User talk:Msscmm

Theoretical Foundation and Framework

 * We define the Multilingual Wikipedia as technical systems and community projects that operate and improve the multi-lingual and inter-lingual cooperation among world languages within the Wikipedia platform.


 * Our group has been investigating the multi-lingual function of Wikipedia to analyze how political, moral and social values are incorporated into its design. We follow SCOT approach as a foundational theory to understand the relationship between technology and society, and look at how technology and society affect each other by studying the relevant social groups.

Background

 * According to the official Wikipedia website, Wikipedia is a “web-based free-content encyclopedia project” to which “people of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write” articles . As of February 23, 2009, there are more than 10,000,000 articles in Wikipedia in 260 languages .  Hence, Wikipedia is indeed growing as a multi-lingual encyclopedia.  At the same time, the language barrier seems to obstacle Wikipedia’s goal to become a universal encyclopedia.  Despite the increasing maturity of Wikipedia as a networked information system in English, its standards on articles do not seem to go beyond language differences.

Problem

 * Wikipedia, though is a single project started in English, there are multiple platforms for the construction of discourses based on language differences. It is a network of networks connecting users of different languages.  This can cause, and already is causing, a problem of disparities in standards from Wikipedia of one language to another.  As Yochai Benkler theorized, the wealth of network comes from the guarantee of individual participation and the peer-produced watchdog mechanism that promotes human liberty and democracy .  If Wikipedia attempts to become a universal encyclopedia based on the network constructed via the Internet, then an attempt to overcome this problem of language barrier has to be made.

Methods

 * Based on Sisay Adafre and Maarten de Rijke’s study of comparison between English and Dutch Wikipedia pages, a cross-linguistic research on the accuracy of contents in Wikipedia pages is proved to be possible and relevant . According to the researchers’ linguistic ability, we plan to conduct our project based on the cross-linguistic comparison among Wikipedia pages in English, Chinese (Mandarin), and Japanese.  We plan to develop our project by exploring the approaches presented in Adafre and de Rijke’s study:
 * 1) improvement of translation system; or
 * 2) improvement of link structure in Wikipedia.

Values in the Multilingual Wikipedia
I feel that we’ve gotta do this.

We define the Multilingual Wikipedia as technical systems and community projects that operate and improve the multi-lingual and inter-lingual cooperation among world languages within the Wikipedia platform. ''Does this make sense??? I’ve gotta check other references.''

Values
We have discovered so far the following values in the Multilingual Wikipedia. Some of them could merge together, I guess. ＃Values in the Definition of a Project:
 * 1) Equity in access/free access to all (forewords by Wales, Lih xv, xvi)
 * 2) *Cooperation (xviii)
 * 3) *Diversity: social and cultural (from the initial Wikipedia project)
 * 4) Emerging Values:
 * 5) *linguistic diversity: (Lih 139-142: “Making It Multilingual”)
 * 6) Designer’s Values:
 * 7) *equity in access → empowerment (xviii)
 * 8) *trust (xvii)
 * 9) *social determination of technology (xviii)
 * 10) *cooperation (xviii)
 * 11) *people to “do good” (its’ like 性善説!) (xviii) --- I don’t know if we should include this here…
 * 12) User Values: --- Do you think you can identify some according to the diff. groups we looked at?

Translation

 * 1) Operationalization:
 * 2) *In the Multilingual Wikipedia, social justice (fairness) and diversity are operationalized as the increasing multiplicity and interconnectedness, and the improved inter-lingual similarities in contents among world languages in Wikipedia. (Adafre and Rijke 2006).
 * 3) Implementation:
 * 4) *Diversity through the multiplicity of languages used in the system
 * 5) *Fairness through the inter-lingual similarity of contents → to overcome language barrier to the knowledge?
 * 6) *Cooperation through volunteer-based edit/translation functions
 * 7) Values in Conflicts:
 * 8) *Encoding of languages "as you mentioned??? Can you identify/clarify?"

Verification

 * don’t if we really need to discuss this on Monday, but it might be interesting to keep in mind for the final work that how we are gonna try verifying the embodiment of values in the some of the technical features we analyze/recommend in the practical environment.

