Obviously, this system should be only used as far as it carries. I don't know how far it might carry us - it might fail miserably, and not get beyond the "Rome is a city. Rome is in Italy. Rome is known for The Colosseum, coffee and Vatican City (state)." stage. It might lead to a glorious future, where we really create an open source system that allows everyone to write in every language and express a wide range of human thought.
I am personally hesitant about automatic translations, and whether we can achieve the coverage (in language pairs) and the quality (of Wikipedia). But that is only my opinion. A hybrid approach, if we can support it and build it, would obviously be the safest bet, as both endeavors are rather risky. I see a lot of possible space for a hybrid system, as you describe it.
One advantage of my proposal is that it's cost is rather small. For supporting translation I haven't seen yet a sufficiently sketched proposal that allows to estimate the potential cost and potential benefit.
Cheers, Denny
2013/8/7 Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada emijrp@gmail.com
Most times the best approach is a compilation of several approaches.
Perhaps we can use the Denny system for the little introduction of articles (for example: geography, biographies) and optional automatic translation for the rest of the article.
I mean, if you follow a red link in a little Wikipedia, it loads the i18n template + wikidata bits, so you have a brief summary about the topic. Then you can save that "live" generated stub, and expand it (using autotraslation from other WIkipedia).
2013/8/7 Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se
Thanks for sharing your very interesting ideas. While I am not fully support your idea of implementation, I share your basic view of the need and think some of the concepts you introduce has a very high potential to better utilize the power of us having many versions.
I have put in my feedback on the talkpage and hope there will be a possibility to evolve this concept further in some type of workgroup. I also see an interesting relation to the talk of machine translation
where I
believe we can do a lot very quickly if we limit the vocabulary to be included in such a tool
Anders
Denny Vrandečić skrev 2013-08-07 02:20:
I have been thinking about this for a while, and now finally managed to
write it down as a proposal. Details are on meta on the following link, below is the intro to the proposal:
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_** multilingual_Wikipedia<
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia
I tried to anticipate some possible questions and provide answers on the page. Besides that, I obviously hope that Wikimania could provide a
place
to start this conversation. And yes, I am aware that the proposal would lead to a very restrictive solution, but imagine what good it already could achieve! And since it is not meant to replace anything, but enrich our current projects... well, read for yourself.
Cheers, Denny
Wikipedia provides knowledge in more than 200 languages. Whereas a small number of languages are fortunate enough to have a large Wikipedia, many of the language editions are far away from providing a comprehensive encyclopedia by any measure. There are several approaches towards
closing
this gap, mostly focusing on increasing the number of contributors to
the
small language editions or to improve the provision of automatic or semi-automatic translations of articles. Both are viable. In the
following
we present a proposal for a different approach, which is based on the
idea
of multilingual Wikipedia.
Imagine a small extension to the template system, where a template call like *{{F12}}* would not be expanded by a call to the template Template:F12, but rather to Template:F12/en, i.e. the template name with the selected language code of the reader of the page. A template call
such
as *{{F12:Q64|Q5519|Q183}}* can be expanded by Template:F12/en into *“Berlin is the capital of Germany.”* and by Template:F12/de into *“Berlin ist
die
Hauptstadt Deutschlands.”* (in the example, the template parameters
Q5119,
Q64 and Q183 refer to the Wikidata items for capital, Berlin and Germany respectively, which the templates query for the label in the respective language). Sentence by sentence could be created in order to provide
for a
simple article.
That wiki would consist of *content*, i.e. the article pages, possibly just a simple series of template calls, and *frames*, i.e. the templates that lexicalize the parameters of a given template call into a sentence (Note that “sentence” here should not be considered literally. It could be a table, an image, anything). The implementation of the frames can be done in normal wiki template syntax, in Lua, in a novel mechanism, or a mix of these. This would be up to the communities creating them.
Read the rest here: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_** multilingual_Wikipedia<
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia
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