On 21/09/06, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
I'd like to second this - don't relax requirements whatsoever.
Of course, it would make the goal silly to do so. I'm putting [[WP:100K]] as working to the Featured Article criteria ...
But don't be afraid to reform the process. The meaning of FA should not be to be one of 365 produced each year to show up on the front page.
... but am explicitly not assuming the current FA process.
[[WP:100K]] seems to have a nascent process outlined:
1. Check various sources for better-than-average articles. (FA, GA, A-rated by a project, collaboration-of-the-week, etc.) 2. Rate these per the FAC. I expect FAs and probably GAs will get an automatic pass to save effort.
An idea I have for step 2 is: no self-nominations. I am *suspecting* self-nominations are why FA has to explicitly say "don't take it personally" - they've set up an environment almost designed to make it personal.
Now then, for the bilinguals ... does translating FAs from one project to another sound like something that would arouse your interest at all?
[cc: back to wikien-l]
- d.
Yes, it's certainly an interesting idea, but it's usually a lot of hard work to get a decent translation going. The article subject would have to be interesting to keep me motivated.
Mgm
On 9/21/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/09/06, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
I'd like to second this - don't relax requirements whatsoever.
Of course, it would make the goal silly to do so. I'm putting [[WP:100K]] as working to the Featured Article criteria ...
But don't be afraid to reform the process. The meaning of FA should not be to be one of 365 produced each year to show up on the front page.
... but am explicitly not assuming the current FA process.
[[WP:100K]] seems to have a nascent process outlined:
- Check various sources for better-than-average articles. (FA, GA,
A-rated by a project, collaboration-of-the-week, etc.) 2. Rate these per the FAC. I expect FAs and probably GAs will get an automatic pass to save effort.
An idea I have for step 2 is: no self-nominations. I am *suspecting* self-nominations are why FA has to explicitly say "don't take it personally" - they've set up an environment almost designed to make it personal.
Now then, for the bilinguals ... does translating FAs from one project to another sound like something that would arouse your interest at all?
[cc: back to wikien-l]
- d.
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On 21/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, it's certainly an interesting idea, but it's usually a lot of hard work to get a decent translation going. The article subject would have to be interesting to keep me motivated.
If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
(and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)
- d.
I'll see if I can chip in with a Dutch article.
On 9/21/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, it's certainly an interesting idea, but it's usually a lot of hard
work
to get a decent translation going. The article subject would have to be interesting to keep me motivated.
If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
(and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 9/21/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, it's certainly an interesting idea, but it's usually a lot of hard
work
to get a decent translation going. The article subject would have to be interesting to keep me motivated.
If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
(and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)
While I know using online translators is discouraged, if a person is familiar enough with a subject to be able to root out mistranslations and to rewrite it as coherent English (good prose in one language doesn't necessarily make good prose in another, hence the "it looses something in the translation" cliche), then I don't see why familiarity with another language is necessarily a requirement. I've found with the couple of articles I've looked at through Google's translation service that it does a passable job, especially if one is familiar with the the subject matter. The nice thing about Google's translator is that if you click a link on the translated page, the linked page will be translated for you as well.
Carl
On 21/09/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
While I know using online translators is discouraged, if a person is familiar enough with a subject to be able to root out mistranslations and to rewrite it as coherent English (good prose in one language doesn't necessarily make good prose in another, hence the "it looses something in the translation" cliche), then I don't see why familiarity with another language is necessarily a requirement. I've found with the couple of articles I've looked at through Google's translation service that it does a passable job, especially if one is familiar with the the subject matter. The nice thing about Google's translator is that if you click a link on the translated page, the linked page will be translated for you as well.
I've tried this. It's somewhat better than nothing. But mostly I've only used it for expanding a bare stub and only in an area I'm already familiar with, and even that's too painful to do much.
- d.
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David Gerard wrote:
I've tried this. It's somewhat better than nothing. But mostly I've only used it for expanding a bare stub and only in an area I'm already familiar with, and even that's too painful to do much.
- d.
The other problem is that unless you're really on the ball there will be mistranslations that you will miss. Something that seems to make perfect, coherent sense in English might be entirely different from what the original text meant, but all machine translators (and Google's is comparatively good, to give them credit) simply have a list of rules as to which Spanish/French/German/[insert as required] phrases translate into which English phrases.