Design Constituencies

 * 1) Users
 * 2) Anonymous ~
 * 3) Identifiable ~
 * 4) WikiMedia Foundation
 * 5) Community Members
 * 6) Administritors
 * 7) Content Contributors
 * 8) Technology Designers
 * 9) Language committeereports directly to the Board of Trustees
 * 10) *Developing a clear policy and documentation for new language projects and their proposal
 * 11) *processing those requests
 * 12) *supporting and coordinating new projects to optimize their success
 * membership

System
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
 * 1) List of Wikipedias
 * 2) Multilingual coordination
 * 3) *"Each language in Wikipedia currently has a separate set of user accounts. Links between articles in different languages are called interlanguage links or (colloquially and a bit ambiguously) 'interwiki'."
 * 4) '''Help:Interlanguage links
 * 5) *Interlanguage links are links from any page (most notably articles) in one Wikipedia language to one or more nearly equivalent or exactly equivalent pages in another Wikipedia language, between language versions of Wiktionary, and the same within Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikibooks.
 * 6) *The interlanguage link feature works also on Commons, and produces links to the Wikipedias. This is not reciprocal: a link from a Wikipedia to Commons is an in-page link.
 * 7) *They appear at one or two edges of the webpage (in Monobook on the left, in Classic at the top and bottom) after Languages, and show the names of languages for which a link is available. Interlanguage links look like external links (or different, depending on CSS), but the syntax is more like internal links. They are a form of interwiki links. See m:Meta:Interlanguage links for details on linking different languages on Meta.
 * 8) Wikipedia Machine Translation Project
 * 9) Babel'''
 * 10) *"All 265 Wikipedias are ordered by article count. The table lists each language name in English (linked to the English Wikipedia entry for the language) and the "local" name, in the language itself (linked to the article in that language's wiki). It also lists for each wiki the language code used in its URL and in interwiki links to it (linked to the local Main Page), as well as statistics on articles, edits, administrators, users, and images (most linked to an appropriate local special page)."


 * 1)  Meta:Interlingual coordination 
 * 2) * Meta:International Wikipedia question 
 * 3) *There are several questions. The main one that bothers me is whether and how Wikipedia articles in different languages might be made to correspond to one another . --Larry_Sanger
 * 4) Embassy

Policy Pages

 * Language proposal policy

Statistics

 * Multilingual statistics

Meta:Talk:Wikipedia Machine Translation Project

 * Translate or Write from scratch?


 * Are you sure the other language wikipedias would rather translate text than write it themselves? It seems to me that it's almost more effort to translate text than to write an article yourself. For instance, I run the Esperanto wikipedia or eo: and I think we appreciate the international nature of our articles. I was wondering if other second-language wikipedias would feel the same way. I mean do the other language wikipedias want it?--Chuck Smith'


 * Initially, it´s better have something that nothing. So, I prefer a translation if there is not an esperanto original language article. Remember, later you can wiki (modify) the translated article.


 * I strongly agree: it is better to have a translated article to refer to, than no article, and it is usually easier to correct a couple of errors at a time than start writing a new article. Now, what will happen when a translated article is corrected and then the original is modified? pgan002 2004-06-25 15:53 EST  [edit] T14N, I18N, L10N


 * I'm an active contributor/translator for the Vietnamese Wikipedia, and I find that it's okay to simply translate most articles to Vietnamese, but with articles that relate more to Vietnamese-speakers (such as articles on Vietnam, Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, etc.), it's better to write an article (almost) from scratch. Because the international Wikipedias are more than internationalization – they're also about localization. – Minh Nguyễn 22:50, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Then do you go back and contribute your advanced knowledge of Vietnamese language and culture to the English (or other existing) version? 59.104.85.53 00:49, 24 July 2005 (UTC)


 * It's true that the effort to write articles is almost the same as the effort to translate. But there are some exceptions. If you are not an expert in the topic, it's easier to translate than to write. On the other hand, it's clear to me that the number of contributers to the portuguese encyclopedia is very small. You must consider the fact that portuguese is not a second-language, but the first language of milions of people. Unfortunaly very few of those millions have access to the internet and/or have an education. A free encyclopedia would be an extraordinary resource for tose people, so every effort to speed the creation of portugurese version is welcomed. Of course, people that write to a second language wikipedia like Vikipedio, have diferent purposes, do it for fun and are not interested in Machine Translation.

PS-You may be interested in knowing that the Traduki project uses esperanto for the deeper word representation to achieve machine translation. user:joao.


