[Wikimedia-l] ¿Qué te hace feliz esta semana? / What's making you happy this week? (Week of 25 February 2018)

[Pine W]

(Hello, I am trying something new this week by writing in Spanish. I am
hoping to encourage people to contribute to this conversation in their
preferred languages.)

Hola, estoy intentando algo nuevo esta semana escribiendo en español. Espero
animar a las personas a contribuir a esta conversación en sus idiomas
preferidos.

Algo que me hace feliz esta semana es la disponibilidad de "diffs visuales"
como se describe en el Blog de la Fundación Wikimedia:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/02/20/visual-diffs/.

¿Qué te hace feliz esta semana?

Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Jonathan Cardy]

There were two presentations on paid translation at Wikimania in Gdansk. I 
think that would be 2010? One by Google.org, the other by Google.com (charity 
and corporate wings).

I'm afraid my memory of the event is far from perfect. But some things stuck in 
my mind.

As one would expect, many of the things that could go wrong had gone wrong. 

Translators were not recruited from the community and did not understand the 
need to interact with the community.

The aims of the two projects were very different. .org wanted to make basic 
medical info available in a number of languages that were emerging on the 
Internet; .com wanted to give responses to common search terms in those 
languages. Bangla, Tamil and I think Telegu were among them.

One, I think it was Bangla had banned a group of translators, on another an 
irate attendee explained that people who spoke his language did not want 
articles on Hollywood film stars: I suspect that shows a disconnect between 
search engine results and the wishes of wikipedians, it illustrates the 
concerns others have already raised re colonialism, and the difficulty of 
mixing volunteers and paid staff in one project. 

No surprise that one of the two projects was much more contentious than the 
other, and not just among Wikipedians on the target project. I can understand 
the frustration of a wikipedian volunteer who realises he is fixing for free 
work that someone else has been paid to do.

I don't know whether the concern about Hollywood was just an inter generational 
thing, whether the people with access tohollywood films were representative of 
the young, or representative of the tech savvy verbally bilingual early 
adopters in that society and unrepresentative of the tens of millions in that 
language who were about to come online.

But I do remember the "common search term" project being much more contentious 
than the medical one.

My experience from here and several other part volunteer communities is that 
there are two golden rules to follow when mixing paid and unpaid staff.

1 Only pay people to do things that the volunteers want to have happen but 
aren't volunteering to do.
2 As much as possible recruit your paid staff from your community of volunteers.

Sadly almost all my examples of getting this wrong come from this movement.

Regards

Jonathan / WereSpielChequers


> On 24 Feb 2018, at 19:41, wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
> 
>  1. Re: Paid translation (Gnangarra)
>  2. Re: Paid translation (Michael Snow)
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 03:05:41 +0800
> From: Gnangarra 
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> Message-ID:
>   

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Info WorldUniversity]

John and All,

As a possible complement to this discussion, CC-4 MIT
OpenCourseWare-centric World University and School seeks to matriculate
students in all ~200 countries' official/main languages (
https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Languages), and may
compensate them for work in a number of ways, including translation and
developing machine translation (and in all 7,099 living languages
eventually).

World Univ. and Sch. donated ourselves to Wikidata in 2015 for
co-development, and got a new WUaS Miraheze Mediawiki last year in these
regards too.

Cheers, Scott
- https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Nation_States
(each to become a major online University for free CC-4 OCW degrees)



On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 1:49 PM, John Erling Blad  wrote:

> It is a long time since everyone on these projects were solely volunteers.
> :)
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 PM, Todd Allen  wrote:
>
> > Yes, and then there's always the question. If he's getting paid, why
> aren't
> > I? Why is he getting paid per word of article translated? Why am I not
> > getting paid per spamvertisement deleted or vandal blocked? Why am I not
> > getting paid for closing discussions that it takes hours of reading input
> > and considering all sides and getting rocks thrown at me no matter what I
> > do? Is that not valuable to the project as well?
> >
> > If you want to pay anyone, you better start paying me. I'm okay with the
> > idea of being a volunteer as long as everyone is a volunteer. But if you
> > start paying some people and not me, we're going to have a problem.
> >
> > Todd
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
> > peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> > > Cheers,
> > > Peter
> > >
> > > -Original Message-
> > > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > > Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> > >
> > > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > >
> > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > > > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves.
> Articles
> > > > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie
> > > > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those
> will
> > > be pretty small.
> > > >
> > > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > > editor!
> > > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > > > are
> > > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the
> project.
> > > > >
> > > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > > > more
> > > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > > > >> that
> > > > tool
> > > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > > > >> articles
> > > > that
> > > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also
> love
> > > > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > > > >
> > > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > > > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish,
> and
> > > > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of
> the
> > > > >> topics in question.
> > > > The
> > > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia.
> And
> > > > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > > > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > > > >
> > > > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> > > > > require
> > > > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > > > >> work seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or
> > > > >> so
> > > > languages
> > > > >> in which 

