Off-topic, but I must share this - WikiEN-l

Jay Litwyn

24 Apr 24 Apr

12:23 p.m.

It looks like Portuguese coming through a mechanical translator like http://babelfish.altavisa.com/ , especially all the references to a man as "it". _______ <a href="http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/">BrewJay's Babble Bin</a> I snake that joined the Canadian feds would be a Mountie Python. "Phil Nash" <pn007a2145(a)blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message news:2456DC0B0387417882F5BAEA7BC0C27C@mothere50f7f7b...

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Whilst Googling for some information, I've just come across this: http://www.wajoop.com/James-Robertson-Justice which is clearly a machine translation of our http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Robertson_Justice I'm particularly fond of "The Blow of Blow of Chitty of Chitty" in the filmography. I defy anyone to read it without laughing as it's just kept me in pleats for 20 minutes. Cheers _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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Jay Litwyn

1:29 p.m.

(I do not think wikipedia will be allowed to drop ShareAlike, which pretty much means static license. If wikipedia's license changes at all, then it will be for matters of style.) Information on wajoop is clearly inferior for readability reasons, so I do not know why it would become popular as an authoritative resource. Even if a human starts cleaning up translations, the hundred and fifty thousand eyes on wikipedia will still outclass just about everyone but the big boys, and when it comes points of view that really need more understanding, even them. Getting listed on google is hard to avoid. Do not worry about competition from wajoop. If they do run commercials, then people will be drawn to their source, that is if they do not find wikipedia, first, which is probable outside of some security and word of mouth disaster -- citations on web pages and such. "Angela Anuszewski" <angela.anuszewski(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:f70a9ccf0904240554m7ee542ecv160cbb0151921796@mail.gmail.com...

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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?) Angela On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 8:23 AM, Jay Litwyn <brewhaha(a)freenet.edmonton.ab.ca

wrote:

It looks like Portuguese coming through a mechanical translator like http://babelfish.altavisa.com/ , especially all the references to a man as "it". _______ <a href="http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/">BrewJay's Babble Bin</a> I snake that joined the Canadian feds would be a Mountie Python. "Phil Nash" <pn007a2145(a)blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message news:2456DC0B0387417882F5BAEA7BC0C27C@mothere50f7f7b...

Whilst Googling for some information, I've just come across this: http://www.wajoop.com/James-Robertson-Justice which is clearly a machine translation of our http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Robertson_Justice I'm particularly fond of "The Blow of Blow of Chitty of Chitty" in the filmography. I defy anyone to read it without laughing as it's just kept me in pleats for 20 minutes. Cheers _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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Jay Litwyn

21 May 21 May

11:40 a.m.

New subject: Getting bias from google.

Subject-Was: Off-topic, but I must share this "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:fbad4e140904240648h62672871h1ace9b3abfcac9b3@mail.gmail.com...

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2009/4/24 Angela Anuszewski <angela.anuszewski(a)gmail.com>om>:

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>

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