3 ms·

What's the point of this with the current high quality of state-of-the-art machine translation? Don't we expect machine translation to surpass humans in the nea

by zelly 6y ago

What's the point of this with the current high quality of state-of-the-art machine translation? Don't we expect machine translation to surpass humans in the near future? People who are domain experts in various fields don't know how, don't care to, and shouldn't code. They should just edit the articles in natural language. A lot of the content of Wikidata isn't numbers and is natural language also, so you'd still need to (machine?) translate it. But this time the machine translation algorithm would not have the benefit of the long-term context from the encompassing paragraph. There are too many reasons why this is a bad idea. Almost makes me mad.

moriturius 6y ago
They are not solving your problem. They are solving theirs. This is an experimental project so there is nothing to be angry about. Time will tell if this was a good idea or not.
_-___________-_ 6y ago
Where is the high quality machine translation? I spend most of my time in countries where I don't speak the same language as the majority of people and text that I encounter, so I am using machine translation many times per day. My experience of the average quality of machine translation is extremely low. It garbles meaning a majority of the time, and in a significant minority of cases destroys meaning completely. To me the idea that you could translate an encyclopedia, where accuracy of meaning is critical, using such technology in its current state is horrifying. By contrast the abstract/semantic approach seems to have some potential, although I can't imagine it working well for all articles.
yellowapple 6y ago
> People who are domain experts in various fields don't know how, don't care to, and shouldn't code. My impression (correct me if I'm wrong, though) is that this is less "domain experts writing code" and more "editors can export a Wikidata 'subject' to a prebuilt translated page that domain experts can later expand". The aim of Wikidata is to collect information in a language-agnostic way, whereas the aim of Abstract Wikipedia seems to be to take that information and turn it into autogenerated pages in whatever language (even if that page is more-or-less a stub).

by zelly 6y ago

moriturius 6y ago

They are not solving your problem. They are solving theirs. This is an experimental project so there is nothing to be angry about. Time will tell if this was a good idea or not.

_-___________-_ 6y ago

Where is the high quality machine translation? I spend most of my time in countries where I don't speak the same language as the majority of people and text that I encounter, so I am using machine translation many times per day. My experience of the average quality of machine translation is extremely low. It garbles meaning a majority of the time, and in a significant minority of cases destroys meaning completely. To me the idea that you could translate an encyclopedia, where accuracy of meaning is critical, using such technology in its current state is horrifying. By contrast the abstract/semantic approach seems to have some potential, although I can't imagine it working well for all articles.

yellowapple 6y ago

> People who are domain experts in various fields don't know how, don't care to, and shouldn't code. My impression (correct me if I'm wrong, though) is that this is less "domain experts writing code" and more "editors can export a Wikidata 'subject' to a prebuilt translated page that domain experts can later expand". The aim of Wikidata is to collect information in a language-agnostic way, whereas the aim of Abstract Wikipedia seems to be to take that information and turn it into autogenerated pages in whatever language (even if that page is more-or-less a stub).