Translations are bad

While providing translations seems like an easy and good way to contribute to our wiki, they are in fact quite damaging.

= This is not wikipedia =

First off, this is a highly technical wiki and not wikipedia.

The intention of this wiki is to cover all technical aspects needed to get your software of choice running on your Allwinner based hardware. This while the hardware and the software for it is constantly evolving. It is not meant to be an encyclopedia which documents everything in history, it is meant to document the current state of our software support for allwinner SoCs.

We are not here to edit wikis all day long, we are primarily about hardware and software for allwinner SoCs. There are no millions of users, there are no hundreds of thousands of editors. There's just a handful of us, and we have a hard enough time getting our stuff to run and documenting it for others to follow. Any translation is going to be forgotten, going to become outdated quickly, or, even worse, will contain some info only accessible in a language only a few persons grasp, and that information might as well never have been committed to our wiki at all.

= But what about those who do not know english? =

Too bad!

As much as many people dislike it, and no matter how badly the spelling mismatches the pronounciation, english is the de-facto language of technology and the interweb. If anyone is unable to grasp the limited english present on this website, then he definitely will not be capable of following any howto here, no matter what language it is in. They will also not be able to communicate with most of the folks behind our site, so they cannot ask for help either.

So let english be a barrier for those who would only walk away frustrated anyway.

= Example =

A great example is the U-Boot page and its french translation.

Here the user Popolon spent a lot of time executing the english howto, while at the same time creating a french copy. He of course only documented his findings and encountered pitfalls in the french copy he was writing. Since this work was done, in september and oktober 2013, the english U-Boot page saw a lot of rewriting and restructuring. None of the english changes of course made it to the french page, making the french translation a bad fit for the rest of the sunxi wiki.

Eventually, in january 2014, libv, had to go and clean it up. Luckily, he is a dutch speaking belgian who lives in germany. So he fluently speaks Dutch, English and german, and can easily understand French (due to the belgian schooling system), and he was able to salvage some bits from the french page.

Now ask yourself:
 * How many linux-sunxi developers speak more than 3 languages?
 * Which languages are covered by long term active sunxi developers?
 * How many of the translated pages were created by someone who just came by, spent a day, and who was never seen again?
 * Was this the best use of libv's time?
 * Was Popolon his contribution an improvement for the sunxi community?