[Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

Wed Aug 7 12:50:37 UTC 2013

Obviously, this system should be only used as far as it carries. I don't
know how far it might carry us - it might fail miserably, and not get
beyond the "Rome is a city. Rome is in Italy. Rome is known for The
Colosseum, coffee and Vatican City (state)." stage. It might lead to a
glorious future, where we really create an open source system that allows
everyone to write in every language and express a wide range of human
thought.

I am personally hesitant about automatic translations, and whether we can
achieve the coverage (in language pairs) and the quality (of Wikipedia).
But that is only my opinion. A hybrid approach, if we can support it and
build it, would obviously be the safest bet, as both endeavors are rather
risky. I see a lot of possible space for a hybrid system, as you describe
it.

One advantage of my proposal is that it's cost is rather small. For
supporting translation I haven't seen yet a sufficiently sketched proposal
that allows to estimate the potential cost and potential benefit.

Cheers,
Denny

2013/8/7 Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada <emijrp at gmail.com>

> Most times the best approach is a compilation of several approaches.
>
> Perhaps we can use the Denny system for the little introduction of articles
> (for example: geography, biographies) and optional automatic translation
> for the rest of the article.
>
> I mean, if you follow a red link in a little Wikipedia, it loads the i18n
> template + wikidata bits, so you have a brief summary about the topic. Then
> you can save that "live" generated stub, and expand it (using
> autotraslation from other WIkipedia).
>
>
> 2013/8/7 Anders Wennersten <mail at anderswennersten.se>
>
> > Thanks for sharing your very interesting ideas. While I am not fully
> > support your idea of implementation, I share your basic view of the need
> > and think some of the concepts you introduce has a very high potential to
> > better utilize the power of us having many versions.
> >
> > I have put in my feedback on the talkpage and hope there will be a
> > possibility to evolve this concept further in some type of workgroup. I
> > also see an interesting relation to the talk of machine translation
> where I
> > believe we can do a lot very quickly if we limit the vocabulary to be
> > included in such a tool
> >
> > Anders
> >
> >
> > Denny Vrandečić skrev 2013-08-07 02:20:
> >
> >  I have been thinking about this for a while, and now finally managed to
> >> write it down as a proposal. Details are on meta on the following link,
> >> below is the intro to the proposal:
> >>
> >> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_**
> >> multilingual_Wikipedia<
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia
> >
> >> >
> >>
> >> I tried to anticipate some possible questions and provide answers on the
> >> page. Besides that, I obviously hope that Wikimania could provide a
> place
> >> to start this conversation. And yes, I am aware that the proposal would
> >> lead to a very restrictive solution, but imagine what good it already
> >> could
> >> achieve! And since it is not meant to replace anything, but enrich our
> >> current projects... well, read for yourself.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Denny
> >>
> >>
> >> Wikipedia provides knowledge in more than 200 languages. Whereas a small
> >> number of languages are fortunate enough to have a large Wikipedia, many
> >> of
> >> the language editions are far away from providing a comprehensive
> >> encyclopedia by any measure. There are several approaches towards
> closing
> >> this gap, mostly focusing on increasing the number of contributors to
> the
> >> small language editions or to improve the provision of automatic or
> >> semi-automatic translations of articles. Both are viable. In the
> following
> >> we present a proposal for a different approach, which is based on the
> idea
> >> of multilingual Wikipedia.
> >>
> >> Imagine a small extension to the template system, where a template call
> >> like *{{F12}}* would not be expanded by a call to the template
> >> Template:F12, but rather to Template:F12/en, i.e. the template name with
> >> the selected language code of the reader of the page. A template call
> such
> >> as *{{F12:Q64|Q5519|Q183}}* can be expanded by Template:F12/en into
> >> *“Berlin
> >> is the capital of Germany.”* and by Template:F12/de into *“Berlin ist
> die
> >> Hauptstadt Deutschlands.”* (in the example, the template parameters
> Q5119,
> >> Q64 and Q183 refer to the Wikidata items for capital, Berlin and Germany
> >> respectively, which the templates query for the label in the respective
> >> language). Sentence by sentence could be created in order to provide
> for a
> >> simple article.
> >>
> >> That wiki would consist of *content*, i.e. the article pages, possibly
> >> just
> >> a simple series of template calls, and *frames*, i.e. the templates that
> >> lexicalize the parameters of a given template call into a sentence (Note
> >> that “sentence” here should not be considered literally. It could be a
> >> table, an image, anything). The implementation of the frames can be done
> >> in
> >> normal wiki template syntax, in Lua, in a novel mechanism, or a mix of
> >> these. This would be up to the communities creating them.
> >>
> >> Read the rest here:
> >> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_**
> >> multilingual_Wikipedia<
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia
> >
> >> >
> >>
> >>
> >
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