Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-09-06/In the news

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Wikileaks[edit]

Wikileaks have a page about contributing at http://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks:Writer%27s_Kit. PhilKnight (talk) 09:41, 7 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not big payers, are they. You'd hope your investigative costs were insignificant. Tony (talk) 10:41, 7 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Based on their talk page, I gather they aren't paying anything. PhilKnight (talk) 10:46, 7 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have to say, I wish Jimmy hadn't registered those Wikileak domain names. It rather muddies the waters. I think what we should be hoping for is that 'Wiki...' as a prefix becomes so widespread that we wouldn't attach it to any one movement any more than we would '... .com' or '.org' --bodnotbod (talk) 09:41, 8 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

..and they wonder why we get mad when they abbreviate Wikipedia as "wiki".. -- œ ^™ 16:03, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: The Wikipedia-related leaks/reports linked in the article have since been removed from wikileaks.org (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks_busts_Gitmo_propaganda_team and http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Mogis_Wikipedia_article_and_history_before_removal,_Nov_2009 are currently giving 404 error messages), as have many other previous leaks. For the time being, the description page for the first is still readable in Google's cache. A copy of the second appears to be here.

Jimmy Wales has since clarified the issue of the domain names:

"The domain names were legally transferred to Wikileaks a long time ago, but for unknown reasons, Wikileaks never completed the technical aspects of the transfer. Wikia has made multiple requests to them to do so, with no result yet."

(In a recent interview on the Charlie Rose show, he mentioned having been in contact with Assange about the issue.)

And in the comments to WWB's blog posting, a reader linked to a historical version of the Wikileaks FAQ which illustrates the changes in policy mentioned in this Signpost article more clearly:

“

How will Wikileaks operate?

To the user, Wikileaks will look very much like Wikipedia. Anybody can post to it, anybody can edit it. No technical knowledge is required. Leakers can post documents anonymously and untraceably. Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity. Users can discuss interpretations and context and collaboratively formulate collective publications. Users can read and write explanatory articles on leaks along with background material and context. The political relevance of documents and their verisimilitude will be revealed by a cast of thousands.

”

Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:21, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Campaigns Wikia[edit]

Campaigns Wikia currently redirects to Wikia, but that is not what we are looking for. Can we pipe the link instead to say a webpage about Campaigns Wikia, or its article (if there is one)? ANGCHENRUI ^Talk ♨ 11:09, 7 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've linked to http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/Campaigns_Wikia. PhilKnight (talk) 20:49, 7 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Copyrighting" a word[edit]

"Wales said that he could not just copyright the word 'wiki', because he did not want to prevent other people from starting wikis." Surely Wales meant he could not just trademark the word 'wiki', right? TJRC (talk) 01:05, 8 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Google Translating medical articles[edit]

I would have thought that we'd classify medical articles as the very last category of articles we would want to apply machine translation to, because of the sorry state of the latter. Comet Tuttle (talk) 03:17, 9 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I believe it is strictly as an adjunct to human translation. Tony (talk) 03:45, 9 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes indeed. While still incipient in many ways, the practice of postediting—that is, having real translators rework and rewrite a machine translation into an accurate and functionally equivalent text—is increasingly common and is being used to great effect in several fields. With a good system in the hands of a good translator, it is a surprisingly powerful tool. Some extremely high-volume translation work, such as that required by international organizations, would be next to impossible without the aid of machine translation. Emphasis on aid. "Raw" MT is indeed a disaster in most contexts and, unsurprisingly, its use often has equally disastrous consequences. Fvasconcellos (t·c) 02:26, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What Fv says. And to reinforce his point, as I understand it, speed is one of the big issues. It is much faster to fix up a bad machine translation that to translate from scratch. Editing the bad into the good actually allows the translator to focus on different things in the relationship between the original and the translated equivalent—subtle nuances that are more likely to be drowned in the pure grunt work of translating from scratch. However, fixing (bad) machine translation is no bed of roses: it involves lower-level work, but just less of it by proportion. As with all translation, it works very well if the translator knows the original language reasonably well and the target language very well.

It occurs to me that as this project gains momentum, some of the linguistically inclined volunteers and Google-paid professionals might collaborate to produce a guideline specific to the task of translating medical texts from English to other languages with machine assistance. Perhaps those new to the task can be warned of pitfalls, of common quirks thrown up by the machine process, of things to look out for. It could be partly generic and partly language-specific. It could be combined with a guideline on the cultural sensitivities of the target readers, and how to handle the vexed issues raised in the Signpost article above concerning traditional medicine. Tony (talk) 02:44, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]