[Foundation-l] Is Google translation is good for Wikipedias?

[Ziko van Dijk]

2010/7/28 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>:
> Just to be sure I understand...

It's good that you ask, indeed. :-)

No, it's not about free software, and the Wikimedians are not too
snobby or lazy to correct poor language. That is what I frequently do
in de.WP and eo.WP, and I suppose Ragib and many others as well. The
point is: The machine translated articles are often so bad that I
simply don't understand them. I *cannot* correct them, because I don't
know what they are saying.

Kind regards
Ziko



What's happening here is that human
> beings, using a software tool, are translating articles from the
> English Wikipedia into a variety of other languages and posting them
> on the comparatively small Wikipedia projects in these languages. The
> articles, of unknown intrinsic quality, are usually mid to low quality
> translations.
>
> In the projects with an active community, some have rejected these
> articles because they are not high quality and because the community
> refuses to be responsible for fixing punctuation and other errors made
> by editors who are not members of the community. In the projects
> without an active community, Wikimedians (who may not speak any of the
> languages affected by the Google initiative) are objecting for a
> variety of other reasons - because the software used to assist
> translation isn't free, because the effort is managed by a commercial
> organization or because the endeavor wasn't cleared with the Wikimedia
> community first. Some are also concerned that these new articles will
> somehow deter new editors from becoming involved, despite clear
> evidence that a larger base of content attracts more readers, and more
> readers plus imperfect content leads to more editors.
>
> What I find interesting is that few seem to be interested in keeping
> or improving the translated articles; Google's attempt to provide
> content in under-served languages is actually offending Wikimedians,
> despite our ostensible commitment to the same goal. Concerns like
> bureaucratic pre-approval, using free software, etc. are somehow more
> important than reaching more people with more content. It all seems
> strange and un-Wikimedian like to me. Obviously there are things
> Google should have done differently. Maybe working with them to
> improve their process should be the focus here?
>
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
Niederlande