[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedians: FYI, the Bassel Khartabil Memorial Fund and Fellowship

[Jay Walsh]

Dear Wikimedians! Apologies if this has already been circulated, but
please do take a moment to read about the recently announced Bassel
Khartabil Memorial Fund and Fellowship:

https://creativecommons.org/2018/02/07/bassel-post/
https://twitter.com/creativecommons/status/961244979988455425

These two separate programs invite applications from free culture
activists, researchers, artists, and much more to help carry on the
incredible work Bassel was involved in. Projects ranging from $1,000
USD to $10,000 USD will be considered for the Memorial Fund, and the
Fellowship provides a $50,000 USD stipend as well as funds for other,
related expenses.

Wikimedians are encouraged to apply and to spread the word. The last
date for review of applications is March 24, 2018.

Please help us spread the word, particularly if you are actively
involved in the Middle East / North Africa region.

Thanks in advance!


-- 
Jay Walsh
Creative Commons

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[Wikimedia-l] Join the third World Mime Day edit-a-thon

[Ivana Guslarević]

*Hello everyone!I’m writing you on behalf of Wikimedia Serbia, regarding
organization of the third World Mime Day edit-a-thon.For the last two years
Wikimedia Serbia collaborated with World Mime Organization
, whose president is Marko Stojanovic
,
famous actor in Serbia, mime artist and acting professor. Along with this
organization we successfully realized these events (2016
,
2017
),
and this year the edit-a-thon will be part of the First Mime World
Conference .The
edit-a-thon aims to have international character. Previously, Wikimedians
and Wikipedians from Macedonia and Armenia joined us in celebrating this
day by writing about notable mime artist, theaters and mime plays.The
support for this event came from the United Nations as well: Ms. Irena
Vojackova-Sollorano, UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident
Representative for the Republic of Serbia, visited the edit-a-thon
 and praised the volunteers mission.This
year we are planning to do the same and we are inviting everyone who is
interested in this topic and who thinks that GLAM cooperation could be
achieved. World Mime Organization has a network of mime artists and
theaters worldwide, so you can use Marko as a contact to reach local
theaters and artist.The Meta page
 is
created, and you can sign in and join the project. There is also an event
page on Serbian Wikipedia
.If
you need any additional information, please contact me. Looking forward to
collaborate globally on this topic.Best regards,Ivana GuslarevicWikimedia
Serbia*


Ивана Гусларевић
менаџер комуникација  Викимедија Србије

p: 011/3348-468 m: 060/74-54-772
w: rs.wikimedia.org e: ivana.guslare...@vikimedija.org



*Замислите свет у коме свака особа на планети има слободан приступ
целокупном људском знању. То је оно на чему ми радимо.*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I'll start by saying that I'm one of the developers of Content Translation,
so I'm obviously biased about this topic.

A lot of good points were raised here, but there's one that is not really
mentioned. If it sounds obvious to you, it's great, but it's not obvious to
everyone. Here it is:

More successful Wikipedia projects tend to be in languages in which there
is an established history and tradition of:
* elementary and higher education where teachers and professors speak to
students in that language, and in which students write papers in that
language
* publishing textbooks
* publishing encyclopedias
* publishing dictionaries
* translating works from (any) other languages, both fiction and reference

People who can read in these developed languages should remember this
privilege that they have: English, French, Russian, Spanish, German,
Polish, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Japanese, Norwegian, Hebrew and a few other
well-developed Wikipedias are written in languages in which good
encyclopedias had already existed before Wikipedia came along. A Wikipedia
in these languages didn't make encyclopedic knowledge available in these
languages; it made encyclopedic knowledge *more easily* available in them.

