I am not "offended", but I think the effect could be much improved by at least hearing the guys actually working on the site first - not negotiating, but collect their problems as well. Yes, there are many problems - but they are not that there are not enough editors or none of them cares. For example, we would happily announce every tiny conference on the site and could also do that, if organizers would just send us a short note. I think most of us would do with a link and write the article themselves. Instead, there are major conferences that seem to be announced on twitter only.
What I cannot and do not want to do (I am also tending for a german ruby portal next to this job) is actively scrape the interwebs for such information.
Also, there is no-one who takes stewardship of the technical part of the site - the "popular projects" widget that is still backed by an effectively dead site (rubyforge) is one of them. This is not a unique problem: rubygems.org has similar problems of finding people to implement/change features. This would be important.
When it comes to languages: I am not sure whether 20 languages is okay, but I am quite proud that we do actually have non-english sites and can link to non-english resources. I reckon that the japanese community likes it as well. As long as there is someone pouring its time into it, i'm fine with it - and its actually not working as bad as it seems.
My biggest problem is that the Ruby community is big on decentralization and no one cares about dragging stuff back together. For example, there are at least 2 people managing great documentation indices (ruby-doc.org and rubydoc.info) that wouldn't have evolved if we had integrated the docs into the main site. What I would really enjoy would be a team that tries to organize that forest a bit and maybe direct efforts of volunteers.
I can't disagree with you and it sounds like you might have enough background knowledge to lead such an effort if you had the time and inclination to do so.
I've merely noticed a problem and I'm pointing it out. I readily admit I am also not the person to fix it, much like Jon Stewart couldn't fix the American political system, yet still he points out its flaws. Would you expect him to write letters to Fox News before picking on them? I'm no comedian but I'm taking a similar approach. If the only option is to write e-mails and have long winded discussions, I'd choose to do nothing instead.
My biggest problem is that the Ruby community is big on decentralization and no one cares about dragging stuff back together.
Yes. As you note, this is both a problem and a benefit, in some cases. Perhaps, then, any sort of "official" Ruby site should focus solely on linking out to up to date third party resources rather than (poorly) maintaining its own.
And, again, I must stress that it seems the localization teams have been doing some great work and deserve recognition for this. My points rest entirely with the "main" English language site.
Also, there is no-one who takes stewardship of the technical part of the site - the "popular projects" widget that is still backed by an effectively dead site (rubyforge) is one of them. This is not a unique problem: rubygems.org has similar problems of finding people to implement/change features. This would be important.
When it comes to languages: I am not sure whether 20 languages is okay, but I am quite proud that we do actually have non-english sites and can link to non-english resources. I reckon that the japanese community likes it as well. As long as there is someone pouring its time into it, i'm fine with it - and its actually not working as bad as it seems.
My biggest problem is that the Ruby community is big on decentralization and no one cares about dragging stuff back together. For example, there are at least 2 people managing great documentation indices (ruby-doc.org and rubydoc.info) that wouldn't have evolved if we had integrated the docs into the main site. What I would really enjoy would be a team that tries to organize that forest a bit and maybe direct efforts of volunteers.