Closed Bug 95808 Opened 24 years ago Closed 24 years ago

Split European Evangelism into East, Central and West European

Categories

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Administration, task)

Product:
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Component:
Administration
Platform:
Other
Other
Type:
task
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
VERIFIED FIXED

People

(Reporter: timeless, Assigned: asa)

Details

Russia and a few other countries span Europe + Asia [heck, some of them span the Middle East too ;-)], but their languages don't match either. BC agreed we could use a new Component in Tech Evang. Anyone interested in taking it? I cc'd people who are working on the Russian and Polish Evang letters since they are already involved in the Evang process. Description, Scope, QA and Assignee are up for grabs. I think Cyrillic might work, but something's nagging me saying that one of the former soviet socialist republics doesn't use cyrillic even though the language is related.
I believe some of the work Bob Clary is doing on the Polish enangelism tool will work for the Russan as well. We (Poles) us the latin alphabet but with some local variations. Therefore the proper coding (ISO-8859-2) is different from the default ISO-8859-1 used by English. As the tool works with ISO-8859-2, it should work with Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5 or other - the Russians use several, I'm not sure which is preferable). <QA_ignore> Timeless: I have no idea what country you mean. No ex-Soviet republic of related (Slavic) language uses the Latin alphabet. The Cyrillic-using Slavic countries are Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (ex-Soviet countries) as well as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Macedonia (never parts of the former Soviet Union). Some other Slavic countres which were never part of the Soviet Union have used the Latin alphabet for over a 1000 years: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia and Slovenia. Bosnia-Hercegovina is obviously divided. Other (non Slavic) countries that use Cyrillis are (I believe) Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia and Mongolia (all except Mongolia ex-Soviet) while ex-Soviet Azerbaijan, Tadjikistan and Turkmenistan converted to Latin. The so-called Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) used Latin even when they were Soviet republics. </QA_ignore>
There are at least 33 languages in the former USSR and most of them are not related to Russian though a lot of them use Cyrillic as a writing script. Here are the languages that do not use the Cyrillic script: Latvian Lithuanian Estonian Georgian Armenian Some languages which were using Cyrillic at the time of the breakup have decided to move to Latin or even to Arabic script depending on pre-Soviet cultural affliations. The 3 major ones I know of which use Cyrillic are Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. Having Cyrillic as a category is not very useful. While I don't oppose creating another component, I would give it a thought as to what the most effective way of doing evangelism work would be. If you have signed up someone who can do Russian, or Ukrainian, you can have the default European owner assign bugs to that person. We may want to have a web page where we can maintain the list of volunteers.
> Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5 or other - the Russians use > several, I'm not sure which is preferable). Use KOI8-R for mail messages - that is what Mozilla uses as the mail standard and most Russian users agree with that. KOI8-U for Ukrainian though you see Windows-1251 used sometimes.
One compromise plan would be to split Europe into 2 regions: West European East European West: Countries/languages to the west of Germany (or about 15 degrees longitude). This also includes countries whose land falls more on the west side of 15 deg L. Austria is here because most of its land falls on the West side. East: Any countries to the East of Germany (15 deg L). This would include: all of former USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. For default assignment, Tristan Nitot for West European. And for East European, how about Jacek? The idea is for us to recruit more people into the evangelism activities and the default owners to re-assign to language-specific experts in case evangelism interaction via mail is needed. I don't think we need to subcategorize Evangelism product into as many languages of the Evangelism letter-tool. This way a Russian volunteer can participate as an assignee of the bug.
Sounds good to me. And thanks to all for the lessons.