There are many other things that (probably) affect the development of a
Wikipedia, such as web connectivity; speakers' population; speakers'
attitude to the language; work week length (and the remaining free time);
volunteering culture (or lack thereof); support of common operating systems
for the language; economic indicators like GDP and HDI in the countries
where the language is spoken; etc. I'm not aware of research that checks
the correlation between these aspects and the development of a Wikipedia
project in a language, but I strongly suspect that it exists for at least
some of the above. (If anybody reading this is aware of such research, I'll
be very happy to read it.)

But it's important to go back to the first point here: The existence of
previous encyclopedias makes it easier for writers in these languages to
simply start writing. "An encyclopedia" is not a new concept for them. The
culture around these languages already had well-developed scientific
terminology and a language style.

When I speak to people who write in Wikipedia in languages of India,
Philippines, and other developing countries, they complain about different
things from people that write in European languages. For example, they very
often complain about the difficulty of writing in an encyclopedic style and
bridging the colloquial language that common people can read and the
standardized versions of the respective languages. This makes me think that
they were standardized in a way that is problematic for *actually* writing
an encyclopedia that would be useful to the general public.

A *massive* project for writing in a language, would create a critical mass
of people who would either make the general public accustomed to reading in
this standard language, or create a new de facto standard. But I guess that
none of the current Wikipedia projects in these languages have this
critical mass of writers.

A translation project, such as what Jon Erling Blad and Lane Rasberry are
suggesting in this thread *may* create such a critical mass. It also needs
bold leaders, who will take it upon themselves Languages that are developed
today went through periods of directed development in the past; Lomonosov
did it for Russian, Diderot did it for French, and so on. This can happen
today as well. (English went through this, too, although I'm not sure which
person should be tied to it: Isaac Newton? Samuel Johnson? John Harris
(Q562265)? Alfred the Great? Probably all of them to some degree.)

I'd even go further and say that I don't agree with Lane when he says that
the WMF cannot and will never pay for content. It sounds like a given thing
to some people, but it isn't. Quite the contrary; it's imaginable that a
careful and thoughtful project of this nature can be carried out by the WMF
itself. "WMF never does this" is not a rule, and it must not be a mental
blocker. I increasingly feel that the WMF is gradually, increasingly
understanding that different languages need different kinds of resources
and support, and this may include paid content creation. (Before you jump
to conclusions: I'm a WMF staff member, but please don't understand from
this that I know about some internal project to do such a thing, or that I
am suggesting to do this. Neither thing is true. I'm just writing a sincere
stream of consciousness about my opinions and feelings, and I might be
wrong about it all.)

That said, it does make more sense to me that organizations other than the
WMF should lead such work, perhaps with some WMF funding, for the sake of
thought diversity if for nothing else. But whether it's paid for by the WMF
directly, by Wikimedia chapters, by thematic interest groups, or by
somebody else is not the main issue. What is important, is that *local*
people and 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Gabriel Thullen]

I should have joined in this discussion a little earlier. I work a lot with
the French Wikipedia, and we do not just translate articles from English (6
million articles) to French (only 2 million articles). The French community
is large and active, and provide a unique local perspective on the
different articles that are written. And when I say local, I mean that
things are seen differently in France than in the French speaking part of
Switzerland or Belgium.

I think that we are ignoring something very important here: putting it
simply, Wikipedia contributors do two things. They add information to the
encyclopedia by improving articles or writing new ones, and they curate or
check the existing articles. All this talk about machine translation does
not address the second aspect of what the volunteer contributors do.
This means that we could have hundreds of thousands of articles in a
language with  very few active contributors. Will that small community be
able to oversee so many articles ?

For example, have a look at the list of Wikipedias ordered by number of
articles:
1. English - 5,578,081 articles - 138,479 active users - 1,230 admins
2. Cebuano - 5,383,108 articles - 162 active users - 5 admins
3. Swedish - 3,784,331 articles - 2,929 active users - 65 admins
4. German - 2,157,495 articles - 20, 085 active users - 194 admins

When I have some time, I will look into different ratios like number or
articles/active users or number of articles/number of native language
speakers... Now I am not saying that our Swedish friends have abused
machine translation of articles, but I definetly that something is not
quite right about the Cebuano wiki...
Gabe


On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 4:06 PM, Anders Wennersten  wrote:

