I'll start by saying that I'm one of the developers of Content Translation, so I'm obviously biased about this topic.
A lot of good points were raised here, but there's one that is not really mentioned. If it sounds obvious to you, it's great, but it's not obvious to everyone. Here it is:
More successful Wikipedia projects tend to be in languages in which there is an established history and tradition of: * elementary and higher education where teachers and professors speak to students in that language, and in which students write papers in that language * publishing textbooks * publishing encyclopedias * publishing dictionaries * translating works from (any) other languages, both fiction and reference
People who can read in these developed languages should remember this privilege that they have: English, French, Russian, Spanish, German, Polish, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Japanese, Norwegian, Hebrew and a few other well-developed Wikipedias are written in languages in which good encyclopedias had already existed before Wikipedia came along. A Wikipedia in these languages didn't make encyclopedic knowledge available in these languages; it made encyclopedic knowledge *more easily* available in them.
There are many other things that (probably) affect the development of a Wikipedia, such as web connectivity; speakers' population; speakers' attitude to the language; work week length (and the remaining free time); volunteering culture (or lack thereof); support of common operating systems for the language; economic indicators like GDP and HDI in the countries where the language is spoken; etc. I'm not aware of research that checks the correlation between these aspects and the development of a Wikipedia project in a language, but I strongly suspect that it exists for at least some of the above. (If anybody reading this is aware of such research, I'll be very happy to read it.)
But it's important to go back to the first point here: The existence of previous encyclopedias makes it easier for writers in these languages to simply start writing. "An encyclopedia" is not a new concept for them. The culture around these languages already had well-developed scientific terminology and a language style.
When I speak to people who write in Wikipedia in languages of India, Philippines, and other developing countries, they complain about different things from people that write in European languages. For example, they very often complain about the difficulty of writing in an encyclopedic style and bridging the colloquial language that common people can read and the standardized versions of the respective languages. This makes me think that they were standardized in a way that is problematic for *actually* writing an encyclopedia that would be useful to the general public.
A *massive* project for writing in a language, would create a critical mass of people who would either make the general public accustomed to reading in this standard language, or create a new de facto standard. But I guess that none of the current Wikipedia projects in these languages have this critical mass of writers.
A translation project, such as what Jon Erling Blad and Lane Rasberry are suggesting in this thread *may* create such a critical mass. It also needs bold leaders, who will take it upon themselves Languages that are developed today went through periods of directed development in the past; Lomonosov did it for Russian, Diderot did it for French, and so on. This can happen today as well. (English went through this, too, although I'm not sure which person should be tied to it: Isaac Newton? Samuel Johnson? John Harris (Q562265)? Alfred the Great? Probably all of them to some degree.)
I'd even go further and say that I don't agree with Lane when he says that the WMF cannot and will never pay for content. It sounds like a given thing to some people, but it isn't. Quite the contrary; it's imaginable that a careful and thoughtful project of this nature can be carried out by the WMF itself. "WMF never does this" is not a rule, and it must not be a mental blocker. I increasingly feel that the WMF is gradually, increasingly understanding that different languages need different kinds of resources and support, and this may include paid content creation. (Before you jump to conclusions: I'm a WMF staff member, but please don't understand from this that I know about some internal project to do such a thing, or that I am suggesting to do this. Neither thing is true. I'm just writing a sincere stream of consciousness about my opinions and feelings, and I might be wrong about it all.)
That said, it does make more sense to me that organizations other than the WMF should lead such work, perhaps with some WMF funding, for the sake of thought diversity if for nothing else. But whether it's paid for by the WMF directly, by Wikimedia chapters, by thematic interest groups, or by somebody else is not the main issue. What is important, is that *local* people and native speakers are as involved as possible in the content creation, and that the list of topics to be translated is not too strongly dictated.
(I also like the suggestion of translating from different languages. For practical reasons, English is the most common translation source [1], but translating from French, Russian, Chinese, or other languages, is awesome for diversity—not just politically, but philosophically as well.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CXStats
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2018-02-24 14:51 GMT+02:00 John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com:
This discussion is going to be fun! =D
A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles, the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand articles from the expanded list[2].
Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1 for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks good translation tools.
I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help. Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not have to be full translations of the source article.
A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_ Wikipedia_should_have [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_ Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe