[Foundation-l] Push translation

[Mark Williamson]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline at gmail.com> wrote:
>   1. Ban the project of Google as done by the Bengali wiki community (Bad
>   solution, and I am personally against this solution)
>   2. Ask Google to engage wiki community (As happened in the case of Tamil)
>   to find out a working solution. But if there is no active wiki community
>   what Google can do.  But does this mean that Google can continue with the
>   project as they want? (Very difficult solution if there is no active wiki
>   community)
>   3. Find some other solution. For example, Is it possible to upload the
>   translated articles in a separate name space, for example, Google: Let the
>   community decides what needs to be taken to the main/article namespace.
>   4. .........
>
> If some solution is not found soon, Google's effort is going to create
> problem in many language wikipedias. The worst result of this effort would
> be the rift between the wiki community and the Google translators (speakers
> of the same language) :(
>
> Shiju

Shiju,

I think you have made some great suggestions here. I'd like to add a
couple of my own:

1) Fix some of the formatting errors with GTTK. Would this really be
so difficult? It seems to me that the breaking of links is a bug that
needs fixing by Google.
2) Implement spelling and punctuation check automatically within GTTK
before posting of the articles.
3) Have GTTK automatically remove broken templates and images, or
require users to translate any templates before a page may be posted.
4) Include a list of most needed articles for people to create, rather
than random articles that will be of little use to local readers. Some
articles, such as those on local topics, have the added benefit of
encouraging more edits and community participation since they tend to
generate more interest from speakers of a language in my experience.

3 of these are things for Google to work on, one is something for us
to work on. I think this is a potentially valuable resource, the
problem is channeling the efforts and energies of these well-meaning
people in the right direction so that local Wikipedias don't end up
full of low-quality, unreadable articles with little hope for
improvement. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

-m.