[WikiEN-l] Duolingo and translating Wikipedia

[Andrew Gray]

On 20 June 2012 13:15, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> A claim made here about Duolingo and translating Wikipedia:
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18367017
>
> "With 100,000 active users, von Ahn says Duolingo could translate
> Wikipedia from English into Spanish in five weeks. With one million
> users, it would take about 80 hours."

See also Tom Morris's blog post on this:

http://blog.tommorris.org/post/23789718674/duolingo-the-future-of-translation-for-wikipedia

- there's some good notes in there about whether this sort of bitty
translation is practicable, and how.

One caveat that may be relevant to von Ahn's mention of Wikipedia:

"...in the case of French, they are from the French version of
Vikidia, a Wikipedia fork that’s basically a simple version of French
Wikipedia intended for 8–13 year old children. There’s also Vikidia
versions in Spanish and Italian. Sadly, Duolingo advertises these as
being “Wikipedia” tasks rather than Vikidia tasks. There’s nothing
wrong with translating non-Wikipedia articles, and it’s great that
there is a more school-focussed version of French and Spanish
Wikipedias, but it’s slightly deceptive to tell Duolingo users that
they are doing a Wikipedia task when they aren’t."

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk