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

[Leslie Carr]

(FYI this is me speaking with my personal hat on, none of these
opinions are official in any way or the opinions of the foundation as
an organization)

<personal_hat>

>
> While Wikimedia is still only a medium-sized organization, it is not
> poor. With more than 1M donors supporting our mission and a cash
> position of $40M, we do now have a greater ability to make strategic
> investments that further our mission, as communicated to our donors.
> That's a serious level of trust and not to be taken lightly, either by
> irresponsibly spending, or by ignoring our ability to do good.
>
> Could open source MT be such a strategic investment? I don't know, but
> I'd like to at least raise the question. I think the alternative will
> be, for the foreseeable future, to accept that this piece of
> technology will be proprietary, and to rely on goodwill for any
> integration that concerns Wikimedia. Not the worst outcome, but also
> not the best one.

I think that while supporting open source machine translation is an
awesome goal, it is out of scope of our budget and the engineering
budget could be better spent elsewhere, such as with completing
existing tools that are in development, but not
deployed/optimized/etc.  I think that putting a bunch of money into
possibilities isn't the right thing to do when we have a lot of
projects that need to be finished and deployed yesterday.  Maybe once
there's a closer actual project we could support them with text
streams, decommissioned machines, and maybe money, but only after it's
a pretty sure "investment"

</personal_hat>

Leslie

>
> Are there open source MT efforts that are close enough to merit
> scrutiny? In order to be able to provide high quality result, you
> would need not only a motivated, well-intentioned group of people, but
> some of the smartest people in the field working on it.  I doubt we
> could more than kickstart an effort, but perhaps financial backing at
> significant scale could at least help a non-profit, open source effort
> to develop enough critical mass to go somewhere.
>
> All best,
> Erik
>
> [1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/animations/growth/AnimationProjectsGrowthWp.html
> [2] https://developers.google.com/translate/v2/pricing
> --
> Erik Möller
> VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Wikipedia and our other projects reach more than 500 million people every
> month. The world population is estimated to be >7 billion. Still a long
> way to go. Support us. Join us. Share: https://wikimediafoundation.org/
>
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--
Leslie Carr
Wikimedia Foundation
AS 14907, 43821
http://as14907.peeringdb.com/