> I am very happy to follow this thread as I believe it is addressing a very
> relevant issue.
>
> In my mind we can divide up the different language version into 5
> categories:
>
> 1.Enwp,
>
> 2.the next 6-7 (de,fr, es,jp,pt,ru..)
>
> 3.the next 20 or so, where the basic workprocesses are applied
>
> 4.the next 40-50 which are struggling to generate more input then what is
> vandalised
>
> 5.the rest which in reality is no viable online encyclopedias
>
> And for me no 1 priority is to accept that there are these categories, and
> that what is applicable for cat 1 and 2 is not so for 4 and 5.
>
> I believe the grant model could easily make room for subsiding good
> initiatives addressing the problem for cat 4 and 5 (and perhaps 3).
>
> And I think it is very presumptuous to start talking of what technique to
> use and things like translation. If we open up for creative brainstorming
> (among the ones having the need) I think very many other ways can turn up.
> Myself I am deeply impressed what you can create using Wikidata as a base
> source of info, and being from a version of type 3 I see how much my
> homeversion improve content with wikidata created infoboxes
>
> Anders
>
>
>
>
> Den 2018-02-24 kl. 13:51, skrev John Erling Blad:
>
>> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>>
>> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
>> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>>
>> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
>> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
>> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
>> articles from the expanded list[2].
>>
>> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
>> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
>> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
>> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
>> good translation tools.
>>
>> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
>> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
>> at
>> all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
>> articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
>> Perhaps
>> we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
>> Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
>> have to be full translations of the source article.
>>
>> A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
>> should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a
>> lot
>> of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
>>
>> [1]
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikip
>> edia_should_have
>> [2]
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikip
>> edia_should_have/Expanded
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>> New messages to: 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Isaac Olatunde]

How about training language experts in academic institutions on how to
translate contents from one language Wikipedia (Eg. English wikipedia) to
another? I believe this would be more productive than paying people
directly to contribute or translate contents.

Sometimes in 2016, I discussed with a professor of Yoruba language and Head
of Department of Yoruba language on possible collaboration between the
department and the Yoruba Wikipedia community. We agreed that students
could be assigned to translating high quality articles from the English
Wikipedia to Yoruba Wikipedia and they could be doing these translations as
part of their course work in Yoruba language.

In Nigerian universities for example, Yoruba students take "Àyan Ògbùfò
(the principle of translation) " as part of a course(s) they must pass to
be awarded a degree in Yoruba language.

We could take advantage of this and approach them on possible collaboration.

Today, I had about 30 minutes discussion with  one of the contributors to
the Yoruba language version

of  The watchtower and awake! magazine.

on possible collaboration. He was excited and agreed to be fully involved.

There are institutions and individuals  that would be interested in
translating high quality contents, we just need to reach out to them and
devise a means to get them fully involved.

Regards,

Isaac


On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman  wrote:

> I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a new
> editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have involvement
> of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be involved /
> have translations from TWB.
>
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
>
> > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from small
> > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> interesting
> > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > wrote:
> >
> > > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > >
> > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > interesting
> > > > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > > > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should
> > also
> > > be
> > > > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical
> > articles,
> > > > as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
> > > >
> > > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > > editor!
> > > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> are
> > > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the
> project.
> > > > >
> > > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > more
> > > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> that
> > > > tool
> > > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > articles
> > > > that
> > > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also
> love
> > > the
> > > > >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > > > >
> > > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > in
> > > > >> which
> > > > >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
> > > there
> > > > >> is
> > > > >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in
> > question.
> > > > The
> > > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia.
> And
> > > for
> > > > >> languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > > avaliable
> > > > >> volunteers.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > > > >
> > > > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Recognition of the Don Wikimedians User Group

[Scott MacLeod]

Congratulations, as well!

Cheers,
Scott

- http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Regions

Soon to move into our new wiki here -
https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Nation_States - in
countries' languages

On Feb 13, 2018 11:53 PM, "Nurunnaby Hasive" 
wrote:

 Congratulations!


