Anthony DiPierro wrote:
My point, however, is that anyone who thinks that such an achievement (the ability to effectively communicate among the 112 languages of which Wikipedia is considered "somewhat active") would not be useful to Wikipedia - they certainly have a completely different idea of the project than I do. I see it as significant that Wikipedia is generally referred to as *an* encyclopedia in multiple languages, not a collection of encyclopedias in multiple languages. I thought it was significant that Jimbo called Wikipedia "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." But now he seems to be implying that it wasn't (I still think maybe he misinterpreted me, though).
Because obviously, it is impossible that Anthony could have misinterpreted me. :)
For what is it worth, I think that questions of language and culture are subtle and deep. Perfect machine translation would of course be useful -- only Anthony could manage to find the straw man argument that anyone who thinks that language distinctions are important and relevant might also think that machine translation would not be _useful_.
I think we sit somewhere around 4 on Steve Bennett's scale, but moreso, I think that is about where we ought to sit, perfect machine translation or not.
--Jimbo