Hello,
Francis Tyers wrote:
On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 18:23 +0200, User 32X wrote:
The German Wikipedia is only about six times larger than the Volapük one. The later one is considerred being small.
This is a ridiculous statement. If you take any metric apart from sheer "page count" there is no comparison.
When I had a look at http://www.wikipedia.org/ I had to asume that there was some kind of comparison.
On the other hand, between closely related languages, machine translation is often very good, [...]
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?
When a language community decides that it speaks a language, not a dialect of another language, for whatever reason (for example national identity) they may have a wish for a Wikipedia. Personally I don't think this is up for you to decide.
Okay, there's the wish (and it's really not up for me to decide), but why are they using the other content then? Having the same content several times is just a balkanization of the the community.
The Serbian Wikipedia works in Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but there's still only one Wiki that serves both forms.
There are currently four Wikipedias for what until a few years ago was called Serbo-Croatian. There is likely to be another one in the future. I think it would be wonderful to see them merged. I'll let you get started on that.
Nice try. See, the [[w:en:Little Rock Nine]] had to have an armed escort to enter the Little Rock High School in 1957 – nearly a hundred years after the American Civil War.
The civil wars in the former Yugoslavia are only a decade ago and there's still too much potential for hate between these people. A combined Wikipedia would work for some of them, but not for all. My hope is there'll be some day a portal-like Wikipedia in serbo-croatia which takes the content of the different Yugoslavian language versions and combines them somehow. (With the ability to easily switch between the same article in different languages.)
Maybe you don't care about smaller languages, [...]
Believe me, I do. [...] 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.
I don't see where I have suggested using a bot. Is that what you think I have in mind? Machine translation needs to be post-editted, that is a job for humans.
Okay, our positions move a bit closer together. After the recent activities on vo.wikipedia I'm a bit cautious when it comes to non-human content creation. As long as there's a comunity to work on that content, this shouldn't be that much of a problem. But still, if the text isn't NPOV or based on OR this machine-based translations /could/ help to establish its contents.
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.
What on earth do you mean by a "special field of interest" ?
The previously mentioned pdc.wikipedia (oviously) has a lot of articles on German immigration in Pennsylvania. Many of these articles aren't in the German nor the English Wikipedia. These are the articles that make the pdc.wikipedia worth reading, a dozen of these articles are more valuable than the 12,294 "articles" of German municipalities in the Volapük Wikipedia.
Best regards, 32X