Ziko van Dijk wrote:
Dear Aryeh,
Your idea of "converting on the fly" would not work in many cases. Take for example the ß in German WP. Swiss (registered) readers can decide via their Preferences to see only ss and never ß, because the Swiss do not use ß. That's ok. But vice versa, not every ss is to be converted to ß.
The Germany-Germans write for example "Masse" (a mass, with a short "a") and "Maße" (measures, with a long "a"). The Swiss write "Masse" and "Masse" for both. Now, imagine that a Swiss editor writes "Masse", the conversion engine would not know whether this should be converted to "Maße" or not. Only a person who knows German is capable to decide.
There's no reason in principle why a computer can't be as good at making that decision as a human. Such ambiguities are what makes the field of computational linguistics interesting, they're not a reason to be dismissive. We need to find out what is possible with state-of-the-art research systems, and then negotiate, or develop software, to bring that technology to Wikipedia.
-- Tim Starling