As far as I understand, the feature to select language for the forum UI has existed for quite some time (and so have the translations).
I see a lot of mentions about "inclusion" etc. everywhere on swift.org, but from my perspective I haven't seen any of it. Consider my interface preferences:
Is this good enough for these forums, even though, in my understanding, the feature has existed for at least a year and has been requested long ago?
Please stop editing my question into something it's not. Especially if you have not expressed any justification or rationale for doing so. I do not want my questions to be misrepresented behind my back when my name is attached to them.
This question exists explicitly because of the ubiquitous mentions of diversity and inclusion on swift.org — trying to separate them is not possible.
There isn't a policy in place here to be intentionally exclusive — either Discourse needs to be updated, or the configuration needs to be double-checked to enable this if the option is off by default; this just takes some amount of human intervention. A light ping to @forum_admins to check would suffice.
We do try to keep things civil here and the tone of your message seems rather accusatory. I’m not sure what editing has you riled up, but I’m sure there wasn’t anything nefarious about it.
i edited the question title because it wasn’t phrased as a question and the tone seemed needlessly combative.
from my perspective, there is a legitimate, on-topic question here regarding forums localization settings, and keeping the wording focused on that question will make it more likely for you to receive a helpful response.
Thank you for your sincere replies and engagement. It's appreciated.
I'll address the points in order:
Thank you for a constructive suggestion / action.
It's not my intent to accuse anyone of intentionally exclude. I'm expressing my disappointment in the context of the impressions that I get whenever I visit swift.org. This includes the fact that preexisting localization is such a basic feature in that context, let alone that it has been requested.
I will assume you're referring to my second message. To me, in my opinion, it is simply not very respectful to edit someone elses choice of words just because they happen to not correspond exactly to the words you would have preferred to read -- nefarious or not. To the contrary: I find it civil that you simply express your concerns if you have them (just as everyone has done here since), and make suggestions. I'll take them into consideration. To me it doesn't matter if the edits are part of a larger system or not. If someone does this whereupon I point out that I don't appreciate it, you may call it accusatory.
If you think that editing others' choices of words should be done liberally as long as the intent is "not bad", then the more power to you (or, rather, to whoever chooses your words). I'm for restraint: When I write something here (or anywhere online) I don't have much more than words to convey nuance, and I find it natural to advocate for being allowed to choose them exactly. If, for example, someone pops in here and starts insulting me personally I still would not find it acceptable if anyone else changed their words. Hide it all if necessary; point out mistakes -- that's fine.
Thank you for the explanation. If I had failed to phrase the title as a question then that was indeed unintentional.
As I mentioned above I'm expressing my disappointment while simultaneously asking a question, but with certain kinds of spectacles I don't doubt that disappointment will come off as "combative" (I've never used that word before and don't know its nuances). After all, my disappointment is rooted in unfulfilled expectations, which someone else will inevitably decide has to be blamed on a third person, and blame is presumably combative making disappointment transitively combative. In that case I think I would simply have liked to edit out the word "needlessly" -- the feature exists, it's in line with goals, it has been requested, much time has passed, and nothing happened. I think it's far from unreasonable to feel the need to express disappointment at that point.
Anyway, my point is this: if there weren't already so much talk about inclusion, I wouldn't even have bothered bringing localization up as a topic...again. I already have a placeholder explanation for arbitrary software that doesn't fix things years after something has been reported: disinterest. On the surface that explanation does not seem to fit in this context, so I want to ask.
For those who are interested in the subject of localization with regards to software development, here's the landscape for a developer (a.k.a. "user") as I see it:
Almost nothing is localized, or even internationalized. Xcode certainly wasn't last time I checked. Code and comments? As if. Documentation...not so much (the Rust book has repos for uncompiled translations, which is as close as I've ever gotten). Tools? Not many that I've seen.
One notable exception would be the git CLI. Ironically, it's a good example: if you ask why the particular git version you are using on macOS doesn't have gettext support compiled in you get an answer along the lines of "there hasn't been any demand for it".
Developers who have had "no localization for you" ingrained into their brain and are used to having no localization whatsoever are basically expected to go request it explicitly, en masse. Then these individual feature requests will be counted just the same as any other request from users of regular software, instead of for what they are: massively underrepresenting the number that would actually like to see the feature (I hope!), but who are too used to status quo to even think of asking -- surely there must already be a good reason for its absence.
It's a little frustrating to conclude that not much will happen in such a situation.
