Birgitte SB schreef:
I have wondered that it would be better to encourage translations to purposely "stubify" articles rather than focus on full Featured Article translations. This would give the less developed langages something where they see a need to "edit", eliminate most cultural bias without a detailed study, and make the limited translation reasources go farther to creating a interlinked web of articles. This idea was brought up in BOF at Wikimania but I do not know if anything was ever done in this line of thinking.
BirgitteSB
Hoi, There is no one size fits all answer to this question. It depends very much on what you want to achieve. When you have translators, you can not "stubify" because that is very much against their ethos. It also requires them to concentrate on the technical aspects of wikipedia ie wikification and categories. This means that you do not use translators and or that you have to train them considerably.
Creating much content in stubs is something that is done on many projects; they are all the towns of country xxx. This is of particular interest when they are also the towns of the country where this language is spoken. There are as far as I know no such lists with the information for countries like Nigeria, Kazakhstan or Ecuador. The same is true for the years information; it is very much biased to its source. There are for instance few African or South American historical figures in the English Wikipedia.. Translating this as the starting information is problematic as a consequence because of the bias that you import. For a language like Neapolitan, the Italian years information was used ...
The advantage of writing background information to the news is that you work on content that is of current relevance and certainly when you base it on what can be found in newspapers of that language, you may even find articles like "Big Brother" in Indian wikipedias. :)
When the aim is to make investments count, it is important to create relevance. Sex, sport and news is what people read. When the aim is to get more people to contribute to a Wikipedia, it is eye balls that you want. I am completely in favour of working on wikification because this can be one way of enticing people to try and edit. I think it should be a healthy mix of these activities.
One problem in several projects is that people control how people can and cannot write. This leads often to political fights that prevent a healthy community from happening. One bad example is the Belarus wikipedia where the orthography insisted on is not the one used by people who live in Belarus. This is in my opinion contrary to what we hope to achieve with our projects. Wikipedia is not to create new languages nor is it to force particular orthographies.
My conclusion is therefore, for every language, for every project there are different things to consider. There is no silver bullet or a one size fits all solution. It pays off when there is sufficient time to prepare for a content creation project.
Thanks, GerardM