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> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) The left sidebar has two killer features for me: 1. Finding canonical trans

> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does) The left sidebar has two killer features for me: 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. You need to know what the standard way to translate "hardware acceleration" or "differentiable manifold" is in French? Go to the wikipedia page and hover over the language switcher link in the left sidebar. Done. This has become one of my indispensable tools. 2. Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives. For example, want to know about the Islamic Golden Age? The English, French, and Farsi versions have significantly different content from different perspectives (I would assume the Spanish and Arabic ones are also equally interesting). I highly recommend this exercise especially for history that one is taught in school, e.g. if you're American and can read Spanish, I bet the Spanish entry on Mexican-American War will teach you a few things you had never heard of.

tasogare 6y ago
You summarize it very well. Those are the two big usage I have from that bar. In fact I switch so often between languages I wish they were displayed upper in the bar (btw I don’t like switch language on mobile), and personalized with my 4 most used languages on top. Sometimes a language I want to read is hidden and it’s super annoying to get it.
dheera 6y ago
> 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. OMG yes I do this as well. Google translate is unreliable for technical terms, regional vegetables/fruits, cultural concepts, and lots of other things. EDIT: Wikipedia is also good at differentiating regional variants of a language, e.g. the country of Laos is 老撾 in Beijing Mandarin and 寮國 in Taiwanese Mandarin and Wikipedia knows this. Likewise, a USB drive is almost universally called "U盤" in Mainland China but this word is virtually unknown outside Mainland China. It's actually a good way for native speakers to look up one-off words like this when writing documents intended to be read by another region because you really just need to replace a few nouns here and there.
ttsda 6y ago
The direct link to the commons page is also useful for finding pictures related to a topic.
nbadg 6y ago
I personally had no idea this existed, even though I would (and now will) use it avidly. So that's probably an indication that the UX needs to change to improve discoverability!
blewboarwastake 6y ago
I second using Wikipedia for translating, most of the time is better than using a translator or using a dictionary and sometimes is the only option for more technical or specific terms. I don't use it for comparing between languages much because I'm bilingual and my native tongue Wikipedia is not that big, but sometimes is really interesting to see the different perspectives.
- waldofrank 6y ago
  Regarding the comments about the importance of language links in the sidebar: if you look here you can see that the language links will be moved to a button/menu in the article header — https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements/Language_Switching_User_Tests https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme... The conclusions of the user testing show that people have a much easier time finding them in the new location.
  - dirktheman 6y ago
    Their test group for this feature consists of 8 to 9 people, with 5 in a control group. You'd think that for one of the most visited sites in the world, they'd have larger test groups?
    - DHPersonal 6y ago
      Testing large amounts of people doesn’t always produce better results. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...
  - account42 6y ago
    Will the new menu require JS to access?
  - seszett 6y ago
    I just hope you can still simply hover your mouse over the languages links to see the translation without having to click and go to the foreign language article.
thoughtleader31 6y ago
I look at the different language wikis all the time for that reason (and because I'm a native Spanish speaker who prefers the English Wikipedia), but it's just routine to scroll to the language selection list completely ignoring the controls of the left pane, that I may have used twice in the last 10 years merely out of curiosity.
Eiriksmal 6y ago
I also find your first point to be a truly indispensable tool. How else do you know what they call carbon fiber in German? [0] But the second is a touchy area. In fact, Wikipedia's co-founder recently wrote a blog post detailing how its neutral point-of-view policy has flopped, in the name of fighting false balance. [1] His examples are pretty embarrassing, but more important in that Google points human "Search Quality Raters" to Wikipedia to understand "reputation" and maintain a supposedly even political bias. [2] [0] Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff, of course. [1] https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ [2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... Pages 16-18
- bosswipe 6y ago
  I don't understand Larry Sanger's complaint about NPOV. If a neutral encyclopedia was required to list all minority points of view on every topic then nothing would be knowable. It wouldn't be able to say that the earth is round. If saying that the earth is round is biased then neutrality is worthless and not worth pursuing.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    In even simpler terms, the use of editorial judgment is required to write an encyclopedia. Always has been, always will be. A website free of editorial judgment looks like 8chan, not an encyclopedia.
    - grawprog 6y ago
      Even 8chan had some level of editorial judgement, however small it was. It was there.
      - Talanes 6y ago
        The Admin has been very active in preserving QAnon's presence on the board. Potentially to the point of hijacking the QAnon tripcodes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Identity_of_%22Q%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Identity_of_%22Q%22
eepp 6y ago
For English-French translation in Québec, have a look at http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/index.aspx http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/index.aspx
- giddhhgcfygfg 6y ago
  Just out of interest, I tried "electronics packaging" (which other sources seem to indicate is called either "habillage" or "packaging" in French). I got this http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=18935538 http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=1893553... result which says "electronics packaging designer" translates to "concepteur d'assemblage électronique." So now I'm not sure what to think. The suggested translation doesn't include the word "habillage" which I previously thought was the term I needed.
