On 6/8/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
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?
Peanut gallery chiming in here: It looks like Jimbo is saying machine
translation would be a very useful tool for building Wikipedia, but we
would not want to reduce Wikipedia to merely being a single repository
of information automatically kept in sync by machine translation.
In other words: Machine translation as a tool == good. Machine
translation as a model for interwikipedia relations == bad.
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."
So an article about sport should discuss in equal measure sports
popular in anglophone countries, and sports we've never heard of, but
that have massive popularity in certain populous African countries?
What does your philosophy say about the Georgia/Georgia question (is
Georgia a country in the former USSR or a US state?) What does
"different content" mean? Given three articles A1, A2, A3, is having
A1 the main article pointing to A2 and A3 as sub articles the same
thing as some other arrangement?
Is it ok if a link at the top of [[President]] at en directs people to
[[George W Bush]], while a link at the top of [[Président]] at fr
directs people to [[Jaques Chirac]]?
These aren't rhetorical questions - what's ok, what isn't?
Steve