On 6/8/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
For what is it worth, I think that questions of language and culture are subtle and deep. Perfect machine translation would of course be useful -- only Anthony could manage to find the straw man argument that anyone who thinks that language distinctions are important and relevant might also think that machine translation would not be _useful_.
You stated that "For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot imagine that we would want to do so."
If you weren't talking about machine translation, then what did you mean? Imagine that we would want to do what?
I think we sit somewhere around 4 on Steve Bennett's scale, but moreso, I think that is about where we ought to sit, perfect machine translation or not.
--Jimbo
And I'd say that "We try to reach people in their mother language or at least a language they handle very well, we should not provide different content based on any other specificity such as nationality, religion, political view point and such."
Anthony