[Wikimediaindia-l] Google's Indic Wikipedia translation project closing down

[Srikanth Ramakrishnan]

Ravi,
What Google did can pretty much be summarized as a 'Half hearted attempt'.
However, I had posted last week, a link to Microsoft's API and
transliteration tools. Personally, I find it better than Google.
The only catch is that Microsoft requires you to link back to them.
--
Regards,
Srikanth

On 5 June 2011 21:44, Ravishankar <ravidreams at gmail.com> wrote:

> In a recent mail to the google group regarding Google's Indic Wikipedia
> translation project, Dimple Batra from Google reported:
>
> "We are in the process of closing down the wikipedia indic language
> translation project.
>
> We had initiated this project to bootstrap the creation of indic content
> and encourage consumption in indic languages. Having accomplished the same
> over the past 2 years we would now like the community to continue
> contributing.
>
> Please feel free to reach out to us if you have other proposals on how we
> can create more local content in India"
>
> ***
>
> Please let us know how the different Indic Wikipedia communities involved
> in this project are going to handle this.
>
> As far as Tamil Wikipedia is concerned:
>
> 1000+ articles created using this project went through few rounds of
> corrections by both Wikipedians and the paid translators. About 50% of them
> were found to be of acceptable quality. We selected few translators who were
> doing a better job and a test case of 25 articles were assigned based on
> which further articles should be written. But, the collaboration between
> Tamil Wikipedia and Google lost its momentum after this stage.
>
> Frankly, Tamil Wikipedians were exhausted in this year long project with
> more than 20 Wikipedians contributing for this. The good will between Google
> - Translators - Wikipedians did not improve as the translators didn't show
> interest in improving their previous articles any further until new articles
> are assigned to them. (Which means continuous employment for them and profit
> for the companies involved). Later, we came to know that most of the
> translators involved in the project resigned from their respective companies
> and expected a stand still in this project.
>
> In this situation, the above reply from Google came for a query posted by
> Arjuna Rao Chavala regarding the project's status in Telugu Wikipedia.
>
> We haven't decided yet on the next course of action on the Google created
> articles. My expectation is that they will be treated as regular articles
> and the community will try to work on them. In case of very badly written
> articles, part of the article may be moved to talk page and moved back again
> after they are corrected. However, this will really be a time consuming
> exercise for sure.
>
> My personal opinion is that I am very much disappointed. Google's intention
> was good but execution left very much to desire. It didn't show interest to
> talk to the community before starting and before ending the project abruptly
> on its own.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ravi
>
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-- 
Regards,
ME.
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