Hasive
WMBD

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 3:39 AM, Subhashish Panigrahi  wrote:

> Congratulations friends!
>
> Subhashish
>
> On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 2:01 PM, Shabab Mustafa 
> wrote:
>
> > Cheers to Don Wikimedians User Group!
> >
> > ---
> > Shabab Mustafa
> > Wikimedia Bangladesh
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 10:26 AM, Md. Ibrahim Husain 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > A warm congratulation to members of Don Wikimedians User Group.
> > >
> > > Cheers!!!
> > > Md. Ibrahim Husain Meraj
> > > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Some years ago I tried to figure out whether there was some kind of
mechanism that kept the community sizes at a fixed level. Taking the
population in countries that spoke a specific language, adjusting for
access to internet, and family sizes, made me realize that most stable
projects have 0.2–0.4 ‰ contributors within a normalized language group. If
you then say a stable community consists of 10-20 users, then this creates
a pretty hard limit on the language size. A community of 10-20 users would
imply a language size of 250–1000 000 people. That makes a
Wikipedia-project out of reach for a lot of languages.

(If you somehow limit this group, for example by demanding that only
trained medics should write medical articles, then you draw those medics
from the already limited set, in effect demanding an even larger language
group to make a working community.)

To create the initial interest to make a core encyclopedia is even more
difficult. To bridge that gap, and initiate building of a sustainable
community, a core set of articles are necessary. Perhaps that core set will
be short-lived, and will be replaced with articles that somehow better
reflects the user basis at the local language, but a core set that reflects
some common ground is nonetheless necessary. The capitol of Sweden doesn't
magically disappears in Bengali. The moon doesn't magically turns into
cheese unless in a fairy tale. There are some universal constants that all
languages must adhere to, even in Sicilian Wikipedia a mafioso is a mobster
[1] (someone have messed up the interlinking)

In Norwegian Bokmål we have a few users that has this kind of weird idea
that if something lacks an explicit name, either a word or phrase, then it
should not be described. In my opinion that is nonsense. Some kind of
entity can be described, in any language, no matter if it has a name. We
describe the World as we know it, using words or phrases from the language
to do so. If what we describe has a name, then we use that name. In some
languages that means describing a specific entity is difficult because the
local language has many words and phrases for the same thing. In some other
language it might be difficult because there are no word or phrases to
describe the entity. Neither of those problems arise because the entity is
non-existing in our world, it is just difficult to describe in the specific
language.

Give people knowledge! If they need to somehow clarify that knowledge to
make it more accessible to them, then let them do that! That is why
Wikipedia is editable for everyone!

[1] https://scn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafiusu

On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 2:07 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> I'll start by saying that I'm one of the developers of Content Translation,
> so I'm obviously biased about this topic.
>
> A lot of good points were raised here, but there's one that is not really
> mentioned. If it sounds obvious to you, it's great, but it's not obvious to
> everyone. Here it is:
>
> More successful Wikipedia projects tend to be in languages in which there
> is an established history and tradition of:
> * elementary and higher education where teachers and professors speak to
> students in that language, and in which students write papers in that
> language
> * publishing textbooks
> * publishing encyclopedias
> * publishing dictionaries
> * translating works from (any) other languages, both fiction and reference
>
> People who can read in these developed languages should remember this
> privilege that they have: English, French, Russian, Spanish, German,
> Polish, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Japanese, Norwegian, Hebrew and a few other
> well-developed Wikipedias are written in languages in which good
> encyclopedias had already existed before Wikipedia came along. A Wikipedia
> in these languages didn't make encyclopedic knowledge available in these
> languages; it made encyclopedic knowledge *more easily* available in them.
>
> There are many other things that (probably) affect the development of a
> Wikipedia, such as web connectivity; speakers' population; speakers'
> attitude to the language; work week length (and the remaining free time);
> volunteering culture (or lack thereof); support of common operating systems
> for the language; economic indicators like GDP and HDI in the countries
> where the language is spoken; etc. I'm not aware of research that checks
> the correlation between these aspects and the development of a Wikipedia
> project in a language, but I strongly suspect that it exists for at least
> some of the above. (If anybody reading this is aware of such research, I'll
> be very happy to read it.)
>
> But it's important to go back to the first point here: The existence of
> previous encyclopedias makes it easier for writers in these languages to
> simply start writing. "An encyclopedia" is not a new concept for them. The
> culture around these languages already had well-developed scientific
> terminology 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Vi to]

Any "global" list reflects (and I fear it will always reflect) the
Weltanschauung of those cultures which are stronger on the web.