Cynical
On 9/21/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
I've tried this. It's somewhat better than nothing. But mostly I've only used it for expanding a bare stub and only in an area I'm already familiar with, and even that's too painful to do much.
- d.
The other problem is that unless you're really on the ball there will be mistranslations that you will miss. Something that seems to make perfect, coherent sense in English might be entirely different from what the original text meant, but all machine translators (and Google's is comparatively good, to give them credit) simply have a list of rules as to which Spanish/French/German/[insert as required] phrases translate into which English phrases.
Cynical
I don't really know what articles you all typically work on, but I've been concentrating on Mathematics articles, which I've noticed have fewer problems than a usual translation. Fortunately, the Pythagorean Theorem, which I'm working on right now, is available as an FA in two languages (de and fr), one of which I know well enough to make a translation, especially since a lot of the mathematics terms are spelling variations on the English (or vice versa, depending on how one chooses to look at it).
Carl
On 21/09/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
I don't really know what articles you all typically work on, but I've been concentrating on Mathematics articles, which I've noticed have fewer problems than a usual translation. Fortunately, the Pythagorean Theorem, which I'm working on right now, is available as an FA in two languages (de and fr), one of which I know well enough to make a translation, especially since a lot of the mathematics terms are spelling variations on the English (or vice versa, depending on how one chooses to look at it).
Yes. The more technical the field, the more likely the words are the same.
My most painful translation experience was [[Karin Spaink]], where I tried to import data from the Dutch article (which is more detailed because she's much more generally famous in NL) without knowing Dutch. Note that she's someone I know from Usenet, and she actually added a note to the article herself and we emailed about it. But whoooo, I never want to try the translation trick on a living bio again. *shudder*
- d.
Carl Peterson wrote:
I don't really know what articles you all typically work on, but I've been concentrating on Mathematics articles, which I've noticed have fewer problems than a usual translation. Fortunately, the Pythagorean Theorem, which I'm working on right now, is available as an FA in two languages (de and fr), one of which I know well enough to make a translation, especially since a lot of the mathematics terms are spelling variations on the English (or vice versa, depending on how one chooses to look at it).
Technical subjects tend to be easier to translate because language there tends to be more precisely defined.
Humanities based subjects depend a lot more on subtle variations and connotations of language, and are more likely to generate false friends. In a controversial subject where people have had long arguments about the right word the situation won't get any easier for translators into a language where the median POV will be different from that found in the source language.
Ec
There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of - can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit summary?
On 9/21/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/21/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, it's certainly an interesting idea, but it's usually a lot of hard
work
to get a decent translation going. The article subject would have to be interesting to keep me motivated.
If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
(and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)
While I know using online translators is discouraged, if a person is familiar enough with a subject to be able to root out mistranslations and to rewrite it as coherent English (good prose in one language doesn't necessarily make good prose in another, hence the "it looses something in the translation" cliche), then I don't see why familiarity with another language is necessarily a requirement. I've found with the couple of articles I've looked at through Google's translation service that it does a passable job, especially if one is familiar with the the subject matter. The nice thing about Google's translator is that if you click a link on the translated page, the linked page will be translated for you as well.
Carl _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 9/22/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of - can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit summary?
You only have to list 5 significant ones.
In order,
I would agree with such a system, especially if the people running articles through the translators already had a working knowledge of the language from which they were translating. This would help in the rewrite as they would generally be aware of common mistranslations.
I don't think that's a problem, especially if we state that we are adding translated text from a given language Wikipedia.
Carl
On 9/21/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of - can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit summary?
On 9/21/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/21/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, it's certainly an interesting idea, but it's usually a lot of
hard
work
to get a decent translation going. The article subject would have to
be
interesting to keep me motivated.
If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
(and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)
While I know using online translators is discouraged, if a person is familiar enough with a subject to be able to root out mistranslations
and to
rewrite it as coherent English (good prose in one language doesn't necessarily make good prose in another, hence the "it looses something
in
the translation" cliche), then I don't see why familiarity with another language is necessarily a requirement. I've found with the couple of articles I've looked at through Google's translation service that it
does a
passable job, especially if one is familiar with the the subject matter.
The
nice thing about Google's translator is that if you click a link on the translated page, the linked page will be translated for you as well.
Carl _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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On 22/09/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of - can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit summary?