Summary: Evangelism needs a Cyrillic/Russian category → Split European Evangelism into East + West European
As I understand German, Russian and (of course Polish) I should like this "East European" realm, even as it is arbitrary. But do you know that Vienna (capital city of Austria) is east of Prague (capital city of the Czech Republic)? Generally Austria lies more to the east than Germany (and its name means Eastern Country :->) so it should be included in the Eastern part of your plan. Anyway it would be ridiculous to put Germany and Austria (same langage) in different categories. More importantly, we step into a political minefield, here. I suspect most Germans will not like putting Germany in the Eastern Europe as described above. Similarly all (or almost all) Central Europeans which were formerly in the Eastern block (including me) will protest if you re-create the iron curtain (that is if you divide Europe as decribed above with or without moveing Germany to the Western part, as the iron curtain used to run across Germany). Therefore I believe we need three categories: - West Europe: exactly like you descibe it - Cental Europe: all the Latin using countries of the Cental Europe, namely Germany, Austria, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia and Albania (I'm not sure about Bosnia & Herzegoviana as it uses both alphabets) - East Europe: the rest of former Soviet Union plus Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Macedonia (maybe Bosnia & Hercegovina) I believe it would be more politically correct to divide Europe like that. I could accept the Central European responsibilities. That means we need someone fr the Cyrillic writing part.
Summary: Split European Evangelism into East + West European → Evangelism needs a Cyrillic/Russian category
Mozilla changed the summary back to the original. I will use the opportunity and change it to something more to my liking.
Summary: Evangelism needs a Cyrillic/Russian category → Split European Evangelism into East, Central and West European
One more thing. If we left Germany in the Western part, the three categories would be defined by the character coding: ISO-8859-1 for Western, ISO-8859-2 for Central and Cyrillic for Eastern Europe.
> I suspect most Germans will not like putting > Germany in the Eastern Europe as described above. I was not clear probably but 15 degree L defines the Eastern border of Germany and so accoding to my proposal, Germany and Austria will fall in the West. I like your idea of West, Central and East because as you say it will hlp avoid the old cold war analogy -- but we should put Germany & Austria into the West. > One more thing. If we left Germany in the Western > part, the three categories would be defined by > the character coding: ISO-8859-1 for Western, > ISO-8859-2 for Central and Cyrillic for > Eastern Europe. Baltic languages (Estonian, Latvian & Lithuaninan) don't use ISO-8859-2. They use ISO-8859-4 or Windows-1257. So as a revision of your proposal: - West Europe: exactly like you descibe it including Germany and Austria. - Cental Europe: all the Latin using countries of the Cental Europe, namely Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia and Albania (Bosnia is here.) - East Europe: the rest of former Soviet Union plus Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Macedonia (maybe Hercegovina -- probably not needed -Kat) I think we should move Bosnia to Central Europe. For recent historical reasons, Bosnian does not use Cyrillic any more. So we should put Cyrillic using Yugoslav blocks into East -- this would include Serbian in East. What about Herzegovina? Is there such a country still? I think that the former Bosnia-Herzegovina can be covered by languages, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, which we already have in the above classifications.
Until you find someone you can list me as the default contact for the East Europe, Nitot for West and Jacek for Central. Does that sound like a plan to begin with? If people reading this bug report knows a suitable person for the East, have that person look at this bug. That person should preferably read/write one of the main languages of the East Europe. (I can read Russian some but writing anything would be extremely hard.)
So we agreed to the new partition of Europe ;-) Good. It seems this continent is more difficult to deal with than North America... I do agree about the practicality of putting Germany and Austria in the West (even as historically those countries actually invented the name Central Europe to describe themselves - but that was over 100 years ago). Bosnia-Hercegovina is actually comprised of two units Croat-Muslin (Latin) and Serb (Cyrillic) so we can probably divide the Evangelic workload from that country on this basis, too.
Sounds good.
Stop, guys! First, so this is no unneeded flame: default Internet encoding is KOI8-R for Russian. There are several others which are commonly used (CP-1251 for example), but they aren't standards, as far as I am concerned. Also is KOI8-R the main encoding for Unices (except for Unicode ones :))). Then a second question: what exactly is the aim of splitting Evangelism? Is it all about covering the earth with Evangelism Letters? Then why don't you split it into languages? Why regions? Or is it about something else, something I don't realize? And third, I am a Russian, so I guess Mozilla Community can count on me :) Even more, I'm a Russian living in Germany, so my German is somewhat close to mother language (but not really close, I couldn't really translate, but assisting!).
