Making the English Wikipedia more accessible to non-English speakers is a worthy objective and something which we could easily make a big difference to. Currently the main route for non-English speakers to access EN wiki is via Google translate and similar online translation services. If Google were willing to work with us, we could make an easy and uncontentious difference to that by getting lists of translation anomalies and where practical amending the Wikipedia article. I've been doing this on a small scale for years working my way though easily confused words like staring/starring and cavalry/calvary. It is now far less common to have Wikipedia articles about actors staring in particular movies or calvary armies charging into battle, and as for the throwing of discusses I've abolished an entire Olympic sport. My understanding of translation software is that it works on a probability basis, so if we were to get lists of articles and phrases on EN wiki that a particular translation software finds to be ambiguous and can only give a borderline probability to, we should be able to identify a lot of ambiguities and errors on EN wiki;. Fixing these would benefit all editors but particularly those who depend on translation software. 

Taking things to the logical next step, we could introduce a system of hidden templates to resolve words with multiple meanings such as bonnet, bolt, batter, tramp or pants. As well as transforming the quality of machine translation of the pedia, this would also make it easier to offer people a choice as to which version of English they view Wikipedia in.

Working in the opposite direction would be more contentious due to licensing, in fact I doubt we could help any translation software improve its own code unless they had a compatible license. I'd also be loathe to see us work with one set of machine translation software in a way that gave them an advantage over their competitord

WSC

On 25 March 2013 21:43, rexx <rexx@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
The most impact that we could realise on a global scale would be to make the knowledge in the English Wikipedia available to people who don't speak English. £500,000 and Google technical support would go a long way to realising some of that goal.

As the largest established chapter in the English-speaking world, the onus should probably fall on us to coordinate an effort of that sort.

Thoughts?
--
Doug



On 25 March 2013 12:20, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree, it is interesting and we do desperately need to diversify our
revenue. Do we have any suitable projects we've been wanting to run
but haven't due to lack of funds, though? Funds haven't really been
our limiting factor.

The VLE work might be suitable, but I doubt Google would consider it
interesting enough (it's useful, but it isn't really transformative).

Coming up with new projects specifically to apply for a particular
grant is generally a bad idea.

On 25 March 2013 10:21, Jon Davies <jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
>
> Interesting....
>
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> Dear Jon,
>
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> The prestigious panel judging the finalists will be inventor of the
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>
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> Chief Executive
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