What about an international section here?

Like similar to the Nextcloud forum in german/russian/french, for example for retired people which do not learn english anymore but want to contribute here too.

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It has been raised before. The feedback from the site is they are only willing to implement if native language speakers can be found to serve as moderators.

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I will be willing to be a moderator for spanish.

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I do agree more languages are needed AND native language moderators are preferred.

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Moderation aside, how would we want to implement multilingual support on the forum, organizationally? Here are a few ideas to get things started:

  1. Should we follow the example @GeraldA suggested, and have an International section which has subcategories for different languages?

  2. Or perhaps make an entire category for each language, so Portuguese would be the equivalent of the current General, Bug Reports, Feature Requests, etc categories? I suppose each section could have some subcategories like Bug Reports.

  3. Or, make language subcategories for our already existing categories, eg https://community.infiniteflight.com/c/support A Spanish speaker can make a post in the Bug Reports category and then choose the Español subcategory for it.

My preference, at least to start out, would be something like 1 or 3, which can more easily fit into our current scheme.

Something to keep in mind is that because iNat Staff are mainly English speakers (a few of us are multilingual), and there are only a 8 of us, things like Feature Requests and Bug Reports would eventually have to make it to those main categories, we don’t have the staff resources to check multiple areas for those.

Anyway, some thoughts to get the discussion started.

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important to note…

#3 is my vote to keep things organized by topic. this would make it possible for staff to manage the actionable items since they might otherwise require a lot more moderation support if all language subsections needed to be sifted through individually. Also, this makes it feel more like just weaving everyone into one international community (with acknowledgment to the reality of the English language-dominant U.S. / North American majority, though that could change!) rather than separate parallel forums or spaces in this forum. I could misunderstand the need though.

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I agree with the #3 option. This will help focusing the discussions and avoiding the isolation of language-based communities.

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Forums in other languages ​​do not mean to build iNaturalist parallel structures, but rather to stimulate basic communication, resolve doubts and help with the proper use of the platform as currently designed.

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What if we star easy, may be by just opening a topic for different languages?, starting from there, we can ask all other non-english users to see how they want to participate?, may be right now there are not so many.
No 3 looks ok, but not sure if there are not many people.

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