On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 18:23 +0200, User 32X wrote:
Hellas!
Francis Tyers wrote:
On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 00:21 +0200, User 32X wrote:
You overestimate the power of machine translation. [...]
I'd like to make a point here:
- Neither English nor German are smaller Wikipedias, in fact both are
quite large!
The German Wikipedia is only about six times larger than the Volapük one. The later one is considerred being small.
This is a ridiculous statement. If you take any metric apart from sheer "page count" there is no comparison.
On the other hand, between closely related languages, machine translation is often very good, as I have demonstrated with a previous post. You might not be aware, but machine translation between Spanish-Catalan and Spanish-Galician is already in production use, [...]
If there's actually a simple way of machine translation between two closely related languages, then why are there more than one Wikipedias for that language family?
When a language community decides that it speaks a language, not a dialect of another language, for whatever reason (for example national identity) they may have a wish for a Wikipedia. Personally I don't think this is up for you to decide.
Unless of course you are suggesting merging the Catalan and Spanish Wikipedias ? Or the Occitan and Catalan Wikipedias ?
The Serbian Wikipedia works in Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but there's still only one Wiki that serves both forms.
There are currently four Wikipedias for what until a few years ago was called Serbo-Croatian. There is likely to be another one in the future. I think it would be wonderful to see them merged. I'll let you get started on that.
Maybe you don't care about smaller languages, [...]
Believe me, I do. At the moment I'm waiting for the Lower Sorbian Wikipedia to come out of the incubator and from time to time I try to read some articles in the Deitsch Wikipedia ([[pdc:]]). These small Wikipedias are often interesting, but only when there's a comunity who writes it. I don't need to read bot-created articles when there are the same articles 1000 times better in other languages I understand.
I don't see where I have suggested using a bot. Is that what you think I have in mind? Machine translation needs to be post-editted, that is a job for humans. It is always necessary to get the permission of the local Wikipedia community before embarking on such a project.
Perhaps you have the idea that smaller language Wikipedias are some kind of "cute experiment", something twee or exotic, rather than a useful resource for the given speech community? Well, that is up to you, but I'd disagree. I think it is valuable to have good articles on a wide range of topics, specialist and non-specialist, and for this, machine translation between closely-related languages can be useful.
When a small Wikipedia doesn't have a special field of interest AND there is no large group of speakers, then it is – in most cases – not worth supporting it.
What on earth do you mean by a "special field of interest" ?
Yours,
Fran
Best regards, 32X