I'm deeply concerned about cultures being eaten up by globalization but
attempts to preserve them should take into account the risk of ending up
preserving just "our" view of these cultures.

I also agree with WereSpielChequers' comments about mixing paid and unpaid
editing. What I think it can be done is a system of prizes/contests (maybe
evaluated by paid experts) focused on attracting people on Wikisource and
Wiktionaries, Wikipedia can follow if a critical mass is eventually reached.

Vito

2018-02-25 15:16 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :

> Sorry, but this does not make sense. The core articles apply globally.
> There will although be articles in additions to a list of core articles,
> but I don't try to advocate any of those lists as the one and only list.
> Actually I have toyed with an idea of automatically create a list of core
> articles, and that would identify important articles no matter if they are
> from a big western language or a minority language.
>
> The main problem is NOT that minority languages should have articles about
> the major cities and important philosophers, *the main problem is that
> minor languages can't get started because they lack content*!
>
> On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 2:41 AM, Vi to  wrote:
>
> > Cultural appropriation is something different, by "forcing" the contents
> in
> > a minority language we would actually be at risk of implementing a form
> of
> > "cultural colonialism" which is the opposite of a cultural appropriation.
> >
> > NOTE: I refer to "the Western" in both cultural and "Wikipedian" sense: I
> > mean cultures with a strong presence on the web plus developed and
> > flourishing Wikipedia communities.
> >
> > Helping minority languages with funds/workforce is not bad in my opinion,
> > but I think a bottom-up process must be followed, with the "bottom" being
> > as closer as possible to relevant linguistic/cultural communities. A
> > Wikipedia full of "what the Westerns think is important" in a minority
> > non-Western language would definitely fail project scopes.
> >
> > This kind of problem almost does not arise with minority language
> > associated to Western cultures since they share the same cultural
> > backgrounds: back to my previous example the cultural background of
> > Sicilian is substantially equal to Italian one. Still, as I already
> wrote,
> > wikis in minority languages should focus on a certain aspect of wiki
> scope:
> > Wiki has roughly two main scopes: 1) sharing knowledge in a certain
> > language 2) also preserving the cultural heritage associated with
> different
> > languages. For languages mainly spoken as first language the "sharing
> > knowledge" aspect is predominant, while the second should take precedence
> > in languages whose speakers are native speakers of a "bigger" language.
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > 2018-02-24 22:58 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :
> >
> > > Seems like this is mostly about cultural ownership and appropriation.
> Not
> > > sure if it is possible to agree on this.
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:08 PM, Vi to  wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
> > > >
> > > > I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed
> > in a
> > > > better way by others:
> > > > *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> > > > translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality
> verification
> > > > requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations
> > themselves;
> > > > *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural
> > > identity
> > > > of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them
> to a
> > > > different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only
> > focuses
> > > > about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> > > > *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the
> cultural
> > > > identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> > > > *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> > > > Wikipedians.
> > > >
> > > > IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise
> > > texts
> > > > of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their
> vocabularies
> > > > (wiktionary).
> > > >
> > > > Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers
> should
> > be
> > > > dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> > > > specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any
> > of
> > > > its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> > > > Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books
> about
> > > him
> > > > in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake
> > > "literary"
> > > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

I like this!
+1000!!

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 11:07 PM, Info WorldUniversity <
i...@worlduniversityandschool.org> wrote:

