2010/7/28 Nathan <[email protected]>: > Just to be sure I understand...
It's good that you ask, indeed. :-) No, it's not about free software, and the Wikimedians are not too snobby or lazy to correct poor language. That is what I frequently do in de.WP and eo.WP, and I suppose Ragib and many others as well. The point is: The machine translated articles are often so bad that I simply don't understand them. I *cannot* correct them, because I don't know what they are saying. Kind regards Ziko What's happening here is that human > beings, using a software tool, are translating articles from the > English Wikipedia into a variety of other languages and posting them > on the comparatively small Wikipedia projects in these languages. The > articles, of unknown intrinsic quality, are usually mid to low quality > translations. > > In the projects with an active community, some have rejected these > articles because they are not high quality and because the community > refuses to be responsible for fixing punctuation and other errors made > by editors who are not members of the community. In the projects > without an active community, Wikimedians (who may not speak any of the > languages affected by the Google initiative) are objecting for a > variety of other reasons - because the software used to assist > translation isn't free, because the effort is managed by a commercial > organization or because the endeavor wasn't cleared with the Wikimedia > community first. Some are also concerned that these new articles will > somehow deter new editors from becoming involved, despite clear > evidence that a larger base of content attracts more readers, and more > readers plus imperfect content leads to more editors. > > What I find interesting is that few seem to be interested in keeping > or improving the translated articles; Google's attempt to provide > content in under-served languages is actually offending Wikimedians, > despite our ostensible commitment to the same goal. Concerns like > bureaucratic pre-approval, using free software, etc. are somehow more > important than reaching more people with more content. It all seems > strange and un-Wikimedian like to me. Obviously there are things > Google should have done differently. Maybe working with them to > improve their process should be the focus here? > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > -- Ziko van Dijk Niederlande _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
