local metas, the real problem is synchronization. I'm not sure who will be doing this hard work and translating posts between local metas and MSE. Even if someone does it, there will be big delay. And the original discussion will be prolonged for a long long time.

At least, to resolve this problem with information, we can automate the posting process of new important discussions on local metas. Such important discussions could use a special tag. The posts with this tag will be automatically posted on local metas in English. Probably, all local sites' chats can be subscribed to a feed. So, the most of the active users will see this post in time.

Answer 2

It is good to see the company looking closer at its international sites, and one cannot disagree that a "bidirectional communication channel between the company and the community" is missing. I believe the process you are suggesting has its problems, but I appreciate your attention.

I will speak for myself as a moderator at Stack Overflow in Português, but it may partially apply to other international sites too – yes, as you said, those sites and communities could really benefit from more integration.

When we had a dedicated CM, communication with the company existed, which was good, but still it wasn't like MSO and MSE, because all company opinion was filtered by a single employee. We missed the diversity of opinions and the process unfolding that you see on the "mother" metas, which in my opinion is an important part of the Stack Overflow experience. Now that we have a single CM for all international sites, I am glad to see you try to avoid that single-channel issue.

The meta cross-posting procedure you suggest could work for some discussions, but translation is the weak spot, specially for answers. This very question has been translated into MSOpt and there are no answers there still.

I am asking myself if MSE is the best or rather the only place to discuss issues specific to international sites. Your suggestion addresses one level of cross-community and company-community exchanges, which is the public level. In fact we always had MSE for that, minus a protocol and the official incentive you're adding. But we're still missing a place for international mod-mod and company-mod exchanges. The existing places for that, the Teacher's Lounge chat room and Stack Moderators, feel too noisy to me. The SOpt mod team rarely use those. I don't know about the mods of other international sites, but I'd like to hear from them.

So, I believe you should consider improving on those missing channels of communication too. Maybe a separate Stack Moderators instance only for international sites? Maybe including some other, regular, users too (by rep, activity, whatever)? Or even a chat room, focused on integrating those sites and communities. Those would have to be in English, while most users would not be native speakers, but I think it could work.

Answer 3

We used to have one CM per site and now we will have only a CM. Many interesting things could have been done in the old days, since we had more resources assigned to every site. However, to me it looked like not much synchronization was done among CMs and so every little initiative needed to start from scratch in every site.

One good point of having a unique CM is that he can have a good overview of all the international sites and try to implement things in all of those that do not have it, while others do.

For example, in SOes we have been asking to have audits for years, while this is in place in SOpt for years.

So I think that good points can arise from new debates blabla, but we should firstly stabilise what every community has and try to fix the historical shortages we have.

There is also an historical list of bugs that are critical to the international sites (we cannot edit questions with tags in the mobile site, for example, as reported as long as three years ago in Accented tags not displayed properly on edit page on mobile web site) and have been there for ages (see the list we reporte to the CM of SOes many months ago as per his request).

Answer 4

For the Tl;Dr version see https://meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/315461/3

Tags

We need better tags on Meta SE for this discussion and New Resources for Our Stack Exchange Network - Part 2, maybe for other threads (discussions, feature requests, support and bug reports) too.

Why do we need better tags

We need better tags because IMHO current tags aren't good enough to properly follow / filter matters about international sites:

• international looks to be too ambiguous.
• internationalization and languages look to be too broad.
• localization looks to be too specific as it's about UI related issues.
• AFAIK at this time there are russian-stackoverflow, portuguese-stackoverflow but there aren't tags for Spanish and Japanese sites.

Proposal

Please checkout https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/315479/289691

Status tracking

We need status tracking "tools" for the new communication processes to clearly and timely identify which topics should be translated and the back and forth discussion between English speaking people and those who don't speak it.

