Hate to be the one to break it to you but there's no such thing as "apolitical" technology. Everything designed by humans has and always will have some kind of ideological or political underpinnings or context. Just closing your ears and pretending that everyone is neutral and objective is foolish.

They could have say it in more neutral way:

> A solution designed by a small group of people is likely to produce a system that replicates trends specific to this group and are not universal enough for our need.

What? It's a true statement, but it has little to do with computer science, but does to do with software engineering. Did the word "imperialist" trigger reflexive typing?

In my opinion this project is about 20 layers too abstract to actually produce working and useful software. But it's not virtue signaling if they're actually trying to do the thing, is it? Virtue signaling is when you act like you're doing something virtuous and then don't.

If they're trying to create a programming syntax that maps to every known human language, good on them. They'll probably fail, but it's not really a stupid concept, especially when your organization's purpose is to spread knowledge to the whole world.

It’s all a bit silly, any global encyclopedia is almost imperialist by definition. Organizing and categorizing knowledge in a centralized way is at its roots an imperialist project (see the history of science and its development alongside the rise of the British power for example). So might as well pick the best tools for the job (English and well known programming languages). Doing otherwise makes it seem like someone didn’t completely think through their motivations. Non-imperialists don’t build encyclopedias of global knowledge. Let local stay local.

No. A global encyclopaedia might be global, but does not have to be imperialist, if the control over the content and the ability to contribute to the encyclopaedia is not limited to imperial structures.

Unless you equate "global" with "imperialist", in which case your statement is true by definition. But then everything that is done on a global scale is necessarily imperialist, and then one of the two terms does not seem useful anymore.

Equity can be global.

That would require the equation to be wrong.

> In my opinion this project is about 20 layers too abstract to actually produce working and useful software. But it's not virtue signaling if they're actually trying to do the thing, is it? Virtue signaling is when you act like you're doing something virtuous and then don't.

If one belives avoiding well-known tools and (english-based) programming languages is likely to actually make it easier for contributors using those languages to contribute to Wikipedia in those languages, then it's real. If one believes that this is not actually going to result in more usable tools, and the intention of avoiding tools from English-speaking Westerners is signalling rather than actually getting better results, then it's virtue signalling.

By that account, above discussion of what is and isn't virtue signalling is itself virtue signalling--mere platitudes rather than contributing to actionable outcomes.

I'd think us, or any foundation for that matter, should be able to lay out an agenda before outcomes are achieved, how (un)realistic they may be. A dot on the horizon to aim for, not necessarily achievable but a heading at least.

> By that account, above discussion of what is and isn't virtue signalling is itself virtue signalling--mere platitudes rather than contributing to actionable outcomes.

If you're just saying it for the upvotes, yes. If you're actually trying to get people to shift their efforts towards more effective things (such as translation support libraries that don't insist on avoiding English at every level), then no, it's legitimate effort.

> I'd think us, or any foundation for that matter, should be able to lay out an agenda before outcomes are achieved, how (un)realistic they may be. A dot on the horizon to aim for, not necessarily achievable but a heading at least.

An aim is fine. It's a question of sincerity.

It's more vice-signalling. His complaint is a reaction to try and show others he doesn't care about the thoughtfulness behind the original statement.

But they actually wrote that in English (while being fellows of Google - one of the most imperial corporations in existence - as I understand) and are sure to use a lot of existing - and English-based - tools to implement it. I mean, if they abandoned the whole Western English-based foundation they rest on - including Von Neumann architecture for computers they use, for example - and started building it from physical laws back up (oh wait, physical laws also mostly discovered by Westerners and they probably learned them in English, which already imbued them with the imperialist perspective) then maybe it could be recognized as a honest - if mind-bogglingly misguided - effort to expunge the presumed imperialist bias. Since it is never going to happen, it can not be anything but virtue signalling.

s/virtue signaling identity politics/caring about other people/g

I don't see how this is caring. This is dismissing and invalidating the work of large class of people (Westerners and English-speaking people) by applying a jargon label "imperialist" (what does that even mean here? That they are about to don pith helmets and rush out to re-conquer India?) and implying that this label automatically makes their contributions less worthy - to which implication you just added the implication that they are presumed to be incapable of caring about other people. Does look like particularly helpful for anything, rather quite alienating.