 * I fail to understand why this would be a good thing. Esperanto is yet another language. Why would it be superior and if it is superior in some aspects would that not be it, just some aspects ? GerardM 08:06, 10 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Point well made. It would be especially good for the minority languages. I was aware of the Traduki project and it looks interesting although it looks like nothing has happened on the project lately... maybe I'm wrong. I actually looked at the pages again yesterday. ...and since I'm going to start learning Portuguese soon (I plan to visit Brazil next August), I'll probably take a closer look at it later. I now know Sim, N~ao and Obrigado. :) --Chuck Smith

Wikipedia talk:Chinese interlanguage links
 Naming of 'cn' and 'tw' On an unrelated note, why call the different links 'cn' and 'tw'? Reminds me of politics... --Jiang, Talk 03:32, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Well, it is not a Wikipedian developer's invention. The chronology:
 * ISO 639 states that Chinese language = zh
 * ISO 3166-1 specifies that Mainland = cn; Republic of China = tw; HK = hk; Singapore = sg; Macau = mo
 * RFC 1766 ("Tags for the Identification of Languages") combines 639 with 3166-1, resulting in five tags:
 * zh-cn
 * zh-tw
 * zh-sg
 * zh-hk
 * zh-mo

These were originally not used to mark trad/simpl, but to differentiate between localism of the same language. Their English parallels are easier to see. For example, en-ca, en-gb and en-nz mean that "color" is spelled as "colour"; but en-us spells it like "color". This is how they are still used in "Language Preferences" in most broswers (IE, Netscape, Mozilla...).

But somewhere down the way, somebody chose to make zh-cn the abbrev of simpli and zh-tw trad. And now, the use is stuck, and quite popular, if not very widespread in computer science. --Menchi 04:43, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Since Wikipedia is still young, one should really try to use zh-trad/zh-simp, the -cn,-tw,-hk should be used to refer to variant on language, not on script. Is this "chinese inter language link" a kind of ad hoc hack?--pektiong 03:35, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I agree, but simp means "stupid" -- which may not be very attractive to "simp" users. --Menchi (Talk)ü| â 05:55, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * 'Simp' does not mean "supid", IMO. Can anybody tell me when/who/how this "new" function is added to the wikipedia software? Is there any discussion "before" this new function is born? --pektiong 00:23, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * Somebody asked for it and I added it, maybe six months ago. If you don't like them, just use "zh". It all goes to the same place. --Brion 00:33, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I think this is a good function. I am just want to know the history of thie change. --pektiong 17:40, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I believe it was User:Formulax who asked. It just suddenly appeared. Even I, at the time very active in Chinese WP, and other Chinese admins had no idea how or who or what this occurred. (We got the why, and we agreed with it.) No, there was no discussion. --Menchi (Talk)ü| â 00:46, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)


 * I love this article! Really funny to read. Personally speaking, using "zh-cn" and "zh-tw" really reminds me of something political... Another problem is, I think the tags now "&#20013;&#25991;(&#31616;&#20307;)(Simplified Chinese)" are really ugly (with two brackets). Why not merge them together like "&#31616;&#20307;&#20013;&#25991;(Simplified Chinese)" and "&#32321;&#39636;&#20013;&#25991;(Tranditional Chinese)" instead? --Samuel 02:59, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)~

Meta

 * Multilingualism (new as of 5/2004; merge with this page?)
 * There is also an English Wikipedia available -- International help necessary
 * Help us find a Wikipedia mascot!

Translation and cross-fertilization

 * Wikipedia Machine Translation Project
 * Transwiki - for moving articles between different languages
 * Wikipedias and cross-fertilisation

Ecological barrier for cross-fertilisation
We must share similar values enough for cross-fertilisation. (If we want it. It is also possible we don't really want to) - Which values must be common ? Copyrights issues ? Some neutrality (even if slightly different) ? Free content? Access for all (age, localisation, langage, education level)? Openess (banning issues) ? Name-calling ? Other values ? - Are we sure we share them ? How can we estimate we share them enough ?

If we are, could we work toward common space and discussions for these values ?

If we are not, what can we do to go in that direction ?

In biology, some claim two individuals are said to be of the same species when they can cross-reproduct, others claim it is when they look similar. Are Wikipedias willing to be from the same species through looking very similar, or through being able to really cross-fertilize ? Do we just need to varnish ourselves ?

Will barrier for cross-fertilisation
Well, this has to do with diversity. Maybe is that not the place to discuss about it. But, fertilisation is not about just one bringing something to another, it's the birth of a new slightly different wikipedia. Diversity of langage and point of views manifest more value, and will help neutrality goal (see Thoughts on Wikipedia interlanguage priorities). On the other hand, some fear setting-up a common wikipedia organisation could somehow reduce cultural diversity, as international wikipedias could loose their specificities. But, why wouldn't Arabic go in length about prayer 'solat' while french just leave a note about it ? It is just specialization. Not destructive fusion.