Why do we need status tracking tools for the new communication processes

At this time there is no way to easily know that there is a post that should be translated, if it was alredy translated, the translation quality, if the international community already participated, if there is a conclusion or if there is something that is waiting for an answer from the English speaking people that doesn't speak the international community language.

Chat Rooms

We need an specific and official chat room to synchronously chat about the international sites.

Why do we need an specific and official chat roomo for the new communication process

Because the new communication process is new. By the other hand, I read about the existence of a "Terminal Chat Room" on a comment on another answer but I didn't hear about it before. Today I wasn't able to find it.

Ambassadors

We need elected international sites ambassadors. They could be the actual diamond moderators but we should know if they accept the resposability to represent their community on specific tasks related to the new communication processes. They should help on disputes / flags, "wrong voting" (i.e. votes about international sites issues from people that don't care about them / didn't notice the thread scope) and inter-cultural sensibility issues.

Why do we need a new role for elected people

Because on the Spanish site election was done one year ago and the new communication process is new. We should know if the current diamond moderators have time and want to help on the tasks of the new communication processes if they aren't able to do the new tasks more people should be added and should be some to identify them as elected representants of an international site.

At this time we don't have badges and we don't have good tags to know if the participation of volunteer really represents an international community.

Answer 5

1. The author of an initiative (a CM or a user) needs to post a question on MSE with a special tag (let’s say international). The language of the post should always be English.

2. Users who know two languages can volunteer to translate the question and post the translated version on an international meta site.

3. When the translation gets posted on a international meta site, the volunteer adds a link to it to the question on MSE. Also, please add the link to the MSE question to the translated one. It should help us keep the discussion over metas synchronised.

4. After a community discusses the initiative, we need a volunteer who will post a summary of the international meta discussion as an answer to the question on MSE. The summary should be in English. I think it might be a good idea to have one wiki answer where there will be summaries from all international meta sites. In this case we are able to keep the answer on top of other replies by accepting it.

5. If anyone has any thoughts about the initiative they can answer on any metas, including MSE.

There are several problems in this proccess:

1. What if a random low-rep user have one of that "brillant" ideas that makes no sense at all and would screw up everything very hard if implemented but his question has the international tag (and is not mistagged nor something off-topic)?

   Translating such question into other sites just to have the idea/proposal/whatever downvoted into hell everywhere (including here on MSE) is just a wasteful effort.

   I think that some sort of filter is needed to assure that the initiative is worth to be shared (or at least has a minimal chance in being so). It don't need to be something hard black-and-white, I think that just adding a guideline "don't bother to translate crap into international meta sites" suffice. On the other hand, if someone thinks that a post might be worth to translate in some international site (and is able to do so or convince someone else to do) he/she is allowed to proceed.

2. Many ideas, critiques and suggestions about internationalization are born in international site metas. The proccess should be flexible enough to allow that without requiring that it must be born in MSE and then be translated. This also have the advantage that stupid ideas given by low-rep users do not spread out to pollute other international metas. If the idea/critique/suggestion is worth, it should be translated everywhere else, with MSE serving as the English-speaking site.

3. Many important things that are discussed here in MSE are missed in international sites, but they have nothing to do with internationalization. As concrete examples, the Code of Conduct and the arbitration clause can be cited. People on international sites became aware of that only at a late stage, if at all, and when they became aware, it is frequently only with partial, incorrect, mistranslated or misinterpreted information. Your proposed process seems to not remedy this situation. Adding the tag international in a MSE question about say, a change in the "be nice" policy, is not ok because that tag would have nothing to do with the question. A simple "please, crosspost this into international sites" remainder into the text of those MSE questions would suffice to at least make people on international sites aware of the issue (and the lack of a link added back serves as evidence that it was not done yet).

4. Many users (mostly English-speaking ones) do not understands the needs that international sites have (or even care about) and might even downvote proposals about that here in MSE. Also, in some cases, the people that have those needs do not communicate in English fluently, risking into getting downvotes or close-votes in MSE. This means that there is a barrier into posting such things in the MSE-first approach and that the [specific international site meta]-first approach should be considered as equally valid.

