[Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[David Cuenca]

Something to take into account should be the efficiency a language pair can
have. For instance, how many articles there are available, how easy is to
translate articles, how many bilingual speakers there are for a given pair,
and perhaps also, how much it can help to harmonize relationships between
speakers of both languages.

There seems to be much more demand for languages that are geographically
closer. While speakers of Kazakh might have little interest in reading the
Lombard or Gujarati wikipedias, they might be more inclined to visit the
Tatar wikipedia, which by the way is closely related and much easier to
translate.

So no, I don't think we should base our decisions on the theoretical number
of pairs that can exist, but on the ones that offer the best efficiency.

Cheers,
Micru


On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 4:45 AM, Denny Vrandečić <
denny.vrandecic at wikimedia.de> wrote:

> Using a rather simple pair like Afrikaans - Dutch or a heavily researched
> one like English - Spanish would be giving us a wrong impression of how
> this will scale. We should at least add a few random pairs like Yoruba -
> Gujarati or Kazakh - Lombard. Most of our 67,000 language pairs that we
> will have to cover will fall in the latter group, not in the first two.
>
>
> 2013/8/23 David Cuenca <dacuetu at gmail.com>
>
> > On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > > As with so many things, it will be hard to assess cost/benefits
> without
> > > > making some effort. A safe bet could be to try with an existing pair
> or
> > > > develop a pair with an estimated high demand.
> > >
> > > Is there a pair where some work has already been done?
> > >
> >
> > For Apertium there are quite a few already done:
> > http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page
> >
> > Regarding new language pairs, no idea if the priorities for Wikipedia
> would
> > be the same as the priorities the Apertium community has.
> > It might be worth considering which languages to prioritize and how to
> > measure success or lack thereof.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Micru
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>
>
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