[Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Erik Moeller]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:06 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Though the Wikimedia community seems eager to add new projects (Wikidata,
> Wikivoyage), I wonder how it can be sensible or reasonable to focus on yet
> another project when the current projects are largely neglected (Wikinews,
> Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, etc.).

I've stated before why I disagree with this characterization, and I
reject this framing. Functionality like the Visual Editor, the mobile
site improvements, Lua, and other core engineering initiatives aren't
limited in their impact to Wikipedia. The recent efforts on mobile
uploading are actually focused on Commons. Deploying new software
every two weeks and continually making key usability improvements is
not what neglect looks like.

What WMF rarely does is directly focus effort on functionality that
primarily serves narrower use cases, which I think is appropriate at
this point in the history of our endeavor. My view is that such narrow
more vertically focused efforts should be enabled and supported by
creating structures like Labs where volunteers can meaningfully
prototype specialized functionality and work towards deployment on the
cluster.

Moreover, the lens of project/domain name is a very arbitrary one to
define vertically focused efforts. There are specialized efforts
within Wikipedia that have more scale today than some of our sister
projects do, such as individual WikiProjects. There are efforts like
the partnerships with cultural institutions which have led to hundreds
of thousands of images being made available under a free license. Yet
I don't see you complaining about lack of support for GLAM tooling, or
WikiProject support (both of which are needed). Why should English
Wikinews with 15 active editors demand more collective attention than
any other specialized efforts?

Historically, we've drawn that project/domain name dividing line
because starting a new wiki was the best way to put a flag in the
ground and say "We will solve problem X". And we didn't know which
efforts would immediately succeed and which ones wouldn't. But in the
year 2013, you could just as well argue that instead of slapping the
Wikispecies logo on the frontpage of Wikipedia, we should make more
prominent mention of "How to contribute video on Wikipedia" or "Work
with your local museum" or "Become a campus ambassador" or any other
specialized effort which has shown promise but could use that extra
visibility. The idea that just because user X proposed project Y
sometime back in the early years of Wikimedia, effort Y must forever
be part of a first order prioritization lens, is not rationally
defensible.

So, even when our goal isn't simply to make general site improvements
that benefit everyone but to support specialized new forms of content
or collaboration, I wouldn't use project/domain name division as a
tool for assessing impact, but rather frame it in terms of "What
problem is being solved here? Who is going to be reached? How many
people will be impacted"? And sometimes that does translate well to
lens of a single domain name level project, and sometimes it doesn't.

> There's a general trend currently within the Wikimedia Foundation to
> "narrow focus," which includes shelling out third-party MediaWiki release
> support to an outside contractor or group, because there are apparently
> not enough resources within the Wikimedia Foundation's 160-plus staff to
> support the Wikimedia software platform for anyone other than Wikimedia.

It's not a question whether we have enough resources to support it,
but how to best put a financial boundary around third party
engagement, while also actually enabling third parties to play an
important role in the process as well (including potentially chipping
in financial support).

> In light of this, it seems even more unreasonable and against good sense
> to pursue a new machine translation endeavor, virtuous as it may be.

To be clear: I was not proposing that WMF should undertake such an
effort directly. But I do think that if there are ways to support an
effort that has a reasonable probability of success, with a reasonable
structure of accountability around such an engagement, it's worth
assessing. And again, that position is entirely consistent with my
view that WMF should primarily invest in technologies with broad
horizontal impact (which open source MT could have) rather than
narrower, vertical impact.

Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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