[WikiEN-l] Translation articles: stemming the flood

Thu May 6 14:56:25 UTC 2004

For the second day running, mid-morning GMT, there have been numerous
articles posted by what appears to be a group of students at a Spanish
university, acting in concert in a project to boost WP's pages on machine
translation and allied topics.

I mention this not because there is an actual crisis - various alerts have
been raised, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:VfD-Translation_articles - but
because of the somewhat alarming feeling while it's on, of a whole group of
newbies loose and working in collaboration, and not communicating in
English.  Much of the work is wasted, because there are existing articles
under almost identical titles.  Much of the text is copied from somewhere,
posing a problem of scale looking at possible copyvio.  Some even seems to
be WP material being copied back here from another site using it.

On the whole I think the Wikipedians involved have handled this rather
professionally - taking a pro-active line in looking at what is going on,
rather than a reactive assumption that this is malicious in some way.  There
is going to be quite a job tidying it all up, later, if every such
contribution is treated (as it should be) on a case-by-case basis.

Charles

http://www.speakingasaparent.com/