I'm putting the l10n-english team in BCC as they *might* want to help us out here but I don't really want to start cross-posting. You'll figure out which list to proceed on, right? On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 01:07:02AM -0500, Michael Gilbert wrote: > On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 6:47 AM, Arno Töll wrote: > >> The term "contributor" conveys a > >> much more welcoming message as it says "this is the place where I can > >> go to learn about start making contributions to debian", and "this is > >> where we can go to help people become contributors". > > > > That's the problem. A contributor can have many roles in Debian, it is > > overbooked just like terms such as "DSA" and "maintainer" (albeit zack > > suggested to come over the latter problem). > > Like I've said before, this is not about eliminating ambiguity. Every > single word in every single language is ambiguous. It's simply > unavoidable. It's about choosing the word with the right context for > the goals of the service. That's the primary goal, yes, absolutely. Though the past shows clearly how un ambiguous terms served us with confusion, may they have been as appropriate as possible (see the DM != DM != DD != maintainer debacle). My point being, we should look for a perfectly describing term, and then make sure it's not used already in a different (or worse: a similar) context. > This should be a place for contributors to come together to > collaborate and make their work better before pestering a DD about it; > with minimal experienced intervention (mentoring). Well, I'm not a native english speaker, though what you're describing doesn't sound like mentoring but rather training. To mentor, as I understand it, is an action someone skilled performs in order to teach or train another person. As you said, the service provided here is for those who still learn, who are being mentored, i.e. it's actually not for mentoring. Now, I'm not sure "training" is the right term, as it suggests (to me) the service is something like a playground, but I can be mistaken. A native speaker should probably say something here. Hauke -- .''`. Jan Hauke Rahm <jhr@debian.org> www.jhr-online.de : :' : Debian Developer www.debian.org `. `'` Member of the Linux Foundation www.linux.com `- Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe www.fsfe.org
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