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I have a question regarding wikipedia itself and languages

8
Ganeshtheone (talkcontribs)

Dear all,

I just got an sudden thought, that 'Why do we need wikipedia in all languages, instead we have a single pool of all the articles, from all the languages, and just translate them to the requested language.

benefits:

  1. all the languages will have the all the articles.
  2. less maintance of articles.

needed:

  1. a better software to translate the articles -> not exist now, but can be built if open source contibuters wish to have.
  2. better community -> which already exist.

It's a thought, may be someone have come across such idea's earlier, or it have some practical complications. Let the community to think on it.

I really feel sorry for my poor english. I tried on my best to write it right. Thank you all!

FeralOink (talkcontribs)

Developing high quality, universal language (machine) translation is beyond the scope of Wikipedia. (At this point in time, it seems to be beyond the scope of anyone, anywhere!) In fact, sufficiently accurate, nuanced language translation between any two languages is not yet at the level of accuracy needed for users of encyclopedic content.

Also, the difference between the various language versions of Wikipedia is greater than the language difference. I don't know how to articulate what this difference is, but I have observed it. The current approach seems to be rather effective.

Summary

Readers can choose to use machine language translation as needed. For now, this seems the more prudent arrangement i.e. to have machine language translation as an option, a helpful alternative, rather than the default.

174.22.202.58 (talkcontribs)

Why write "I have a question?" Why not write "My question is this?"

FeralOink (talkcontribs)

Because this is Wikipedia, not Stack Overflow, nor Quora?

Because we need more machine translation?

Tiny joke.

I concur with Qgil, that any further discussion of this topic should be continued on MetaWikimedia.org.

FeralOink (talkcontribs)

Eek, that is thumbnail sized! I'm sorry.

Ricordisamoa (talkcontribs)
Qgil-WMF (talkcontribs)

This topic (discussed several times over the years) belongs to http://meta.wikimedia.org and not mediawiki.org. Please continue the discussion there, if you wish.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.