I do not see how the GFDL is in any way linked to a pages "edit summaries" or "revision histories". It is more knowing who has contributed in the long run, a history of which would be kept on the non-en:wp page. It would be more than sufficient to reference that page if someone found the need to trace the contribution history for a page.
Peter Ansell
Well, I'm relatively fluent in German so I could start by translating a de FA into English and seeing how it turns out. Anyone know where the list of FAs is for de:wp?
On 9/22/06, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
On 22/09/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of - can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit summary?
I do not see how the GFDL is in any way linked to a pages "edit summaries" or "revision histories". It is more knowing who has contributed in the long run, a history of which would be kept on the non-en:wp page. It would be more than sufficient to reference that page if someone found the need to trace the contribution history for a page.
Peter Ansell _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 22/09/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I'm relatively fluent in German so I could start by translating a de FA into English and seeing how it turns out. Anyone know where the list of FAs is for de:wp?
Go to [[WP:FA]], click on "Deutsch" in the list of other languages (on the left in the default Monobook skin) and it will take you to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Exzellente_Artikel .
- d.
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Akash Mehta wrote:
There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of - can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit summary?
Couldn't we put the link to the contributors list on the other wiki into the edit summary when pasting in the translation?
Cynical
On 9/22/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
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Akash Mehta wrote:
There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of - can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit summary?
Couldn't we put the link to the contributors list on the other wiki into the edit summary when pasting in the translation?
Probably not because there is no way of guaranteeing that the link will stay active.
On 9/22/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
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Akash Mehta wrote:
There are obviously some of us with excellent english and proofreading skills, so if we could set up a system where people run articles through online translators and rewrite the result into reasonable English it would work. Obviously this would involve reading through the whole thing, but it is possible. One thing I'm not too sure of - can we really copy FA text from a non-en:wp to en:wp and still comply with GFDL without stating every single contributor in the edit summary?
Couldn't we put the link to the contributors list on the other wiki into the edit summary when pasting in the translation?
Cynical
You could, but why not simply link to the article instead of the edit history? It's a lot shorter and provides pretty much the same info if you know where to click.
David Gerard wrote:
If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
(and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)
I translated an Italian featured article ([[Carlo Airoldi]]) earlier this year. It was short (only about 600 words) and it took probably about two or three hours. I have very little experience as a translator, though, and i think it could be done much quicker by a better Italian speaker with more experience of translation. The article in question would never have been featured on en, since it had no inline references and I wouldn't have even called it NPOV, which illustrated the problems with this sort of approach.
adam
On 21/09/06, adam underthechair@gmail.com wrote:
I translated an Italian featured article ([[Carlo Airoldi]]) earlier this year. It was short (only about 600 words) and it took probably about two or three hours. I have very little experience as a translator, though, and i think it could be done much quicker by a better Italian speaker with more experience of translation. The article in question would never have been featured on en, since it had no inline references and I wouldn't have even called it NPOV, which illustrated the problems with this sort of approach.
Heh. Yes, the translated version is definitely not en: FA standard ... but it's a vast improvement on what was there before and was clearly work of value to the project. Hmm. Would you ever do one again?
- d.
On 9/21/06, adam underthechair@gmail.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
(and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)
I translated an Italian featured article ([[Carlo Airoldi]]) earlier this year. It was short (only about 600 words) and it took probably about two or three hours. I have very little experience as a translator, though, and i think it could be done much quicker by a better Italian speaker with more experience of translation. The article in question would never have been featured on en, since it had no inline references and I wouldn't have even called it NPOV, which illustrated the problems with this sort of approach.
That thought occurred to me as well. As each language is allowed to set its own standards, an FA in one language may not be an FA in another. Assuming that the development of the criteria in each language is roughly equivalent to that of en (and from what I've seen, that's the case, given the proportion of articles to featured articles), the strictness of each language's FA criteria is proportional to the number of articles it has. Thus, it is logical to assume that en has the strictest FA requirements, having more articles than any other language. That said, the French criteria appear to be essentially a translation of the English criteria. The German FA process doesn't seem to have a set criteria in the concise sense of en, but instead seems to be based on a general article about considerations while writing an article.
Furthermore, as "brilliant prose" tends to be one of the main sticking points on an FAC in my experience (next to the use of in-line refs), what may be "brilliant prose" in one language may not be so in another language, either because of writing convention (cultural or otherwise), assumption of technical expertise, or the fact that an article in language X just doesn't read well when translated to language Y.
Carl