... or "fora", as you wish.

What is your feeling about the proliferation of Maemo related community sites in several languages?

Do you think it's worth considering the creation of subforums or paralel forums for languages other than English within the maemo.org domain?

No.

While I believe having places for people to be able to discuss Maemo in their native language is a great thing, the real problem is that a lot of the people with the real information just don't speak those languages... so those forums will end up with a lot of crap that isn't correct/isn't true... and I don't think that having that sort of misinformation going on in the official Maemo forums does anything to help our reputation.

People speaking other languages most likely already have a place they like to go to talk about their phones anyways... so unless there's a native speaker that knows what he's talking about is moderating or contributing to it... I just don't see what we can bring to the table by having it under the Maemo.org banner.

i think subforums is the way to go as it will make it all easier to manage and it will make it easier to cross communicate with other languages for getting things done

My opinion is there are enough user forums already (déjà vu )

Most of them are either spinoffs of Symbian user forums, and thus the posts there mostly consist in spreading lies (as zerojay said) or asking when is it released.

I'm missing more interesting/hacking/development forums though.

if i was a Chinese speaking symbian user i'd be feeling pissed off right now,
in your two's own words non English speakers and symbian users dont know crap and spread incorrect stuff.
do you even have a idea how offensive you sound

Um... no. You need to reread what I said above. If you really think I said "all non-English speakers and Symbian users don't know crap and spread incorrect stuff", then you really need to learn how to read.

What I did say is that the most engaged community members with the most information generally will NOT be on those forums to correct anyone saying incorrect stuff.

You're just attempting to find something offensive to complain about, apparently. I know, why not make stuff up?

the people with the real information don't even speak english as there first language so your point is truly not valid.
if the subforums or whatever are moderated well then misinformation will get recognised and corrected.
this is a English speaking forum and I've seen just as much bs misinformation on it what people correct so i don't see how language as anything to do with wrong info
its not that i'm trying to pick a fight just the way the two posts came across is like you think people who can speak english or use maemo instead of symbian are superior in knowledge to others, which i found offensive

About "a lot of the people with the real information just don't speak those languages"... if you go through threads with 'real information' you will find easily people whose native langauge is German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian...

To me the question is whether those guys would be happy following more or less those forums in their language.

What if there would be a light process e.g. needs to be requested by nn maemo.org users, with n of them having at least nnn posts/karma.

I mean, "being open to normal users" also has an implicit multilingual approach. Expecting that developers manage some English is OK-ish (even if this is more true for reading than writing) but making the same assumption about users...

Another way will to look at it is: forums elsewhere will happen anyway so breeding them will help more or less the Maemo community?

I'm Spanish, and I use just this website (maemo.org, talk, downloads, wiki) and mailing lists to know about Maemo. All this amount of info is in English, and, for me, it works as a first barrier, by separating those Spanish users who can write/understand/both English, from those who rather can't.

While this has some advantages (the Spanish users capable of participating are quite skilled), it also has a major drawback: most average users (what I read you call Joe-average user) aren't good enough at English to get the best from this website.

Creating subforums (sub-fora) may lead to separate, and we may lose accuracy. Maybe there should be some way to provide translations for the more important info (official news, announcements, etc).

its a choice between
1.people who don't speak English not participating at all
or
2.participating in there own language in sub forums

I go for two as its best to compromise than lose talented people we never knew
As long as the mods can speak fluent English who will moderate a certain language and are pretty knowledgeable anything lost in translation can easily be corrected