[Foundation-l] Push translation

[Oliver Keyes]

Agreed. There's one wiki which artificially inflated the number of articles
it had via a bot (I forget the specific language). That's not a way to
increase the wiki's strength. There's an old phrase used on en-wiki; "africa
is not a redlink". It means that because we have articles on a lot of common
things, the ways in which people can contribute have been reduced - they
can't write an article on africa, say. As such, the community growth is
slowing (one theory, not one I subscribe to). If you want to grow an active
userbase, which is the only way for sustained and non-artificial growth that
can respond to the concerns of its readers, you need an active userbase. And
for that, there has to be something they can write; there has to be a
redlink for Africa, or physics, or Britain. There has to be something where
the reader goes "I could fix that" and becomes an editor.

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 12:06 AM, Cristian Consonni <kikkocristian at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 2010/7/24 Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org>:
> > On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 4:11 PM, Pavlo Shevelo <pavlo.shevelo at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> These days Google and other translate tools are good enough to use as
> >>> the starting basis for an translated article
> >>
> >> No, it's far not true - at least for such target language as Ukrainian
> etc.
> >>
> >> So any attempt of "push" translation will be almost the disaster...
> >>
> >
> > ...and we need to remember that most articles are *not* translations
> > of the English article, but are home-grown on the wiki and use their
> > own sources in their own language.
>
> Also don't forget that the same subject can be treated very
> differently among different cultures (even if they are not distant,
> think to French and English).
>
> An article in the English Wikipedia can be a very good basis to start
> a new article, but I don't think that an automated "flooding" of the
> other Wikipedias is a good thing in *any* way.
>
> Cristian
>
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