For those who have a vision of enlarged community, how to share it with those who merely see international wikipedias as potential uplifts from the "main" one ?

Maybe symbiosis would be a much better word than fertilisation ? And maybe symbiotic communities are the way for a truly comprehensive and neutral, yet evolutionary encyclopedia ?

Standards, formats, character sets

 * Date formats for language linking
 * Caractères spéciaux - special characters to copy & paste on each page?

International community and forks

 * Future of international Wikipedias as part of the main community
 * Thoughts on Wikipedia interlanguage priorities
 * Two Russian WPs
 * South Slavic NPOV page
 * Open letter to the Enciclopedia Libre group (Historical; from the fork of the spanish wikipedia in spring 2002)

Language integration ideas

 * Thoughts on language integration - Proposal on language integration: merge of database
 * Multilingual communication - It is not neccessary to have wikipedias in different languages. There could be one multilingual wikipedia. People will do the coordination what to translate themselves. -- MattisManzel

Bibliographies
There are various bibliographies on wiki and free culture research, such as:
 * Wiki Research Bibliography: wiki and wikimedia related research publications; A version of same information using WIKINDX: http://bibliography.wikimedia.de/ (See this link for more bibliography links.)

For our group, as a way to point to common interests (but also to share interests), we could list ten to twenty most recommended readings. (We could compile our favorite references and vote on favorite items to list. This needs a sub-page.) To start, here are some interesting books. Feel free to add suggestions and key articles. What do you think is important to read/review?:


 * Axelrod, Robert. 1985. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books.
 * Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press.
 * Bray, John et al. 2000. Collaborative Inquiry in Practice: Action, Reflection, and Making Meaning. Sage Publications.
 * Darder, Antonia, Rodolfo D. Torres, and Marta Baltodano, eds. 2002. The Critical Pedagogy Reader. Falmer Press.
 * Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning Technology. Routledge.
 * Fox Keller, Evelyn. 1996. Reflections on Gender and Science: Tenth Anniversary Paperback Edition. Yale University Press.
 * Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Rowman & Littlefield.
 * Harding, Sandra. 1998. Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. Indiana University Press.
 * Lessig, Lawrence. 2005. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. Penguin.
 * Kellner, Douglas. 1995. Media Culture. Routledge.
 * Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Harvard University Press.
 * Polletta, Francesca. 2004. Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. University Of Chicago Press.
 * Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. The University of Chicago Press.
 * Willinsky, John. 2005. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press.

Msscmm (talk) 04:35, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Adafre, Sissay F., and de Rijke Maarten. Finding Similar Sentences across Multiple Languages in Wikipedia. Amsterdam: ISLA, University of Amsterdam, Benkler, Yochai. Chapter 7 “Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere” in The Wealth of Networks: How Special Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Msscmm (talk) 19:56, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Removed from Local_Embassy
Hello! I've been cleaning up the list of users that new users may seek help from. I've removed your name from the list because you have not edited in a while. Feel free to add yourself back if you're active again. If you have any questions, feel free to message me on my talk page. Netalarm talk 22:46, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Asian 10,000 Challenge invite
Hi. The WikiProject Asia/The 10,000 Challenge has recently started, based on the UK/Ireland The 10,000 Challenge and WikiProject Africa/The 10,000 Challenge. The idea is not to record every minor edit, but to create a momentum to motivate editors to produce good content improvements and creations and inspire people to work on more countries than they might otherwise work on. There's also the possibility of establishing smaller country or regional challenges for places like South East Asia, Japan/China or India etc, much like The 1000 Challenge (Nordic). For this to really work we need diversity and exciting content and editors from a broad range of countries regularly contributing. At some stage we hope to run some contests to benefit Asian content, a destubathon perhaps, aimed at reducing the stub count would be a good place to start, based on the current WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon which has produced near 200 articles in just three days. If you would like to see this happening for Asia, and see potential in this attracting more interest and editors for the country/countries you work on please sign up and being contributing to the challenge! This is a way we can target every country of Asia, and steadily vastly improve the encyclopedia. We need numbers to make this work so consider signing up as a participant! Thank you. -- Ser Amantio di Nicolao Che dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 11:16, 20 October 2016 (UTC)