[Wikipedia-l] multilingual wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

Mattis Manzel wrote:

> I'd like to propose a new Wikipedia: "the multilingual wikipedia"
>
> Some ideas about how to do that are on 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_communication
>
> I would be very interested in getting the multilingual features of 
> oddmuse (the colored background, the language filters) ported to 
> Mediawiki and then start working on two things:
>
> A) Elaborate the engine to make it work for multilingual pages: 
> language filters also in the edit mode, inclusion of automatic 
> pretranslation in a new translate-mode, etc.
> B) Start making the "multilingual wikipedia". Kinda getting people 
> into the fun of translation.
>
> Hopefully this wouldn't require a fork of Mediawiki. Unfortunately I 
> have a vage feeling that it does. In that case I propose as a name for 
> the multilingual Mediawiki engine: MMediawiki ;)
>
> But who knows?  Maybe things are easier than I think?

Or more difficult.  I think the idea is full of naïve optimism about 
translation in general, and machine translation in particular.  Begin 
with an English text and translate it into another language.  Have 
someone else, who cannot see the original, translate it back into 
English.  Compare the two English versions.  The difference can be amazing.

On another level, articles on the same subject are often separately 
developed in each language.  This can often result in having stable 
NPOVs in each language that are different, frequently in the wake of 
careful negotiation over the exact meaning of a word.  Reconciling these 
could be extremely difficult.  I can easily imagine that attitudes 
toward US foreign policy might not be as conflicted when written in many 
languages other than English.
En