Re: Complaint of the Slovak coordinator

[Marcel Telka <marcel telka sk>]

Hi Peter, GTP members, GTP Coordination Team and Slovak translation team
members,

I am prepared to answer all questions regarding this issue. I think the
GTP Coordination Team should decide first whether the
gnome-i18n gnome org mailing list is the proper forum for such
discussion, because I am not sure all of the GTP members are interested.

Please let me know.

Thanks.

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 09:30:01PM +0200, Peter Mraz wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have been advised to write an email to this mailing list to help us
> resolve the problems of the Slovak translation team.
> 
> 
> Due to reasons listed below our team is unhappy with approach and behaviour
> of current coordinator of team. Recently, I have volunteered for new
> coordinator by sending email to gnome-sk-list outlining how I would like to
> change the way team works [8]. I have also asked members of our team to
> express their opinion on whether they would like to change coordinator.
> Throughout past three weeks 6 members of our team have voted for myself and
> 3 members have voted against the change of coordinator (more less all active
> members of team have voted and expressed their opinions). Marcel has
> discussed this with me in quite a length, however he did not decided to
> accept wish of majority of the team and resign.
> 
> Therefore I would like to ask you to help us resolve this situation, as
> current coordinator does not want to give up his position. Please see our
> reasoning below.
> 
> (I do acknowledge that most of the references provided here are in Slovak,
> however at least members of Czech team should be able to understand them and
> verify if necessary).
> 
> 
> We observe the declining trend in the amount of Gnome translated to Slovak:
> 
> Gnome 2.20 – 70%
> 
> Gnome 2.22 – 59%
> 
> Gnome 2.24 – 56%
> 
> Gnome 2.26 – 52%
> 
> Gnome 2.28 – 48%
> 
> Gnome 2.30 - 46%
> This happens while there is a quite active team and currently there are 25
> modules to be committed and most of them are in this state from Feb/Mar.
> (I'm convinced that there would even more activity if things would be moving
> quicker).
> 
> 
> I see the problem in that the coordinator of the Slovak team, Marcel,
> focuses solely on perfection and nothing else. While I understand that
> quality is important, the translation procedure should be organized in such
> a way that strive for quality is not the factor which decreases the coverage
> of the translated Gnome. On his side there is no will for any compromise,
> even though majority of the team voted for change on this[1] and would like
> to see more translations being committed. He has very little or no wish to
> try to get more modules translated, unless they are 100% perfect. He has
> recently said that he had not ignored the wish of the majority of the team,
> but he had not accepted it, providing only this explanation: "What you wish
> for is nice, however wishes might not always come true, even if the majority
> wishes it." [2].
> In past year he committed 26 modules (some of them more than once), half of
> these modules were modules translated by him. Between June 2009 and February
> 2010 he committed only 2 modules (24.9.2009 damned-lies, 10.11.2009
> swfdec-gnome). Two-thirds of commits were done since February 2010, after a
> proposal to change the coordinator and after a lot of members asked for a
> change in the work flow.
> Marcel checks everything after each reviewer and until he checks it whole
> (including string which are currently translated) and all of his comments
> are addressed he does not commit the module.
> 
> He also insists on numerous bureaucratic procedures which are not necessary:
> 
>    -
> 
>    Every new member must sent a registration email with very strict
>    formatting rules, and unless he/she does it, he/she is not accepted to the
>    Slovak team. Even if one provides all information required and he/she
>    fulfills all the prerequisites, he/she would not be accepted as a team
>    member, if the registration email has an extra line, or a line is broken by
>    an email client etc. This causes issues with almost every new member trying
>    to join the team. Marcel considers this as some kind of test! (The only
>    explanation why the email must be in this format was that Marcel wrote a
>    script to check whether the registration email is correctly formatted and
>    another script to get some statistics on team performance).
>    -
> 
>    Until recently, Marcel insisted on using only one's full name, as it is
>    written in the birth certificate !! After a long discussions [9] at
>    gnome-sk-list, he has allowed members to use other forms of one's name (e.g.
>    Joe if your full name is John), however one still cannot use his/her
>    nickname!! [10] (It was even pointed to in the mailing list that this is
>    against a Slovak law which gives the right to use any name or nickname to
>    publish one's work).
>    -
> 
>    Marcel also does not accept translations of modules unless one promises
>    to look after the module in the future. There was a case of somebody out of
>    the team submitting translation of dia, and Marcel refused to include it
>    unless that person would join the team and would look after the module.
>    -
> 
>    Recently, Marcel proposed a new system to accept and change rules
>    governing Slovak Gnome translation team. His first draft of the procedures
>    can be found here [3]. It is extremely lengthy and written in obscure
>    language and the chance is that nobody will be willing to read it at all.
>    -
> 
>    He refuses to allow anybody else except for him to commit translations
>    without specifying sane reasons. The only given reason was "the time has not
>    come yet" and also "there will be transparent rules created when I will get
>    more time, which is not now"[4]. No rules were published up till now.
> 
> 
> Marcel by himself decides who should translate which module and refuses to
> give up modules which he has assigned to himself in the past, even though he
> has not worked on them for a long time. Here, [5], [6], are few examples
> from recent past where Marcel refused to allow other members of the team to
> translate module, but he did not updated them by himself. If one wants to
> start translating a module, he/she must first request it by an email and
> only when he checks that it is not one of the modules he would like to
> translate in the future by himself, he then assigns it to translator.
> 
> It should also be noted that the few improvements, which happened in the
> past months, happened only after lengthy discussions, a proposal to change
> the coordinator and pressure from other members of the team. There already
> were problems with that in the past, and he only started replying once there
> was discussion about his replacement [7].
> 
> Further, I know two former members of the Slovak team who had quit because
> of the behavior of the coordinator.
> 
> 
> I hope that you will be able to help us to resolve this.
> 
> 
> Kind regards
> 
> 
> [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-March/msg00252.html
> [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-May/msg00002.html
> 
> [3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-April/msg00096.html
> [4] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-March/msg00247.html
> 
> [5] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-January/msg00046.html
> 
> [6] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-January/msg00073.html
> [7] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2007-November/msg00038.html
> 
> [8] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-April/msg00081.html
> 
> [9] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-February/msg00166.html
> 
> [10]
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-sk-list/2010-February/msg00346.html

-- 
+-------------------------------------------+
| Marcel Telka   e-mail:   marcel telka sk  |
|                homepage: http://telka.sk/ |
|                jabber:   marcel jabber sk |
+-------------------------------------------+