I know it's triggering to you. But it's just choosing to be nice to people. Not a bad thing. You're comment just comes across as vice-signalling.

I always wonder why can't one choose to be nice to people without using divisive language, emotionally charged accusatory jargon (like "imperialist"), devaluing somebody's sincere contributions and framing the situation in group vs. group terms? Like, if the point is that you choose to be nice to people, why can't you start with being, you know, nice to people?

For example, if the same sentence was formulated as something like "expanding the contributor community by including people knowledgeable and proficient in languages not commonly spoken in the West and soliciting feedback from such contributors would greatly expand the appeal of the resulting solution and make it more widely applicable" - wouldn't that sound more nice to people?

It's pretending to be nice to one group by dunking on another group largely responsible for the foundations they are standing on.

> WTF. Virtue-signaling identity politics has no place in computer science.

The fact that I couldn't type my name for decades in most IT systems because of the charsets used is not "virtue-signaling" to complain about, thank you.

You could just use whatever romanized version of your name is the standard for your language and writing system without any real down side except EEWWWWW ANGLOCENTRISM NOOOOO. That way people from other cultures around the world (who generally don't have trouble learning the latin alphabet in addition to their own) will be able to do something with your name rather than seing random symbols they can't even attempt to pronounce, won't remember and certainly won't be able to re-type.

Please don't be a dick and dismiss it as "EEWWWWW ANGLOCENTRISM NOOOOO". Fuck off.

When in Rome, do as the Romans (and use ASCII). Please don't be a dick and DDOS the Romans' IT systems with needing to support the vagaries of every foreign dialect in the world.

I'm not in Rome. I'm trying to book an airplane ticket in my country. But it's not possible to write my name, even though my name contains letters found in our alphabet.

> with needing to support the vagaries of every foreign dialect in the world

Then don't impact the Roman software on people outside Rome. Basically the definition of imperialism.

Edit:

> I think the Internet was a better place before Eternal September, when it was the exclusive precinct of relatively affluent white male nerds. (...) I think elitism is right.

Ah, I see this from you in another thread. So you're basically against other cultures and groups being present online. No wonder you want everyone to conform to your definition of how things should be. Too bad the ship has sailed, we're here.

> I'm not in Rome.

You (or others you depend on) are choosing to use "Roman" software.

> I'm trying to book an airplane ticket in my country. But it's not possible to write my name, even though my name contains letters found in our alphabet.

It is possible to write your name in a way that lets the airline and airports identify you, which is what matters. It might not be possible to write it exactly the way you'd like but that's not causing any real issues except making you upset.

It's also pretty ironic to complain about having to deal with other cultures for (presumably) international travel.

> Then don't impact the Roman software on people outside Rome. Basically the definition of imperialism.

"Anglocentric" software isn't forced on anyone. You can campaing for your country to disregard all English writings and re-discover all that knowledge from first principles instead if you'd prefer. But that would make you much worse off, wouldn't it?

English-first computing dominates precisely because not having to deal with localization (or at least not initially) lets people focus on what actually matters to make work. Don't like it? Write your own software instead of complaining that relying other people's work means you sometimes have to adapt a bit.

> So you're basically against other cultures and groups being present online.

Plenty of people from other cultures (including me) have no problem with learning English to interact with the world and tap into the vast pool of English knowledge and tools. Language != Culture.

> Too bad the ship has sailed, we're here.

So is English as the lingua franca of the computing age.

Thanks for again dismissing peoples' feelings and saying they don't matter. I'm not gonna bother replying to your ill conceived points.