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:
1) 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