> John and All,
>
> As a possible complement to this discussion, CC-4 MIT
> OpenCourseWare-centric World University and School seeks to matriculate
> students in all ~200 countries' official/main languages (
> https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Languages), and may
> compensate them for work in a number of ways, including translation and
> developing machine translation (and in all 7,099 living languages
> eventually).
>
> World Univ. and Sch. donated ourselves to Wikidata in 2015 for
> co-development, and got a new WUaS Miraheze Mediawiki last year in these
> regards too.
>
> Cheers, Scott
> - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Nation_States
> (each to become a major online University for free CC-4 OCW degrees)
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 1:49 PM, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
>
> > It is a long time since everyone on these projects were solely
> volunteers.
> > :)
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 PM, Todd Allen 
> wrote:
> >
> > > Yes, and then there's always the question. If he's getting paid, why
> > aren't
> > > I? Why is he getting paid per word of article translated? Why am I not
> > > getting paid per spamvertisement deleted or vandal blocked? Why am I
> not
> > > getting paid for closing discussions that it takes hours of reading
> input
> > > and considering all sides and getting rocks thrown at me no matter
> what I
> > > do? Is that not valuable to the project as well?
> > >
> > > If you want to pay anyone, you better start paying me. I'm okay with
> the
> > > idea of being a volunteer as long as everyone is a volunteer. But if
> you
> > > start paying some people and not me, we're going to have a problem.
> > >
> > > Todd
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
> > > peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> > > > Cheers,
> > > > Peter
> > > >
> > > > -Original Message-
> > > > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org]
> On
> > > > Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> > > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > > > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> > > >
> > > > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my
> simple
> > > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > > >
> > > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > > > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > > > > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves.
> > Articles
> > > > > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical,
> ie
> > > > > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those
> > will
> > > > be pretty small.
> > > > >
> > > > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > > > editor!
> > > > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <
> jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > > > > are
> > > > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the
> > project.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made
> efforts
> > > > > > more
> > > > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > > > > >> that
> > > > > tool
> > > > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > > > > >> articles
> > > > > that
> > > > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also
> > love
> > > > > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty
> obvious.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our
> partner
> > > > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that
> languages
> > > > > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish,
> > and
> > > > > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of
> > the
> > > > > >> topics in question.
> > > > > The
> > > > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia.
> > And
> > > > > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often
> few
> > > > > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I used projects below 65k 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Anders Wennersten]

I am very happy to follow this thread as I believe it is addressing a 
very relevant issue.


In my mind we can divide up the different language version into 5 
categories:


1.Enwp,

2.the next 6-7 (de,fr, es,jp,pt,ru..)

3.the next 20 or so, where the basic workprocesses are applied

4.the next 40-50 which are struggling to generate more input then what 
is vandalised


5.the rest which in reality is no viable online encyclopedias

And for me no 1 priority is to accept that there are these categories, 
and that what is applicable for cat 1 and 2 is not so for 4 and 5.


I believe the grant model could easily make room for subsiding good 
initiatives addressing the problem for cat 4 and 5 (and perhaps 3).


And I think it is very presumptuous to start talking of what technique 
to use and things like translation. If we open up for creative 
brainstorming (among the ones having the need) I think very many other 
ways can turn up. Myself I am deeply impressed what you can create using 
Wikidata as a base source of info, and being from a version of type 3 I 
see how much my homeversion improve content with wikidata created infoboxes


Anders



Den 2018-02-24 kl. 13:51, skrev John Erling Blad:

This discussion is going to be fun! =D

A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.

What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
"List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
articles from the expanded list[2].

Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
good translation tools.

I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
have to be full translations of the source article.

A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Sorry, but this does not make sense. The core articles apply globally.
There will although be articles in additions to a list of core articles,
but I don't try to advocate any of those lists as the one and only list.
Actually I have toyed with an idea of automatically create a list of core
articles, and that would identify important articles no matter if they are
from a big western language or a minority language.

The main problem is NOT that minority languages should have articles about
the major cities and important philosophers, *the main problem is that
minor languages can't get started because they lack content*!

On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 2:41 AM, Vi to  wrote:

