Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Pumpie2

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Statement of the dispute
Continued addition of unintelligible, badly translated articles.

Desired outcome
The user must refrain from translating articles in languages that he cannot actually read with facility, whether or not he uses an automatic translator, and must improve his English to be adequate.

Description
While probably good-intentioned, Pumpie's contributions to Wikipedia consist of badly translated articles from other-language wikis, usually the French or Greek versions of Wikipedia, although formerly from German and Portuguese as well. The user does not seem to comprehend any of these languages, and also writes very poor English. He claims not to be using an automatic translator but the quality of the translations is no better than automatic translator output. Despite numerous pleas from several users he continues to be almost entirely unresponsive and to paste articles straight from the automatic translator, and makes only minimal effort to edit them constructively after posting them (primarily correcting city names that he copied and pasted from another article). He does not check spellings or check whether passages are intelligible, and he continues to make many mistakes of both translation and English. Without a thorough re-writing from other users, these articles are worthless. Pumpie was also involved in the German and Portuguese projects, with the same problems (and got banned at the German wiki).

Evidence of disputed behavior
Already in 2004, many users contacted him on his talk page about not using automatic translators:. A first RfC was also opened in 2004 over the low quality of his articles, but came to nothing.

This discussion in October 2004 is illuminating: Pumpie promises to reduce his errors and improve his translating, and seems to indicate that he will stop translating from Germany (sic) and Portuguese, but that he comprehends French and Greek enough to carry on. Right after he seems to admit that he does not actually know any foreign languages. In this discussion it becomes apparent that he prefers to create an article, even if in horrible English, and have others smooth it out after. He is advised to keep off from doing so and why this is an undesirable imposition on others (,, & ).

Again, only a few days after, following another complaint [], he promises not to autotranslate articles any more:. Even during the first RfC he did not respond in any meaningful manner.

However in the years that have passed nothing has changed, despite continued warnings on his contributions:, , , , , , ,

User:Cplakidas
Having come across his "translations" many times and every single time forced to re-translate them from the original, I issued repeated calls to abstain from using automatic translators, learn the respective language, or confine himself to writing stubs, if need be, but only with the info that he does understand 100%. ,, ,. I also twice warned him with an RfC if he continued, at several weeks' interval. ,

User:Markussep
As I've tried to make clear to him on his talk page, his English is horrible (many grammatical errors, and the incorrect use of words like "rarely", "nearly" and "rely"), and he clearly doesn't understand French. See for example these articles he created about French railway stations:, and. He makes mistakes that noone with the tiniest understanding of French would make, and just omits crucial words from sentences (apparently because he doesn't understand them). And the silliest typos, like Amine instead of Amiens in his Gare de Serqueux article. My recent comments on his talk page: ,. He does not respond to these comments, and hasn't improved his editing. He makes strange errors in articles about Greek villages as well, and his reply to my comment on that (in November 2009) isn't intelligible.

User:Yngvadottir
Having come across Pumpie's work and finding myself spending a lot of time fixing it, and having read the exchanges on his talk page, I wrote him a long and specific critique with a diff. I hoped to show him what was objectionable in his translations so that he could improve them, as well as explaining to him why I and others wanted him to. This has produced some improvement: compare the state in which he left a French station article in March 2010 with the state in which he left another French station article on July 25, 2010. The line is no longer represented by a redlink based on a French article, but uses en.wikipedia links. He now correctly translates the words for platforms and tracks instead of rendering them as walkways and levels. He disambiguates RFF correctly. And although he did not respond to my post to his talk page, his edit summary for the Gare de Poix was new - translated from the fr Wikipedia, translation is almost good. - he has made several such references to trying to improve his translations in edit summaries since my post. (And he appears to have stopped responding that he is a genius and that others will fix the translations, which were his main two responses when the issue was first raised with him.) However, despite this evident effort, he is still translating poorly. Continuous prose, rather than formulaic elements, still produces incomprehensibilities that look like machine translation; I will cite someone else's example: "it offered its used conditions month by month and satisfied by reports of mixed freight passing on the line since the 1990s." in Gare de Poix. But he does not appear to be actually using an automatic translator; notice the typo "staion" for "station" (which should grammatically be "stations"). And he continues to demonstrate poor English: despite the diff I supplied him with, he still has "The station are served" for "The station is served." This is incompetence in both English and translating, with only small improvement, I am sorry to say. (Regarding his English competency, I think his response to being given the reviewer right is significant: "Though I don't want to review pages as much as others, I'll won't be reviewing but not as much. I will review some or a few pages (not as many) but I don't want to be a reviewer. I will still do some links when I see them that are not linked.") I thought he had improved more, but was misled by others' having responded very quickly to clean up some of his recent articles. Also, at Gare de Poix he made no edits at all after the initial production of the page - not even to remove the "-->" he inadvertently left in. So he still doesn't clean up after himself sufficiently from a collaborative point of view.

User:Fences and windows
I gave a warning on their talk page about their poor translations in January.

Users certifying the basis for this dispute

 * 1) Constantine   ✍  11:51, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 2) Yngvadottir (talk) 15:56, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 3) Markussep Talk 17:09, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 4) If the poor translations and failure to attribute text to its sources does not stop, Pumpie needs to be banned.  Fences  &amp;  Windows  23:04, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Other users who endorse this summary

 * -- Cirt (talk) 02:06, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I was unfamiliar with this user, but after looking at a few of their recent contributions (such as and ), it's clear that either these are automated translations, or Pumpie does not have the knowledge of English to properly translate the articles.  Lankiveil (speak to me) 06:57, 28 August 2010 (UTC).

Outside view by the Rhymesmith
I am aware that Pumpie has not replied yet; however, a cursory investigation of the marshaled evidence is enough to establish the problem. If Pumpie responds in a fashion that nullifies the below, I'll revoke my comments. I would suggest as a basic solution that Pumpie be advised/compelled to create and edit articles in his own userspace, and then submit them for external review (which can be arranged on an ad hoc basis). Those who are willing to "fix" his pages can do so before they're introduced to Wikipedia proper. The onus of ensuring the linguistic competence of his edits will, ideally, be transferred from the editors who watch him to him - should he choose to continue contributing in neo-gibberish, such edits will not be included. While the specifics of such a proposal clearly need some work - has anything similar been suggested in the past?

Users who endorse this summary:
 * 1) The Rhymesmith (talk) 14:39, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 2) -- Cirt (talk) 02:07, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 3) This seems a sensible way of dealing with the situation. Lankiveil (speak to me) 06:53, 28 August 2010 (UTC).
 * 4) Indeed it does. The only problem will be to get him to bother to respond here... Constantine  ✍  10:14, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 5) Phearson (talk) 01:41, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 6) Markussep Talk 07:25, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
 * 7) &oelig; &trade; 08:03, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Reminder to use the talk page for discussion
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