[Foundation-l] One Wikipedia Per Person (regarding the distribution of and the ability to read Wikipedia)

[Brian]

Proprietary algorithms aren't what make their system better - it's that they
have a larger corpus. Google has published a trillion token dataset for
machine translation researchers but it's presumably just a subset of what
they now have.  The data that makes their system so good is already
available public but it is not (yet) within the scope of the WMF to harvest
all copyrighted information in order to increase the performance of already
published machine translation algorithms.

It would cost the WMF dearly in resources to build such a system themselves
based on published
research.  In other words, as long as the output of the black box is
CC-BY-SA the other factors aren't very important.

In my mind if you consider using a corporation's semi-proprietary
translation engine to be a violation of the WMF's principles then accepting
visitors that come from Google in the first place would be an analogous
violation. We have no idea how the search engine that is the single largest
source of visitors to Wikipedia works, and yet we accept them graciously.

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 1:45 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
> Currently the translation engine by Goole works for some twenty languages.
> We have Wikipedias in over 250 languages and we localise in over 300. If we
> are to collaborate with Google on this, we should partner in the building
> of
> translation engines for our other languages. We could and we should
> consider
> this when the software was to be open source.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
> 2009/5/31 Foxy Loxy <foxyloxy.wikimedia at gmail.com>
>
> > I would guess a partership with Google would be a good idea because:
> > 1) They are the best (according to Brian) and
> > 2) If we were to go through with this proposal we'd want the translation
> > technology now, not in X years when the technology catches up with
> > google, if at all.
> >
> > And with many OSS/free projects, the X could be insanely high.
> >
> > On Sunday, 31 May 2009 2:50 pm, Fajro wrote:
> > > And why partner with Google? There are Free alternatives in
> > > development:
> > >
> > > http://www.apertium.org/
> > >
> > > http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page
> > >
> > > --
> > > △ ℱajro △
> >
> > --
> > fl
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user_talk:fl>
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