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

[Gautam John]

Thanks for sending this, Ravi. I am wondering how much this has to do
with them also shutting down their translation and transliteration
APIs as recently announced and how much this has to do with them
having achieved what they set out to do - not as far as Wikipedia is
concerned but their internal metrics for the project.

A larger question I am trying to parse - what have we learned from it
in terms of partnering with organizations that also have commercial
goals?

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam
________
http://social.prathambooks.org/




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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