If the Foundation Endowment paid for translations of articles across
Wikipedias, it would still be like a Foundation Grant in terms of the
legal effect on the DMCA safe harbor provisions and the practical
effect on whether mistakes could bring the Foundation into disrepute.
Maybe the Foundation could pay for translations, as long as a much
smaller independent third party was reviewing them for fidelity and
freedom from bias under conditions where a group of people are trying
to confound the paid reviewers by including a constant but small
proportion of intentionally inaccurate and biased proposed
translations to make sure that the reviewer quality is sufficient.
If that doesn't work, then the independent third party anti-bias QA
organization could grow to do the translation, perhaps as a thematic
organization supported by both outside and less than half internal
Foundation grants.
Best regards,
Jim
On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 2:53 AM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Pine, there is one possible way to fund such
translation in the future; The
Foundation is building up an endowment. When that endowment has grown to
the point where the annual return is sufficient to fund the Foundation,
then you could re-purpose the annual fundraiser from collecting money to
host Wikipedia, to collecting money to make Wikipedia available in other
languages.
If I'm correct in thinking that part of the problem for many of our widely
spoken languages with weak wikipedias is that the more educated people who
speak those languages are more likely to contribute edits in what is to
them a higher status or more language or one more useful to their career,
then maybe we should test using fundraiser type advertising to ask our
English readers in places like India to translate articles from English to
Indic languages.
In some parts of the world where incomes are generally very low and
financial donations reflect that perhaps we have little to lose by shifting
now from asking for funds to asking for content donations, especially in
the language of that area.
WereSpielChequers
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2018 18:13:38 -0800
From: Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
Message-ID:
<CAF=dyJhxBXyhmMPvDYWA4oPGuj3mOTjQ1bP5QQKhGE3U2tDFcA@mail.
gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
On the subject of paid translation, I could imagine this being included in
the scope of work for a "Wiki Community Foundation" or "Wiki Content
Foundation" that would do work that WMF doesn't do and/or shouldn't do. I
have a number of activities in mind for this kind of organization.
Unfortunately, I do not know how to fund it. I think that this organization
should get most of its funding from non-WMF sources, and WMF has such
strong fundraising capabilities that I think that competing with WMF for
funding from readers and grant-making organizations would be very
difficult. If WMF would like to have conversations about how the community
could raise funds directly from readers and non-WMF foundations, I for one
would be very interested in having that conversation.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
------------------------------
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