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

[Muhammad Yahia]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I heard that for the Swahili Wikipedia contest at least, they gave
> away prizes... but perhaps they should've included a requirement that
> the articles they created be rated as "good" by the community, not
> full of errors and nonsense sentences, and that all project
> participants who want any chance at winning must respond to all
> talkpage messages within 72 hours (or something like that).
>
>
>
I have been involved with 2 big pushes by Google in the Arabic Wikipedia,
one of them was by professional paid translators, the other was done
completely by a volunteer organization in collaboration with Google. I
supported both efforts heavily. In the latter, they recruited university
students mostly to do the work and there was very little to earn beyond
recognition. All the problems mentioned above plagued both efforts, and
while the second one had slightly better results than the first, the vast
amount of translated articles lay ignored in the user space (that's what
the consensus on ar.wp was, confine them to their user space until deemed
good), the efforts to contact and teach either the volunteers or the paid
translators were futile, and the articles had some very awkward sentence
structures, some very bad jargon translation, etc.

I have reached the opinion that the gradual nature of collaboration in
Wikipedia is what makes our good and excellent articles what they are. I
think a very little percent of wikipedians started by writing a full length
article, instead most of us started by a small edit in another article, and
a bigger edit after it and so on. By the time we began writing whole
articles, we had enough knowledge of the community and the wiki syntax to
produce good results. Whenever someone has a question about terminology, it
gets discussed on the VP, whenever someone is unsure, he recruits other
people to review or help. This was all missing from the effort and I think
what caused most of the problems.

-- 
Best Regards,
Muhammad Yahia