Proposal:Combination of all languages into a unipedia

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Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

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1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

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Summary

Create a version of wikipedia which is to be developed for one language, translate all existing wikipedia articles into this language and collect it on this new platform.

Proposal

Compressing the information of all wikipedia articles into one wikipedia, to maximize the effect of the improvement progress of the human race.

Motivation

Reaching the maximum and/or most effective level of information exchange. Saving time and resources to reach a faster development of "The Human".

Key Questions

• When is that language available and when do we begin to develop the new version of wikipedia?
• Who develops the new language? The community?
• Who develops the new wikipedia software?
• What happens to the sources of any article?
• Which language should be the starting point?
• How long will it take before we have a version of auto translation software that can do this at an acceptable standard of accuracy for any two languages, let alone all of them?

Potential Costs

The costs for the servers will increase at the beginning, but on the long term end they will be drastically reduced because wikipedia only consists of one language.

This is simply not true. Server storage is cheap. I can't imagine saving a considerable amount of money through this. --Church of emacs 22:13, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

• Many companies have been working on translation software for many years, but we are still an unknown distance from having software that can do this reliably, and as with any technology that requires a major breakthrough we can no more predict when we will have good translation software than we can predict when we will have commercial fusion power. So however many millions we invested in translation software we would not know when or if we could use it.
• There are many typos in English that are not picked up by wordprocessors because they are valid words, but the wrong word for that sentence. This is little more than a cosmetic problem at the moment because posses looks almost identical to possess and staring is only one letter different to starring; but if they are auto translated there will be many languages where that one letter difference becomes a completely different word that renders a sentence unintelligible (these are not hypothetical examples - I have corrected over a thousand errors in each). Before we can use auto translate we not only need the autotranslation software to be written, but we need to greatly reduce such errors on wikipedia.
• English contains many words that have multiple meanings, and English is currently our largest pedia so would at the least be a significant source for such a unipedia. In order to have a chance at an auto translator we would need to disambiguate misleading words so that they could be auto translated; that isn't too difficult for fag with less than a thousand occurrences for all three of its very different meanings, but fair appears in 50,000 articles and hold appears in almost 140,000 articles. The cost of volunteer time in identifying which meaning applied to each of those words would be substantial.

References

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Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Combination of all languages into a unipedia.

UNIPEDIA idea is great

Love it, certainly got my vote.

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