As some of you may know, I'm trying to promote Spanish writers in Steemit. It's not easy, but I think it can get done with a bit of patience and work... It'll take time but we'll eventually get there. The last post about this was... https://steemit.com/spanish/@webosfritos/a-pick-at-hidden-gems-spanish-version-3-una-seleccion-de-tesoros-ocultos-version-espanola-3 I do this in coordination with who came up with original Hidden Gems concept,
who curates the Russian content, and
who does it in German.
The idea is to share the revenue with post authors and have them make some money that way which they don't receive via their original posts. For some people in Latin-America what may seem like a ridiculous payout in the US or Europe can really make a difference.
There are two major problems regarding the adoption of multilingual content.
The first one may be only a Spanish issue, the lack of Spanish whales or Spanish supporting whales. I wrote an article about it, maybe you find it interesting. https://steemit.com/steemit/@webosfritos/on-how-to-solve-the-unfair-multilingual-whale-problem
The second one which I think is a general issue, comes from a lack of guidance, guidelines or a map for multilingual content, and has to do with how posts are tagged.
I'll explain myself, there's no consensus for tagging multilingual posts, it gets very hard to discover and promote posts in specific languages, thus building communities around such languages.
In putting some though on this matter, I humbly propose a solution which I think makes sense, we would have to structure a system relatively similar to those used by websites who publish content in different languages, this is;
a) Generic multilingual top level tag: We should use a tag which gathers all posts published in languages other than english, and it should be #multilingual
b) Language Specific: Further than what I proposed above, we should also use a tag for specific languages following multilingual.
Bearing the above in mind, tagging for multilingual posts should look something like this:
German: multilingual-de
Chinese: multilingual-cn
Russian: mullingual-ru
Spanish: multilingual-es
Japanese: multilingual-jp
...
n language: multilingual-n
...and so on and so forth.
I think this would help a lot in clarifying the multilingual mess.
I believe it should be community leaders doing this, people like;
But if we don't give them a hand with ideas it won't get done anytime soon.... however, a proposal from them, an announcement from Steemit on this subject , or the whale support for this type of initiative and tagging would foster the adoption of multilingual content.
I believe the platform could benefit from it and if some "bulky" languages such as Russian, Spanish, Hindi or Korean gather an audience, then Steemit should grow in leaps and bounds and eventually benefit all active actors and Steem holders.
Any thoughts or ideas on the above?
I apologize for summoning the above whales, but I think their involvement in this type of issues is of paramount importance for the growth and evolution of Steemit. If any of you have a problem with me mentioning you please PM me in Steem Chat and I won't do it again. Thank you for your patience and understanding.