Hi Samuel, Thanks for the clarification. Good to know that the foundation is in the know. Ravi and I have acted as interlocutors with the Google team for Tamil Wikipedia. We have exchanged several emails and have had one conference call with the Google team. During these communications, we have conveyed clear bullet-pointed requirements that are the bare minimum necessities to meet our guidelines and are very much doable. Of these, to be fair, they did address some of our issues, but not the most important ones. The most important of the issues stem from the pillars of Wikipedia and we absolutely can't compromise on that. For Google, the required outcome is the number of words in Indian languages SEOed from their query logs. For the translators, it's the money that they'll get for each word translated. For Wikipedia, the basic necessity is readable and meaningful content added through a process that doesn't subvert the Wiki way. Following is a summary: 1. The quality is abysmal. Too mechanical and ungrammatical more than 50% of the time. [To set the context for Samuel (who might mistake that it works like it does for European languages), the toolkit is not anywhere ready for Indian languages and doesn't do any translation as such, it's the translators who do that and it's unimaginable that a native speaker writes those words, not sentences.] 2. The process is hands-off, the translators don't even read the page that they've dumped. 3. The pages are broken with infinite erroneous redlinks and missing templates due to an easy-to-fix bug in the kit. 4. The basic premise of the team is 'something's better than nothing'. It's not. Having no article on a subject is better than having an unreadable text of 2000 words on that subject. 5. Their process requirement: you can pick subjects, give guidelines, but we can't guarantee anything. We don't carry any responsibility to improve the articles once dumped and we don't want you to mess with them. Of course, on the last point, they have come down. They agreed to have a look at talk page feedback and only one translator (of nearly 20-30) has responded so far. This is CLEARLY unacceptable and our editors have said it in as many words. I also request the community here and the foundation folks to reflect on the policy issues: how can we let someone post articles of no acceptable level which they won't edit further? Tomorrow, if a vandal does the same, won't we block them? On top of this, they casually mentioned some sort of agreement or contract with the foundation, but decline to give any information regarding that. Either they don't get what Wikipedia is or they don't care about it. On a positive note, we still have our channel open with them and we're going to propose that they approach universities or the Classical Tamil Institute in Chennai who undertake such projects employing retired Tamil professors and teachers. Also, carrying an obligation to fix issues before adding new articles. If they can't do that, we don't have any other option left. - Sundar "That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted." - George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture ----- Original Message ---- My first post on this list, and a long one :-) The topic of supporting small language Wikipedias is one that is close to my The foundation doesn't have any particular policy on translations or article-writing projects. As Achal says, community is welcome to use translation tools or not as they see and to work with outside translation groups or not as they see Ravi's concerns are valid -- people interested in translation as whole may want to discuss some of these issues on the foundation translation mailing lists -- you will find that there are multilingual editors who are interested in the good (and bad) uses GTT and other translation tools. == on the use of automatic Automatic translations can be useful as one arrow in the community of editors. For instance, I find it helpful for pages to have an automatic category, and a large cleanup template top, something like: "this page was automatically translated by from [permalink to revision of article in another It may need cleanup to meet [[STYLE GUIDE|community In the case of Google and their Translation Toolkit, I be good for Wikipedians to give them strong feedback about how need to improve the tool for it to be more useful to (and, if it is more of a nuisance than a help, the community clear that it is not helping.) == On Google's toolkit Google has been fairly transparent about what been in touch with the Foundation on a few occasions on how to make their tools more useful. I encourage local communities directly for that advice... (however, they few direct responses from those language-communities. I directly on swahili wikipedia - there were a few general the difficulties raised by GTT overwriting existing articles, specific feature requests / recommendations / requirements from active swahili editors.) You can start a page for feature requests for this sort of translation -- and tell the particular) that all translations /must/ adhere to a format, or must be less invasive when an article already topic. (noone will continue a project if they know that going to be reverted or removed.) I don't Wikipedia. They publishing them to memory" produced as license, for other Google has carried out similar projects other languges; I helped with the recent which was supported by GTT (for participants who toolkit to translate an article rather than writing one -- but the resulting articles were rated based on their that poorly-translated articles did not rank That was a largely community-driven translation effort, with a run and maintained by Swahili admins. Cheers, SJ -- Samuel _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l