The most important task in terms of promoting Monero is to translate information about it into new languages. And the most important source of information as of 2024 is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is very often the first thing that shows up when ordinary people google a certain word. I encourage anyone to translate the Wikipedia article into as many new languages as possible.
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
Short answer: I did. In August this year, I translated the Monero article into approximately 50 languages. All of these articles were concise and contained all the necessary information divided into sections as well as categories and links to other wikipages, scientific papers and ‘reliable’ newspaper articles. If it was possible to add an infobox, I did that as well. Of course I cannot guarantee there were no minor grammatical or spelling errors, but anyone who know those languages would agree they were written in a perfectly legitimate language.
Then something weird and quite frankily evil happened. A user calling himself Johannes89 started to delete article after article with the ‘rationale’ what they were either ‘poorly written’ or ‘machine translated’. However, at the end of his psychotic rampage he started to feel insecure and added a big red info box on top of each article about to be annihilated demanding it to be reviewed by a moderator who knows the particular language. One such example is the Monero article in Romanian [which currently is too short and has to be expanded. A moderator who has Romanian as their native language perused the article and deemed it to be [written in a perfectly legitimate Romanian.
By then however, most of the damage had already been done and the final show of mercy was like sparing a cathedral whilst having carpet bombed a city. And there was no immediate action I could take to restore the articles since Johannes89 decided to ban both my Wikipedia account and my home computer IP-address. When I emailed his fellow ‘global stewards’, the only reply was that the havoc had been wrought because of ‘obvious reasons’. These ‘obvious reason’ are as ludicrous requiring that a US president has to speak fluent Mandarin to communicate with the Chinese leader or claiming that a Bible or a Quran has to be written shorthand on vellum or papyrus and that no printed Bible or Quran is a valid religious source.
Since Johannes89 brands his censorship as fighting ‘vandalism and spam’, my only conclusion is that this is a war for the future of financial freedom on this planet. And it is a war we must win. As a modern history analogy (without romanticizing the Kremlin), this rather shocking and depressing experience has been like ‘conquering Kyiv within 48 hours’ only to realize that one is facing a long-term war of attrition. Every new article about Monero that is added on Wikipedia is like conquering a new village.
How can you contribute?
Short answer: translate. With the help of various AI tools such as Chat GPT and Gemini, anyone can translate. Make sure that you double-check every section or sentence on Google Translate. Also, look up the Bitcoin article and see which categories should be added to a proper article about a cryptocurrency. If you write in a minor language, make the article as short and concise as possible. Add at least one source from a scientific paper or a ‘reliable’ newspaper, but try to add as many sources as possible. When you feel the article is accomplished, add it on the interlanguage page by providing the ISO 639 language code and a link to the specific Monero article. Make sure you add some critical information so that the article does not appear as pure advertisement. Also, make sure you respect the local alphabets. An article about Monero in, for example, Hindi should have the caption मोनेरो, not Monero.
By writing this, I do not promote laziness regarding learning new languages. Learning new languages is fun and the better you know a certain language, the more unique your article or interaction with local people might become. Not knowing a language perfectly is however no excuse for not translating important information into that language.