On 6/8/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 6/8/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
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_.
You stated that "For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot imagine that we would want to do so."
If you weren't talking about machine translation, then what did you mean? Imagine that we would want to do what?
Peanut gallery chiming in here: It looks like Jimbo is saying machine translation would be a very useful tool for building Wikipedia, but we would not want to reduce Wikipedia to merely being a single repository of information automatically kept in sync by machine translation.
In other words: Machine translation as a tool == good. Machine translation as a model for interwikipedia relations == bad.
And I'd say that "We try to reach people in their mother language or at least a language they handle very well, we should not provide different content based on any other specificity such as nationality, religion, political view point and such."
So an article about sport should discuss in equal measure sports popular in anglophone countries, and sports we've never heard of, but that have massive popularity in certain populous African countries? What does your philosophy say about the Georgia/Georgia question (is Georgia a country in the former USSR or a US state?) What does "different content" mean? Given three articles A1, A2, A3, is having A1 the main article pointing to A2 and A3 as sub articles the same thing as some other arrangement?
Is it ok if a link at the top of [[President]] at en directs people to [[George W Bush]], while a link at the top of [[Président]] at fr directs people to [[Jaques Chirac]]?
These aren't rhetorical questions - what's ok, what isn't?
Steve