I wonder if creating dynamic articles from Wikidata is better than creating static articles. Because we lack tools for this, it is easier to do this offline, and as a consequence we get the static bot-articles.
Den søn. 25. feb. 2018, 16.26 skrev Gabriel Thullen gabriel@thullen.com:
I should have joined in this discussion a little earlier. I work a lot with the French Wikipedia, and we do not just translate articles from English (6 million articles) to French (only 2 million articles). The French community is large and active, and provide a unique local perspective on the different articles that are written. And when I say local, I mean that things are seen differently in France than in the French speaking part of Switzerland or Belgium.
I think that we are ignoring something very important here: putting it simply, Wikipedia contributors do two things. They add information to the encyclopedia by improving articles or writing new ones, and they curate or check the existing articles. All this talk about machine translation does not address the second aspect of what the volunteer contributors do. This means that we could have hundreds of thousands of articles in a language with very few active contributors. Will that small community be able to oversee so many articles ?
For example, have a look at the list of Wikipedias ordered by number of articles:
- English - 5,578,081 articles - 138,479 active users - 1,230 admins
- Cebuano - 5,383,108 articles - 162 active users - 5 admins
- Swedish - 3,784,331 articles - 2,929 active users - 65 admins
- German - 2,157,495 articles - 20, 085 active users - 194 admins
When I have some time, I will look into different ratios like number or articles/active users or number of articles/number of native language speakers... Now I am not saying that our Swedish friends have abused machine translation of articles, but I definetly that something is not quite right about the Cebuano wiki... Gabe
On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 4:06 PM, Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se
wrote:
I am very happy to follow this thread as I believe it is addressing a
very
relevant issue.
In my mind we can divide up the different language version into 5 categories:
1.Enwp,
2.the next 6-7 (de,fr, es,jp,pt,ru..)
3.the next 20 or so, where the basic workprocesses are applied
4.the next 40-50 which are struggling to generate more input then what is vandalised
5.the rest which in reality is no viable online encyclopedias
And for me no 1 priority is to accept that there are these categories,
and
that what is applicable for cat 1 and 2 is not so for 4 and 5.
I believe the grant model could easily make room for subsiding good initiatives addressing the problem for cat 4 and 5 (and perhaps 3).
And I think it is very presumptuous to start talking of what technique to use and things like translation. If we open up for creative brainstorming (among the ones having the need) I think very many other ways can turn
up.
Myself I am deeply impressed what you can create using Wikidata as a base source of info, and being from a version of type 3 I see how much my homeversion improve content with wikidata created infoboxes
Anders
Den 2018-02-24 kl. 13:51, skrev John Erling Blad:
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?
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