> First, so this is no unneeded flame: default Internet > encoding is KOI8-R for Russian. There is no disagreement about this, please don't worry. If you want to translate the Evangelism letter into Russian, you can make sure that the warning about mail encoding woudl say "KOI8-R" for Russian. See my comments above for Russian and Ukrainian mail encodings. > Then a second question: what exactly is the aim of > splitting Evangelism? Is it all about covering the > earth with Evangelism Letters? Then why don't you split > it into languages? Why regions? Or is it about > something else, something I don't realize? It is primarily not about splitting them into many languages. We would like multiple default owners for Evangelism bugs. Currently, me, Bob, Jacek, and Tristan have agreed to be default owners. My belief is that splitting the Evangelism product into a reasonable number of subcategories will help lessen the load each default owner carries. At the same time, we can enlist from other Mozilla volunteers to help out with contacting webmasters or site owners having problems. Each default owner can manage such sub-assignments in consulatation with appropriate volunteers. For this reason, having a reasonably small number of region/lang components is preferable. If some default owners have too many bugs assigned, then we can think of adding another category and seeking additional default owners. I would like to suggest that we give it a try to the proposed split of Europe and see how it works. If this is not sufficient in practice, then let's revisit the issue at that time.
I ran through all the European bugs and marked CentralEurope or EastEurope in the status board to help make the split easier. BTW: do we count Turkey as Europe? It spans the Bosphorus so technically is both part of Europe and Asia/Middle East.
I had some difficulty with Turkish when I proposed the Character Coding sub menus. Turkish used to be written in Arabic script unitl the early 20th century but since about 1930 has been using a modified Roman script. After mulling over this, we decided to place Turkish in SW Asia since the language is of the Altaic family and almost all instances of this family of languages are in Asia. I recommend the same for the Evangelism product.
Don't forget about Scandinavian countries. :-)
Antti, Denmark, Norway by our criteria (15 deg L) are in the West but Sweden and Finland would be in Central probably. I hate to split Scandinavia, however. How about putting them all in the West? (The only reservation I have is Finland since its language is not related to Germanic languages like other languages of Scandinavia.) Any opinion?
I think "West Europe" would seem like the best option for most Finns, anyway.
Nikolai Prokoschenko, would you agree to be the default assignee for the East Europe? Please also find the default QA contact for your component. Until you can find someone, I am willing to act as the defautl QA.
Asa, here's our proposal for the split with the descriptions and default contacts info: =================================== West Europe: Countries/languages to the west of Germany's eastern border. This includes Germany, France, Austria, all Scandinavian countries, UK, Iceland, etc.-- i.e. what is commonly known as Western Europe. Default assignee: Tristan Nitot <nitot@netscape.com> QA contact: Christopher Aillon <christopher@aillon.com> Central Europe: All the Latin/Greek using countries of the Cental Europe, namely Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia, etc. Default assignee: Jacek Piskozub <piskozub@iopan.gda.pl> QA contact: Katsuhiko Momoi <momoi@netscape.com> -- temporary fill-in East Europe: Former USSR countries like Russia, Ukraina, etc. plus Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Serbia/Slavic Hercegovina. Default assignee: Nikolai Prokoschenko <prokosch@gmx.net> QA contact: Katsuhiko Momoi <momoi@netscape.com> -- temporary fill-in =================================== I am assuming that Nikolai is OK with the East Europe and Chris Aillon is OK with the West Europe QA contact. I am seeking my replacement for Central and East Europe's but until someone comes forward, I will act as a temporary default QA. Let's get linguistic diversity between the assignee and the QA contact!
The default QA for West Europe is: Christopher Caillon <caillon@returnvalue.com> Asa, please use this corrected address rather than the one listed above.
Hey Axel, I thought you might be interested in this bug ...
Hi! I'd like to volunteer for QA position for Central Europe. I speek these languages: Slovak, Czech, English. Can understand German and Russian, with some dificulties also Polish :-) -mondo
Thanks,mondo (Pavol?) for volunteering to relieve me! You will be a good complement to Jacek who knows Polish and a few other languages. Jacek, you've got a partner now. Central Europe: Default assignee: Jacek Piskozub <piskozub@iopan.gda.pl> QA contact: Pavol Vaskovic <pali@pali.sk>
I agree with Jacek Piskozub that this is a political minefield. I also agree with Nikolai Prokoschenko that splitting to West-Central-East doesn't make sense it the real issue is language/writing system. I think it would be less confusing and more politically correct if the individual bugs were just assigned to a person who writes the language that is relevant to the bug. The latest division seems to be based on character coding. If you really are going to split Europe, wouldn't it make sense to at least use names that better describe the slitting criteria (instead of using vague geopolitical terms)? That is: Latin-1 (in Europe) Latin-other Cyrillic
Henri, I don't think we have that many volunteers to be the default QA's -- to have an assignee for each of the languages. We want to lessen the task of default QAs but it is unrealistic to expect that many volunteers. What we have is not perfect but the current proposal will work as well as yours. Since we have more or less regional splits in the rest of the world, I would rather keep consistency in categorization in Europe. As a practical matter, I sense that there is more or less an agreement among the volunteers that they can work with this classification. I would rather not revisit the issue that had been (in my mind) settled already.
So, there goes my comment.... One question: do we have a newsgroup for Evangelism? I would really like to have one. Second: I guess, it's ok with me as an assignee. I'm not too sure, whether I understand right, what I have to do, but I'll try my best. Third: Yes, of course we do not have so many people. But splitting Europe is also silly enough - a potential bug reporter won't be really sure which part of europe he should take. And also, if we take languages, it is a lot more easier for us and for everyone else - how many sites do we cover, if we have a (default) English department? Spanish and French and we have 80% of countries out there. Russian, German, French and we have covered almost everything. Where is the problem?
> But splitting Europe is also silly enough - a > potential bug reporter won't be really sure > which part of europe he should take. You can look in the Component descriptions -- what countries are in what subcomponents will be explained there. This is like finding which Mozilla component to assign bugs to. Bug filers can look in the component descriptions and then make the best choice. In case there is an error made in choice, the default assignee can easily correct it. We have had other regional divisions for the past several weeks and there have been very few problems like you mentioned. >Russian, German, French and we have covered almost > everything. Where is the problem? The problem is we also need to cover other countries/languages and we need to have a way to classify them. In the current proposed classification, the default assignees will most likely end up covering their favorite languages anyway. But in addition, we are asking them to help with other languages within the region the assignee is responsible for.
> You can look in the Component descriptions -- what countries are in what subcomponents will be explained there. Wrong. There is NO link in Evangelism Tool to ANY kind of descriptions. Everything one can expect is a complete bug report, which is IMHO too complicated for a "normal" bug reporter. > We have had other regional divisions for the past several weeks and there have been very few problems like you mentioned. Do you know why? Because there are thousands of people out there using Mozilla, who don't even know there is such thing as Bugzilla. And of course they don't know about any kind of components, nor do they know about Evangelism and Evangelism Tool. Most people who are filing bugs are Mozilla project contributors - developers, testers, people who took the time to learn about this whole thing. As I understand the situation, Evangelism Tool has been made for "normal" people, who simply discovered an unworking site, that's all. All they want is to inform the developers about this and forget it! Therefore, there must be an easier way to file an Evangelism Bug, like some kind of automated system with only a few questions - where have you found a rendering bug, what is your name, how can we contact you and short description of the problem. The Project Contributors can then make a better bug report, write Evangelism Letters, or whatever. Do you see the problem I am worrying about?
I don't know how the Evangelism Letter tool got into this bug, but let me clarify some of the comments regarding it. The letter tool is intended for regular members of the evangelism communitity not for general consumption. The Letter tool is designed primarily for sending standard letters to webmasters to help give them information to help them upgrade their content. It does have the ability to bring up a new evangelism bug using the normal bugzilla new bug form which does have links to component descriptions. We don't necessarily want mom and pop kettle to file evangelism bugs. We deal with enough bad evangelism bug reports as it is. The idea of setting up a newsgroup with an email interface where 'normal' people can report problems with sites has been discussed. That would allow us to collect data from users without having to pollute bugzilla with poorly written evangelism bug reports. I think this is a good idea but we have not progressed on implementing it. Either way, that is not relevant to this bug. We want knowledgeable mozilla.org community members to help locate sites, file evangelism bugs, diagnose site problems, and to contact web masters. We do not need thousands of evangelism bug reports filed by people who are not knowledgeable about Mozilla or Bugzilla.
