No subject

edited, to fix grammatical, spelling or other "simple" mistakes.  Generally
people don't dive in and write/translate entire articles - it is simply too
high of a barrier to entry.  These pre-translated articles give people an
"in", they are already there, and have obvious errors that are easy to fix.


More "ok" content is better than no content, at least if I have my druthers.

-Jon

On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 23:12, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> Recently there are lot of discussions (in this list also) regarding the
> translation project by Google for some of the big language wikipedias. The
> foundation also seems like approved the efforts of Google. But I am not
> sure
> whether any one is interested to consult the respective language community
> to know their views.
>
> As far as I know only Tamil, Bengali, and Swahili Wikipedians have raised
> their concerns about Google's project. But, does this means that other
> communities are happy about Google efforts? If there is no active community
> in a wikipedia how can we expect response from communities? If there is no
> response from a community, does that mean that Google can hire some native
> speakers and use machine translation to create articles for that wikipedia?
>
> Now let us go back to a basic question. Does WMF require a wiki community
> to
> create wikipedia in any language? Or can they utilize the services of
> companies like Google to create wikipedias in N number of languages?
>
> One of the main point raised by the supporters of Google translation is
> that, Google's project is good *for the online version of the
> language*.That
> might be true. But no body is cared to verify whether it is good for
> Wikipedia.
>
> As pointed out by Ravi in his presentation in Wikimania, (
> http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddpg3qwc_279ghm7kbhs), the Google
> translation of wikipedia articles:
>
>   - will affect the biological growth of a Wikipedia article
>   - will create copy of English wikipedia article in local wikis
>   - it is against some of the basic philosophies of wikipedia
>
> The people outside wiki will definitely benefit from this tool, if Google
> translation tool is developed for each language. I saw the working example
> of this in Poland during Wikimania, when some people who are not good in
> English used google translator to communicate with us. :)
>
> Apart from the points raised by Ravi in his presentation, this will affect
> the community growth.If there is no active wiki community, how can we
> expect
> them to look after all these junk articles uploaded to wiki every day. When
> all the important article links are already turned blue, how we can expect
> any future potential editors. So according to me, Google's project is
> killing the growth of an active wiki community.
>
> Of course, Tamil Wikipedia is trying to use Google project effectively. But
> only Tamil is doing that since they have an active wiki community*. Many
> Wiki communities are not even aware that such a project is happening in
> their wiki*.
>
> I do not want to point out specific language wikipedas to prove my point.
> But visit the wikipedias (especially wikipedias* that use non-latin
> scripts*)
> to view the status of google translation project.  Loads of junk articles
> are uploaded to wiki every day. Most of the time the only edit in these
> articles is the edit by its creator and the  inter language wiki bots.
>
> This effort will definitely affect community growth. Kindly see the points
> raised by a Swahali
> Wikipedian<
> http://muddybtz.blog.com/2010/07/16/what-happened-on-the-google-challenge-the-swahili-wikipedia/
> >.
> Many Swahali users (and other language users) now expect a laptop or some
> other monitory benefits to write in their wikipedia. That affects the
> community growth.
>
> So what is the solution for this? Can we take lessons from
> Tamil/Bengali/Swahili wikipedias and find methods to use this service
> effectively or continue with the current article creation process.
>
> One last question. Is this tool that is developing by Google is an open
> source tool? If not, we need to answer so many questions that may follow.
>
> Regards
>
> Shiju Alex
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shijualex
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> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
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>



-- 
Jon
[[User:ShakataGaNai]] / KJ6FNQ
http://snowulf.com/
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