Answer 6

I would use a tag which is slightly more specific than the ambiguous international. Perhaps international-stack-overflow, international-sites or even international-site-initiatives? And give it the red moderator-only tag formatting, this makes it more recognizable and official. (The same goes for announcements, BTW.)

Between step 1. and 2., you could post a stub on each of the local metas announcing the MSE post and asking for translators. Make it featured so that local users are sure to read it even if they don't visit MSE; not everybody does and even if they do, they might not be able or willing to do the translation.

Answer 7

People have a fear to start writing in English and that's one of the reasons why all international activities concentrated on local metas, not on MSE.

Maybe we need to set a #SoReadyToTranslate hashtag in user profiles on MSE and local metas like a Soreadytohelp?

Answer 8

I think it might be worth not thinking of the internationalised site as "something different".

A lot of initiatives tend to "start" on meta.se (or even meta.so) and perculate through the communities through the mods or "regular" users who find that news is useful.

The trick here is to identify what people need to know about across meta, and find an efficient way to disseminate it to folks who can try to repackage it for language specific sites.

In a sense - build the communities and the rest deals with itself.

In the "anglophone" SE world - quite a lot of this is within the spaces mods hang out in and things on meta tend to get discussed organically. As a meta and SU regular I've often gone "hey, so this thing affects us - what do you guys think?" on the main Super User chatroom (Root access) and sometimes our site meta. Mods also often talk to each other about such things, and that might result in related meta posts aimed at and tailored to the communities in question

Personally it feels like this is part of what a moderator needs to do - to act as a bridge between the community and the folks - though I do recall that there's a mysterious 1 rep user doing these sort of things in Ja.SO. There's also an active russian translation and bug hunting community on MSE so it might be worth leveraging them too. The trick here I suppose is not to get stuff from english language meta to elsewhere but working out to get ideas from say SO.ru to SO.Jp. It might be useful to have periodic "town hall" style discussions in some common language with mods to see what's worked/not worked in the past period. Seems a bit tricky, since I don't know what would work best as a common method of communication.

In addition to that, this may be a great use for a site/language specific chatroom, should interest exist where folks can drop in posts of interest for translation. It might be worth using tags and RSS feeds to automate these too.

And of course, if the translation process for such things is formalised or there's people doing a super awesome job at it, it might be worth showing appreciation in some way - maybe with a badge or a swag package of some sort ;)

Answer 9

Being realistic, and probably pretty obvious, in the short term the new communication processes about "international sites" should take advantage of the existing Meta SE workings.

Vocabulary

• Instead of using "international sites" to refer to [es.so],[ja.so], [pt.so] and [ru.so], refer them as SO localized sites. Rationale: The first term leads to confusions and create wrong expectations as currently new localized sites proposals are not being accepted. Ref. Internationalization 'State of the Stack'.
• The term "International sites" should be used to refer to the whole set of sites about international matters like language, history, etc., not just about those which have localized UIs.

Tags

• Use localized-sites for questions about sites which UI has being localized: [es.so],[ja.so], [pt.so], [ru.so] and [rus.se]
• Use localized-stackoverflow for questions about existing International Stack Overflow Sites ([es.so],[jp.so], [pt.so] and [ru.so]). Rationale: We already have portuguese-stackoverflow, russian-stackoverflow and spanish-stackoverflow but they are specific to the corresponding localized site. I think that it make sense to follow the same tag name pattern for a tag that encompases all the SO international sites.
• Use stackoverflow for questions about the Stack Overflow ecosystem (the localized Stack Overflow sites plus [so]). Rationale: Specific [so] discussions could be held on Meta SO. This tag have historic value and the extend of the [so] workings to other languages is a big part of it.

