I'll see if I can chip in with a Dutch article. On 9/21/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 21/09/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've tried this. It's somewhat better than nothing. But mostly I've only used it for expanding a bare stub and only in an area I'm already familiar with, and even that's too painful to do much. - d.

On 9/21/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote: I don't really know what articles you all typically work on, but I've been concentrating on Mathematics articles, which I've noticed have fewer problems than a usual translation. Fortunately, the Pythagorean Theorem, which I'm working on right now, is available as an FA in two languages (de and fr), one of which I know well enough to make a translation, especially since a lot of the mathematics terms are spelling variations on the English (or vice versa, depending on how one chooses to look at it). Carl

Carl Peterson wrote: Technical subjects tend to be easier to translate because language there tends to be more precisely defined. Humanities based subjects depend a lot more on subtle variations and connotations of language, and are more likely to generate false friends. In a controversial subject where people have had long arguments about the right word the situation won't get any easier for translators into a language where the median POV will be different from that found in the source language. Ec

On 9/22/06, Akash Mehta <draicone(a)gmail.com> wrote: You only have to list 5 significant ones. -- geni

On 22/09/06, Akash Mehta <draicone(a)gmail.com> wrote: I do not see how the GFDL is in any way linked to a pages "edit summaries" or "revision histories". It is more knowing who has contributed in the long run, a history of which would be kept on the non-en:wp page. It would be more than sufficient to reference that page if someone found the need to trace the contribution history for a page. Peter Ansell

On 22/09/06, Akash Mehta <draicone(a)gmail.com> wrote: Go to [[WP:FA]], click on "Deutsch" in the list of other languages (on the left in the default Monobook skin) and it will take you to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Exzellente_Artikel . - d.

On 9/22/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote: Probably not because there is no way of guaranteeing that the link will stay active. -- geni

David Gerard wrote: I translated an Italian featured article ([[Carlo Airoldi]]) earlier this year. It was short (only about 600 words) and it took probably about two or three hours. I have very little experience as a translator, though, and i think it could be done much quicker by a better Italian speaker with more experience of translation. The article in question would never have been featured on en, since it had no inline references and I wouldn't have even called it NPOV, which illustrated the problems with this sort of approach. adam

On 9/21/06, adam <underthechair(a)gmail.com> wrote: That thought occurred to me as well. As each language is allowed to set its own standards, an FA in one language may not be an FA in another. Assuming that the development of the criteria in each language is roughly equivalent to that of en (and from what I've seen, that's the case, given the proportion of articles to featured articles), the strictness of each language's FA criteria is proportional to the number of articles it has. Thus, it is logical to assume that en has the strictest FA requirements, having more articles than any other language. That said, the French criteria appear to be essentially a translation of the English criteria. The German FA process doesn't seem to have a set criteria in the concise sense of en, but instead seems to be based on a general article about considerations while writing an article. Furthermore, as "brilliant prose" tends to be one of the main sticking points on an FAC in my experience (next to the use of in-line refs), what may be "brilliant prose" in one language may not be so in another language, either because of writing convention (cultural or otherwise), assumption of technical expertise, or the fact that an article in language X just doesn't read well when translated to language Y. Carl