Mattis Manzel wrote:
I'd like to propose a new Wikipedia: "the
multilingual wikipedia"
Some ideas about how to do that are on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_communication
I would be very interested in getting the multilingual features of
oddmuse (the colored background, the language filters) ported to
Mediawiki and then start working on two things:
A) Elaborate the engine to make it work for multilingual pages:
language filters also in the edit mode, inclusion of automatic
pretranslation in a new translate-mode, etc.
B) Start making the "multilingual wikipedia". Kinda getting people
into the fun of translation.
Hopefully this wouldn't require a fork of Mediawiki. Unfortunately I
have a vage feeling that it does. In that case I propose as a name for
the multilingual Mediawiki engine: MMediawiki ;)
But who knows? Maybe things are easier than I think?
Or more difficult. I think the idea is full of naïve optimism about
translation in general, and machine translation in particular. Begin
with an English text and translate it into another language. Have
someone else, who cannot see the original, translate it back into
English. Compare the two English versions. The difference can be amazing.
On another level, articles on the same subject are often separately
developed in each language. This can often result in having stable
NPOVs in each language that are different, frequently in the wake of
careful negotiation over the exact meaning of a word. Reconciling these
could be extremely difficult. I can easily imagine that attitudes
toward US foreign policy might not be as conflicted when written in many
languages other than English.
En