NOTES:

1. People looking to discuss new sites proposals should do that on Area51 as usual but before making an international site proposal first should chekout Internationalization 'State of the Stack'.
2. We already have localization and internationalization to discuss localization and internationalization matters respectively.
3. At this time there is only one non-English (fully localized) site outside of the "Stack Oveflow umbrella", [rus.se]. It has it's own tag russian-stackexchange.

Related

My previous answer to this question -> https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/315461/289691

Answer 10

This community-wiki answer translates and summarizes posts from international sites.

Posts from SOja

Original posts: 多言語サイトにおける機能提案とフィードバックについて

• We decided a tag for translated international posts in SOja Meta: [他言語サイトでの提案] ([initiative-from-other-language-sites]). It's a long tag-name in English, but short in Japanese.
• It's a difficult problem that the translation will be late. We considered about a deadline, but Nic-san said it will not work well on metas in this comment.

Answer 11

Tl;Dr

international is a bad tag

UPDATE: international was renamed as international-sites

Description

This already was mentioned on other answers (from me,from Glorfindel) but it's was requested to me to elaborate.

international is a bad tag for MSE because among other things, it's a meta-tag not because is a tag of MSE but because it's ambiguous.

• Stack Exchange users and valued associates are international

  • From https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/06/09/welcome-stack-overflow-valued-associates-00006-and-00007/

    • As I alluded to in a recent blog post, the way we build the Stack Exchange network should be genuinely reflective of what it already is — websites with avid international users all over the globe.

• Meetups are held internationally
  Ref. https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/05/03/highlights-from-stack-overflow-worldwide-meetups/

• Stack Exchange sites are international (already mentioned on another of my answers)
  • We have several sites that their scope include international topics
    • Language sites:
      • English Language & Usage( international),
      • English Learners
      • Spanish Language
      • ...
    • Religion sites
      • Christianity (new-international-version)
      • ...
    • Travel (international-travel)
    • History (international-relations)
    • Politics (international, international-law, international-relations, ...)
    • Seasoned Advice (mexican-cuisine,...)
    • Motor Vehicle Maintenance and Repair (nissan, volkswagen, ...)
    • ...

---

From What are tags, and how should I use them?

Avoid meta-tags

Do not use meta-tags in questions. Here are some tips to help you determine whether a tag is a meta-tag:

• If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are not helpful by themselves – they do not communicate anything about the content of the question.
• If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. For example, the meaning of the tag [subjective] is, itself, subjective; the same is true for tags like [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? Use only tags that have a broadly accepted, objective definition.

Answer 12

Tl;Dr

The title on this question should be changed to be congruent with the content.

Instead of

Feedback And Initiatives On International Sites

It could be

Feedback And Initiatives On Stack Overflow International Sites

Rationale

1. The body of the question first paragraph clearly states that it's about Stack Overflow ecosystem

Stack Overflow's ultimate goal is, with our community's help, to build a library of detailed answers to every programming question. Together with our brave users, we've gone on an amazing adventure as we've launched Stack Overflow sites in different languages over the past few years.

2. The same happens on other several parts of the post. The only reference to non SO site is the link to the traslation of the post made an editor.

3. "International Sites" is very ambigous

   1. A site could be interational due to

      • The scope, like [history.se], [politics.se], [travel.se] among others that aren't limite to the U.S.
      • The geolocalization of the historic backgrounds like those of the sites about language, religions.
      • The geolocalization of the community members.
      • The nationality of the community members.
      • The content like sports, vehicles, etc. that are played / available outside of the U.S. but not on the U.S.

   2. A more specific term to refer to SE sites that have a non-English UI is "localized sites".

Why this post

1. The OP reverted the tag edit without giving any feedback. I'm afraid that the same will happen if I edit the title.

Related

• Do posts have to be in English on Stack Exchange?
• Where in the world do Stack Overflow users say they are from?

Answer 13

Please use edit summaries to highlight which edits should be "synced" across all "international" metas

Reference

answer to What is the "best way" to keep selected discussions on all meta sites synchronized?