[Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge

Sat Jul 30 06:56:29 UTC 2011

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 20:31, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com> wrote:
> On 7/29/2011 11:06 AM, Wjhonson wrote:
>> Yes of course translating documents "has been practiced in academia for a very long time."
>>
>> We however are not a first publisher of translations.  We are an aggregator of sources.
>> That is the point of RS.
>> We don't publish first.
> Translating a quotation from a foreign-language source in a Wikipedia
> article is functionally no different from translating the contents of a
> Wikipedia article in one language to create an equivalent Wikipedia
> article in a different language.

That's, actually, different. Encyclopedic text is our work; or, if we
talk in the sense of OR, our own OR, no matter if it's been written
originally or translated. So, when you translate an article from one
language to another, you do that as encyclopedist, not as researcher.

In other words, if you miss something in encyclopedic text, that would
affect just encyclopedic text itself. If you claim that you've
translated the source, that affects validity of the source itself.