On 6/8/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
For what is it worth, I think that questions of
language and culture are
subtle and deep. Perfect machine translation would of course be useful
-- only Anthony could manage to find the straw man argument that anyone
who thinks that language distinctions are important and relevant might
also think that machine translation would not be _useful_.
You stated that "For the record, and as I have said many times in the
past, I do NOT
think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias
are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were
possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot
imagine that we would want to do so."
If you weren't talking about machine translation, then what did you
mean? Imagine that we would want to do what?
I think we sit somewhere around 4 on Steve
Bennett's scale, but moreso,
I think that is about where we ought to sit, perfect machine translation
or not.
--Jimbo
And I'd say that "We try to reach people in their mother language or
at least a language they handle very well, we should not provide
different content based on any other specificity such as nationality,
religion, political view point and such."
Anthony