To also add some positive feedback from researchers: you are fully welcome to translate my research into humanly readable text. It would have to be enormously badly made before people would confuse a readable text with a scientific article and I have no fears that people would think a scientist would have written the readable version. I would see the situation similar to a translation in another language. Non-problematic and useful.
From my side there are no problems with using wikipedia. There have been several studies showing that Wikipedia is as accurate as traditional encyclopaedias. I mostly wrote the Wiki page pertaining my field of study; I think it is reasonably good. I have installed an add-on for my browser where I can select a word and directly open Wikipedia on that term. Very useful. Similarly it may be useful to make your translation engine as independent of the search engine as possible, so that it can also be used in other contexts. The features you describe can also be useful for scientists reading scientific articles, especially when they are not native speakers or people doing interdisciplinary work. Then showing simpler terms and pictures would also be very helpful. So the translation engine could also be a good add-on for a browser or a PDF reader. My main worry would be that the problem will not reach its societal aims. Already now there is more information on vaccinations and climate change in readable language on the net than any person will ever read. People chose not to read it because they do not want to change their opinion, especially when it gets them into conflict with their social peers. The AI translated articles may be better readable than the original scientific articles, but would still be horrible scientific articles. I would expect even less people to read them. Transparency done right can help the scientific community. But I am more sceptical that it can bridge the gap between science and the public. The BBC Reith lecture on trust makes a strong case, imho, that transparency does not reduce, but actually fuels, a culture of suspicion. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2002/lecture1.shtml -- <>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<> Victor Venema Chair WMO TT-HOM & ISTI-POST WMO, Commission for Climatology, Task Team on Homogenization http://tinyurl.com/TT-HOM ISTI Parallel Observations Science Team http://tinyurl.com/ISTI-POST Grassroots scientific publishing http://grassrootspublishing.wordpress.com/ Meteorological Institute University of Bonn Auf dem Huegel 20 53121 Bonn Germany E-mail: victor.ven...@uni-bonn.de http://www2.meteo.uni-bonn.de/victor http://variable-variability.blogspot.com Twitter: @variabilityblog Tel: +49 (0)228 73 5185 Fax: +49 (0)228 73 5188 There is no need to answer my mails in your free time. <>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<> _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
