At 04:16 AM 10/11/02 -0700, Jimbo wrote:
Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
I am sure Polish Wikipedians would regard it as a big disincentive to be reduced to mere translators of English (other languages?) articles. I think we have created a relatively small but precious Wikipedia with some remarkably good articles.
I think Cunc will gladly take back the word "translation". I think he was just speaking loosely there.
The way I see it is that the Wikipedia is one project with many languages. The individual language wikipedias are not separate projects, but part of the large family. But neither are they merely _translations_.
We are united by the fundamental goals: NPOV, openness, encyclopedic writing.
I am opposed to the idea, for example, that an article in Spanish about the Spanish-American war should be in any way fundamentally different from an article in English about the same war. There's no need for them to be translations of each other, of course. But they should contain the same information, and both should be free of bias.
An interesting example. I would expect an article in Spanish to have more to say about the effects on Cuba and Puerto Rico, and maybe less on Hearst; an article in Tagalog would probably spend more space on the results for the Philippines. Yes, in theory space is infinite. In practice, we cut articles up when they get too long, so there are choices to make on what is in the article and what's moved to an external link.
Multilingual people can read both and notice discrepancies and bring the articles into line with each other.
More to the point, given finite human energy and the severe flaws in current machine translation techniques, I don't expect anyone to translate all the stubs on US counties into Polish any time soon.