[Foundation-l] New projects opened

Fri Aug 21 06:02:08 UTC 2009

Svip wrote:
> 2009/8/21 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>:
>   
>> Just to clarify, are you saying that in your view, too
>> few messages are translated to Danish, or are you
>> saying that too many messages are translated to the
>> Danish language?
>>     
>
> Unfortunately; neither.  Messages that shouldn't be translated to
> Danish, have unfortunately been, while messages that should have been
> translated to Danish, haven't.
>
> But that's without mentioning the horrible state of the localisation
> in general:  Wrong context translations, just wrong translations and
> many spelling errors.
>
> The Danish Wikipedia itself is in a pretty bad state to.  Too many
> articles on it are close to laughable, and you can often find better
> articles on Danish subjects on the English Wikipedia than the Danish
> one.
>
>   
I find your comments very significant. This suggests to
me quite strongly that it may in fact be that emphasizing
the *quantity* and *completeness* of localizations, over
the _quality_ of the same, can be a double edged sword.

The thought also is hard to escape, that there is a definite
"late mover disadvantage" to the creation of a wikipedia.
Anyone who has experience of the growth process of a
LOTE-wikipedia (to borrow a four-letter acronym from a
different free content context -- 'Language Other Than
English'), will inevitably recognize the feeling of seeing
something better written on the en-wikipedia than at
their own language version, and as the en-wikipedia
matures, this disadvantage is not going away, or losing
effect, sadly.

I could write more on these subjects, but in the interest
of briefness, choose not to, but will instead mull my
thoughts over and reflect...
> I my mind, the combination of the poor localisation and the bad state
> the Danish Wikipedia is in, scares many Danish editors off.
>
> And it should be mentioned, that many Danes have a pretty good
> conception of English, and the interest in Danish is unfortunately
> lessen as well.
>
> I am trying to do my part, by translating the pages on Meta wiki and
> the Strategy wiki to Danish.
>
>   

Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen