Hellas!
Francis Tyers wrote:
On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 00:21 +0200, User 32X wrote:
You overestimate the power of machine translation. [...]
I'd like to make a point here:
- Neither English nor German are smaller Wikipedias, in fact both are
quite large!
The German Wikipedia is only about six times larger than the Volapük one. The later one is considerred being small.
On the other hand, between closely related languages, machine translation is often very good, as I have demonstrated with a previous post. You might not be aware, but machine translation between Spanish-Catalan and Spanish-Galician is already in production use, [...]
If there's actually a simple way of machine translation between two closely related languages, then why are there more than one Wikipedias for that language family?
The Serbian Wikipedia works in Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but there's still only one Wiki that serves both forms.
Maybe you don't care about smaller languages, [...]
Believe me, I do. At the moment I'm waiting for the Lower Sorbian Wikipedia to come out of the incubator and from time to time I try to read some articles in the Deitsch Wikipedia ([[pdc:]]). These small Wikipedias are often interesting, but only when there's a comunity who writes it. I don't need to read bot-created articles when there are the same articles 1000 times better in other languages I understand.
When a small Wikipedia doesn't have a special field of interest AND there is no large group of speakers, then it is – in most cases – not worth supporting it.
Best regards, 32X