PS. Forgot to say that this claim misses several points about how different language Wikipedias often have very different articles on the same topic (i.e. they are rarely direct translations if independent editing of the articles is being done). Also, I'm not clear if they are saying that this would be an improvement on machine or human translation or not. I think the claim is merely being used as an example of translating of a large amount of text relatively quickly using a form of crowdsourcing, rather than any intention to actually translate the articles, but maybe they do intend to do that?
What I did wonder was whether the "gaming" approach reflects how things work on Wikipedia:
"Points are offered for each translation attempted; completing a round earns the user a shiny gold medal; and learners can follow each other, adding a competitive edge."
Sound rather familiar...
Carcharoth
On 6/20/12, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
A claim made here about Duolingo and translating Wikipedia:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18367017
"With 100,000 active users, von Ahn says Duolingo could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish in five weeks. With one million users, it would take about 80 hours."
Our article on Duolingo is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo
Carcharoth