Nikolai, what you're commenting on is about Evangelism Tool mostly. This bug is about Buzilla components. We are not speaking about the same thing. If you have questions about Evangelism Tools, please address them in another bug and not do that in this bug. The Evangelism tool is a helping tool to use in conjunction with Evangelism bugs reported in Bugzilla. The component descriptions I am talking about are from Bugzilla. For example, go to any Evangelism bug, e.g. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98341 and then click on the link "Component" below Bug # and Product fields. You will find the component descriptions. As for fling a bug more easily, you can use the Bugzilla Helper form if you are not familiar with Bugzilla: http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html You can help improve this for average users if you want.
Thank you for the answers, now I see that I've been thinking in a wrong direction. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Nikolai, thank you for your last comments. As you know, we want to ask you to be the default assignee for East Europe. In this position, you will: 1. monitor Bugzilla bugs filed on web sites in East Europe component. (There is no deep meaning to this categorization except to divide up the work among several volunteers as explained above.) 2. You can then analyze the problem reported -- by yourself, or QA person (like me), or any other person you might want to seek help from. You're the manager of this East Europe component and so you can ask other people's help on the net, newsgroups, etc. 3. For web sites in languages you don't read, you might want to request help from others. I will try to help also. (If you're adventurous,you can do it yourself.) 4. Once you know the cause of the problem, a bug could on the Mozilla side. Or it could be a problem on the web site. In the latter, you can use the Evangelism letter for Russian if you like. If it is not possible to write in Ukrainian, Belarusian, etdc., then you might ask for help or write in English as the last resort. We hope you can help us in this effort by being the East Europe's default assignee. Thanks.
QA Contact: lchiang → timeless
Let's get the categories estalished now. If we need more categories later, please file additional bugs. You should line up a default assignee at least if you want to do that, however. Asa, here's the revised summary of component descriptions and assignees: (Note: I am still looking for someone to replace me as the default QA contact for East Europe.) =================================== West Europe: Countries/languages to the west of Germany's eastern border. This includes Germany, France, Austria, all Scandinavian countries, UK, Iceland, etc.-- i.e. what is commonly known as Western Europe. Default assignee: Tristan Nitot <nitot@netscape.com> QA contact: Christopher Aillon <caillon@returnvalue.com> Central Europe: All the Latin/Greek using countries of the Cental Europe, namely Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia, etc. Default assignee: Jacek Piskozub <piskozub@iopan.gda.pl> QA contact: Pavol Vaskovic <pali@pali.sk> East Europe: Former USSR countries like Russia, Ukraina, Armenia, Georgia, etc. plus Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Serbia/Slavic Hercegovina. Default assignee: Nikolai Prokoschenko <prokosch@gmx.net> QA contact: Katsuhiko Momoi <momoi@netscape.com> -- temporary fill-in ===================================
New Components created. When the bugs have all been moved out of the old EUropean component I'll remove it.
Nikolai and Jacek, can you migrate some of the European bugs to appropriate categories? Once this is done, Asa will eliminate "Euroepan" as the category. Tristan, can you also help moving some bugs out of your assignment to Central or East Europe as well as classifying yours as West Europe.
OK. I've already marked CentralEurope or EastEurope in the status whiteboard of the appropriate bugs to make it easier.
I don't seem to have any permissions to change the Component :(( Can someone please set the appropriate permission bit on my account? Thank you.
Asa: Could you give Nikolai the permissions he needs as the new East European Evangelism component owner? Thanks in advance. PS. I've already took all the bugs that IMHO belong to Central Europe.
Asa, I've just finished moving the last of the bugs over to appropriate regions. As of right now there are no bugs in the European component. All set to remove the European component.
Chris and Jacek, a great job!
Now that the migration to new components is over, let me mark this bug resolved/fixed.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 24 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Just one more thought. The deciding factor in many cases should be the language of the site. For example a Russian speaking webmaster in Estonia (see bug 59290for an example) should be contacted by the Russian speaking evangelist (Nikolai) making East Europe the obvious choice even as the default language of Estonia falls in the Central European comonent, according to what we decided here.
vrfy fixed
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Component: Bugzilla: Keywords & Components → Administration
Product: mozilla.org → bugzilla.mozilla.org
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.