> Cultural appropriation is something different, by "forcing" the contents in
> a minority language we would actually be at risk of implementing a form of
> "cultural colonialism" which is the opposite of a cultural appropriation.
>
> NOTE: I refer to "the Western" in both cultural and "Wikipedian" sense: I
> mean cultures with a strong presence on the web plus developed and
> flourishing Wikipedia communities.
>
> Helping minority languages with funds/workforce is not bad in my opinion,
> but I think a bottom-up process must be followed, with the "bottom" being
> as closer as possible to relevant linguistic/cultural communities. A
> Wikipedia full of "what the Westerns think is important" in a minority
> non-Western language would definitely fail project scopes.
>
> This kind of problem almost does not arise with minority language
> associated to Western cultures since they share the same cultural
> backgrounds: back to my previous example the cultural background of
> Sicilian is substantially equal to Italian one. Still, as I already wrote,
> wikis in minority languages should focus on a certain aspect of wiki scope:
> Wiki has roughly two main scopes: 1) sharing knowledge in a certain
> language 2) also preserving the cultural heritage associated with different
> languages. For languages mainly spoken as first language the "sharing
> knowledge" aspect is predominant, while the second should take precedence
> in languages whose speakers are native speakers of a "bigger" language.
>
> Vito
>
> 2018-02-24 22:58 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :
>
> > Seems like this is mostly about cultural ownership and appropriation. Not
> > sure if it is possible to agree on this.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:08 PM, Vi to  wrote:
> >
> > > I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
> > >
> > > I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed
> in a
> > > better way by others:
> > > *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> > > translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> > > requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations
> themselves;
> > > *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural
> > identity
> > > of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> > > different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only
> focuses
> > > about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> > > *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> > > identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> > > *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> > > Wikipedians.
> > >
> > > IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise
> > texts
> > > of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> > > (wiktionary).
> > >
> > > Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should
> be
> > > dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> > > specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any
> of
> > > its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> > > Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about
> > him
> > > in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake
> > "literary"
> > > language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting"
> > in
> > > Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
> > >
> > > As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> > > knowledge.
> > >
> > > Vito
> > >
> > > 2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :
> > >
> > > > My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was
> merely a
> > > > statement about my present experience about translators in general.
> > > >
> > > > The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a
> > specialized
> > > > area is that there is a small community, and within this community
> some
> > > > kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the
> > > remaining
> > > > group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and
> > there
> > > > will be no 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Not sure what you mean by common search terms, but if it is about direct
translation of search terms to get good SEO ranking it is outside what I'm
talking about. That area will vanish completely in a coupe of years.

I've replied about medical articles previously, and why this isn't an area
where it is easy to translate articles.

I agree to both of your bullet points, but note that for point 1, creating
a core set of articles are necessary to attract interest to the project.
There are some weird ideas that these kind of projects emerge from nothing,
but it is a lot of really hard work to start them. Without a base set of
articles the projects does not attract readers, and without readers no
contributors, and without contributors no articles.

The main problem isn't the "cultural colonialism" or "cultural
appropriation" BS, it is lack of articles and thus non-existing communities.

On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 12:10 PM, Jonathan Cardy <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There were two presentations on paid translation at Wikimania in Gdansk. I
> think that would be 2010? One by Google.org, the other by Google.com
> (charity and corporate wings).
>
> I'm afraid my memory of the event is far from perfect. But some things
> stuck in my mind.
>
> As one would expect, many of the things that could go wrong had gone wrong.
>
> Translators were not recruited from the community and did not understand
> the need to interact with the community.
>
> The aims of the two projects were very different. .org wanted to make
> basic medical info available in a number of languages that were emerging on
> the Internet; .com wanted to give responses to common search terms in those
> languages. Bangla, Tamil and I think Telegu were among them.
>
> One, I think it was Bangla had banned a group of translators, on another
> an irate attendee explained that people who spoke his language did not want
> articles on Hollywood film stars: I suspect that shows a disconnect between
> search engine results and the wishes of wikipedians, it illustrates the
> concerns others have already raised re colonialism, and the difficulty of
> mixing volunteers and paid staff in one project.
>
> No surprise that one of the two projects was much more contentious than
> the other, and not just among Wikipedians on the target project. I can
> understand the frustration of a wikipedian volunteer who realises he is
> fixing for free work that someone else has been paid to do.
>
> I don't know whether the concern about Hollywood was just an inter
> generational thing, whether the people with access tohollywood films were
> representative of the young, or representative of the tech savvy verbally
> bilingual early adopters in that society and unrepresentative of the tens
> of millions in that language who were about to come online.
>
> But I do remember the "common search term" project being much more
> contentious than the medical one.
>
> My experience from here and several other part volunteer communities is
> that there are two golden rules to follow when mixing paid and unpaid staff.
>
> 1 Only pay people to do things that the volunteers want to have happen but
> aren't volunteering to do.
> 2 As much as possible recruit your paid staff from your community of
> volunteers.
>
> Sadly almost all my examples of getting this wrong come from this movement.
>
> Regards
>
> Jonathan / WereSpielChequers
>
>
> > On 24 Feb 2018, at 19:41, wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> >
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> >  1. Re: Paid translation (Gnangarra)
> >  2. Re: Paid translation (Michael Snow)
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> > --
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 03:05:41 +0800
> > From: Gnangarra 
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> > Message-ID:
> >