Whilst the idea of having a truly multi-lingual Wikinews with articles
published in numerous languages is a good one, I fear that the
practicalities make this somewhat idealistic. I think infact we should
actually be rather proud that we manage to get so many articles published in
so many articles as it is, which given the circumstances is rather amazing.
As someone who is multilingual and used to be pretty active on Wikinews
(regretfully temporarily taking a break), I have been asked to translate
articles from time to time. On the rare occasion that I have had the time
_in addition_ to writing my own articles, it has been time consuming to say
the least, and on most occasions I have had to decline requests to translate
other people's articles because I simply didn't have the time to write my
own.
It should not be forgotten that contrary to other sister projects where time
is not a factor, it is a major one for Wikinews, where news that is over
three days old is not published.
Finally the number of Wikinewsies is _incredibly_ small and we truly bi-,
tri- and quadri-lingual Wikinewsies are a very rare breed indeed.
User:AlexandrDmitri on all Wikimedia Foundation projects
cc Foundation list per initial email as the replies seem only to be going to
the Wikinews list
2010/3/1 Aphaia <aphaia(a)gmail.com>
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 10:59 AM, gopher65
<gopher65(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
You know, I've actually been recently
considering an idea for combining
all
of the Wikinews language editions into a single
project. However, the
code
required to accomplish this in a reasonable
fashion does not currently
exist, and I don't think that anyone at the foundation would be willing
to
jump in and volunteer the significant amount of
dev time that would be
necessary to make such a project possible from a technical perspective...
even though I can see Wikipedia benefiting immensely from the same tech.
Imagine going onto a single, non-language specific Wikipedia, simply
selecting your language from a list, and having every major article
appear
in your selected language. You switch to another
language, the same
article
appears, with the same text, merely having been
translated by users.
Translation is MUCH easier than writing a
Featured Article quality
article
from scratch (FA articles take a surprising
amount of effort and time to
write),
Then you don't know what translation is, or just you are no translator
at all. It is bridging one culture to another, and as creative and
productive as writing from scratch. I think I don't need to speak how
it is time-consuming work.
so this would significantly decrease the current duplication of
effort that is taking place in the "separate
but equal"
multiple-languages
version of the mediawiki software that we
currently use. In such a model
of
Wikipedia much more emphasis would be placed on
the translation of other
language's articles into every language than is currently the case. (For
instance, a while ago I was looking up some special type of Russian
Perogie.
The article I wanted doesn't exist on English
Wikipedia, but it does
exist
on Russian Wikipedia... which was useless to me,
because I don't speak
Russian. Thankfully Google Translate came to the rescue... sorta.) ;-)
Back to Wikinews and the issue at hand. As a Wikinews specific example of
how this could eventually work: you have an article about something that
happened in France, investigated by French Wikinewies, originally written
in
French, and then translated into Dutch, English,
German, and Mandarin by
other Wikinewsies. That type of coordination is currently *possible*, but
it's much more difficult to manage than it would be in a better designed,
multi-frontpage, auto-language selection multi-lingual site (based on
your
preferences for logged in users, or a per-visit
dropdown language
selection
system (for non-logged in users)). Right now if
you try to do that kind
of
thing you're attempting to coordinate 20
different people spread across
10
different sites; it's nigh-on impossible in
practice, unfortunately.
Because of the technical issues that would need to be addressed, at the
present time I'd have to say that a multi-lingual version of Wikinews
simply
isn't practical. Combining the efforts of
Wikinewies everywhere and
reducing
our duplication of effort via translation of
locally investigated and
written articles would be a great idea, but it's not something that will
happen soon. That's something for the far future (10 or 15 years from now
maybe), not for the immediate future. Wikinews as a whole has bigger
things
to worry about than that, for the moment.
Maybe though, Wikipedia doesn't?
Gopher65
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Milos Rancic" <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 11:32 AM
To: "Wikinews mailing list" <wikinews-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>;
"Wikimedia
Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikinews-l] Discussion about proposal for multilingual Wikinews
> I am cleaning Requests for new languages [1] at Meta. Some of the
> requests are clearly out of the Language committee scope, and they
> need wider discussion for concluding them.
>
> One of such requests is for multilingual Wikinews [2]. Please, discuss
> here (at foundation-l; I am sending this message to wikinews-l to poke
> those who are not at foundation-l) or on wiki at the page [2].
>
> [1] -
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
> [2] -
>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikinews_multilin…
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