[WikiEN-l] Getting bias from google.

[Jay Litwyn]

Subject-Was: Off-topic, but I must share this

"David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:fbad4e140904240648h62672871h1ace9b3abfcac9b3 at mail.gmail.com...
> 2009/4/24 Angela Anuszewski <angela.anuszewski at gmail.com>:
>
>> So, what happens when this site starts profiting off material they lifted
>> from Wikipedia without crediting the original authors and conforming to 
>> the
>> GFDL (or whatever license that Wikipedia winds up with?)
>
>
> These blogs and sites are typically put up by spammers. They use
> machine-translated content so as not to trigger Google's duplicate
> content penalty.

Maybe google should run a mechanical grammar critic over everything. I would 
not mind the convenience of one on wikipedia at all, because it would save 
me a lot of keystrokes trying to explain any changes I could theoretically 
make. Good ones hav a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index, along 
with commentary about why some words raise that index -- the lower the 
better, and it's hard to bring one down to eight.

The only disadvantage is that active voice makes a cleaner translation, so 
the more wikipedia's readability improves, the better the mechanical 
translation. I do not think it would make a big statistical difference, 
though. If google tuned and rated their fog index nicely, then bloggers of 
the plain English variety would like the rating changes, too.

I feel like cross-posting this to alt.usage.english, and I see no convenient 
way to do that, today.
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