Proposal talk:Integration across languages and WMF projects

Not sure about this. A lot of the time I feel as if 'integrating' pages is the overriding concern of the project, to the extent that it actively suffocates content. I am finding that when I make a new entry, a bot will be along within two or three hours to put in the wrong interwikis. - Brya 06:36, 10 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would be very skeptic with this proposal, because you can fill the gaps in different languages artificially - by means of imports and translation. That is according my opinion for a big quantity of low quality data and chaos.--Juan de Vojníkov 08:55, 14 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I like this proposal in general. I thought of an addition (new proposal?): If an article about Circle is missing in a langauage: Just display the article in a related language. For instance in Dutch for dialect wikipedias. Of course a warning and a different background or so should be shown to trigger the reader that this is not the correct language. What is needed is a) interwikis to not jet existing articles (red-link interwikis), and b) a list of related languages. HenkvD 09:52, 14 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Related proposals

I think this is an excellent proposal, and I especially would support some sort of "single sign-on" user accounts (and profile pages) that are unified across all languages/projects. An excellent example of the annoyance of the current situation was that this wiki (strategy) is separate from the meta-wiki, so I had to create yet another account to comment or rate the proposals.

The Proposal:More connection between the Wikimedia projects is a very closely related proposal that is mostly a subset of this one; it should probably be merged into this one.

Another related proposal is Proposal:Change languages quickly. Dupuy 16:52, 14 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree, except for

The problem with all machine translation programs is that it is based, in the bottom line, on an algorithm that performs a systematic find-&-replace of one language's words for another. And language is a very fluid & ambiguous thing which does not lend itself to this approach: idioms are garbled, meanings missed & subtitles lost. (Okay, the last is often lost even when expert humans translate from one language to another.) What this proposal needs is for someone who is familiar with both languages to correct the English translation against the German original. -- Llywrch 16:14, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

That comment was left by Llywrch on a German proposal in dire need of translation.

and I ephasize "the first task in translation is interpreting. This, computer programs cannot do as yet. Thus, translation software output is usually so garbled up that it really is much simpler not to use it at all, or only in a very limited way."

I am a somewhat experienced translator (outside WP) and I personally never found a translation software that I could use, except of course for dictionaries, which can be very good these days. Apart from that technical detail, I agree with everything else in this proposal. I imagine we would need a much better coordination among translators. Possibly, on each article's talk page we could have a gadget to inform translators of its "unification status".

Also, after having offered to help with translations on several pages including my own, and asked specific questions about how I can help with translations, going on for about two weeks now I think, with NO answer, I begin feel demoralised in that respect. Regards, Thamus 01:57, 23 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:11, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]