Subject-Was: Off-topic, but I must share this
"David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote in message news:fbad4e140904240648h62672871h1ace9b3abfcac9b3@mail.gmail.com...
2009/4/24 Angela Anuszewski angela.anuszewski@gmail.com:
So, what happens when this site starts profiting off material they lifted from Wikipedia without crediting the original authors and conforming to the GFDL (or whatever license that Wikipedia winds up with?)
These blogs and sites are typically put up by spammers. They use machine-translated content so as not to trigger Google's duplicate content penalty.
Maybe google should run a mechanical grammar critic over everything. I would not mind the convenience of one on wikipedia at all, because it would save me a lot of keystrokes trying to explain any changes I could theoretically make. Good ones hav a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index, along with commentary about why some words raise that index -- the lower the better, and it's hard to bring one down to eight.
The only disadvantage is that active voice makes a cleaner translation, so the more wikipedia's readability improves, the better the mechanical translation. I do not think it would make a big statistical difference, though. If google tuned and rated their fog index nicely, then bloggers of the plain English variety would like the rating changes, too.
I feel like cross-posting this to alt.usage.english, and I see no convenient way to do that, today. _______ <a href="http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/">BrewJay's Babble Bin</a>