[Foundation-l] Push translation

[Mark Williamson]

Wikipedias are not for _cultures_, they are for languages. If I and
1,000 other Americans suddenly learnt French (to the point of
native-level fluency) and decided to read and edit the French
Wikipedia, it would "belong" to us just as much as to anybody else.
This came up recently in the debate about the Acehnese Wikipedia. Some
people said that all Acehnese were Muslim (not true - there is a small
community of Acehnese Christians). They said that if anyone is
Christian, they'd be ejected from Acehnese society and therefore no
longer Acehnese. However, they'd not stop speaking the Acehnese
language.

Nobody claims the English WP is for US/Commonwealth cultures only...
this is reasonable when a Wiki is tiny, but as it grows large it's
important that NPOV mean "neutral point of view for EVERYBODY", not
just "a point of view that everybody in OUR country can agree upon",
etc.

-m.

On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 4:06 PM, 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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