  - xf00 6y ago
    "Habillage" (literally "dressing") in this context relates to packaging of a concept/proposition i.e. the marketing around it (or "spin"). The french word for "packaging" in the physical sense would be "emballage" (literally "wrapping"). Some would use "empaquetage" but that is less common. So "electronics packaging" would translate to "emballage/empaquetage de composants électroniques".
    - sefsdfsdfdsf 6y ago
      Are you sure about this? I know linguee.fr has been criticised, but check out these two analogous pages found via a search for "electronics packaging" there: https://schroff.nvent.com/en/schroff/about-us https://schroff.nvent.com/en/schroff/about-us "The brand Schroff, which belongs to the business unit of nVent Technical Solutions, has been a world leader in electronics packaging for over five decades." https://schroff.nvent.com/fr/schroff/about-us https://schroff.nvent.com/fr/schroff/about-us "La marque Schroff, qui appartient à l’entité légale nVent, est leader mondial dans le domaine de l’habillage électronique depuis plus de cinquante ans." This makes it look extremely like habillage doesn't just mean what you claim it does "in this context." Emballage was indeed my initial guess for the appropriate French word, but I, you know, did some research before jumping to a conclusion?
mschuster91 6y ago
> 2. Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives. Interesting anecdote: Linguistically, Serbian and Croatian are almost identical, except for the obvious thing that Serbs write in Cyrillic alphabet, while Croatians use the Latin alphabet. Politically however? Holy what a can of worms. "Inevitably biased" is putting it mildly, outright history revisionism puts it better, and it has been twice a subject of widespread outrage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2019-08-30/Opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... (in case it's relevant, I'm half Croat, and have a massive dislike against NDH supporters and any other fascist/fascist apologets)
jeromegv 6y ago
I've never realized how often I do both scenarios but now that you said it, that's exactly right, it is very useful. Being multi-lingual myself, the benefit of the switching language is not just for bias but also because some topics are just more expanded in other languages. I keep Google in English so obviously English wikipedia articles are the ones showing up, but let's say I look at some francophone music artist, i'm more likely to get a longer wikipedia page once I switch to French.
pueblito 6y ago
> if you're American and can read Spanish, I bet the Spanish entry on Mexican-American War will teach you a few things you had never heard of. That's a great idea, I'm gonna do exactly that tonight. Thank you very much!
ogurechny 6y ago
I guess monolingual people simply don't understand some things. That there is so much information not represented in English Wikipedia, or, say, that some foreign person with a stub article is many times more valuable, interesting, relevant than other foreign person with a decent article (when it is clear from the content in another language). Or that “information on the internet” doesn't simply appear out of nowhere, that people work on it, and the process is far from being optimal or comprehensive (never was, and never will be, sadly). The difference of perspectives is also quite enlightening. I'm not talking about obvious transitory trifles like Obama vs Trump vs Clinton — it is pathetic that a free encyclopedia, of all things, wastes so much time on those, — or who's at war with whom for which reasons. I mean deeper differences in the world view. So there's some “highly controversial” (whatever this means) topic, and there is a completely regular article on it in other language, no signs of editing wars or flame wars, doesn't seem all that important altogether. You obviously start to meditate on why it couldn't be written the same way in the first language. Just like many pop-science fans believe that the cardboard presented to them is a “real science” and the only true world view, most people talking about “approaching neutrality” assume that basically everything can be analyzed from the same common base, and, of course, their own beliefs are that common base. This, obviously, is not a good way to understand anything that belongs to a different culture.
glandium 6y ago
I do 1. quite often, but I've also noticed that sometimes, the list of languages the term is available in varies between languages, which makes no sense to me.
simula67 6y ago
> Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives Not just historical events. For example, Vladimir Putin's Russian page looks very different from the English page. If I suspect bias, one quick check I always do is to read the page from another language using Google Translate. Does not always work, but sometimes you get more information.
tambourine_man 6y ago
> Finding canonical translations for technical terms Exactly.
guerrilla 6y ago
In addition to these, I also use the sidebar's random button when learning a new language. Instead of committing to reading a book or reading the news its nice to just flip through random articles and trying to power through them, sometimes with the aide of wiktionary.
nullc 6y ago
Years ago Wikimedia external-to-community "UX" staff previously forcefully hid the inter-language links against substantial community outcry. The result caused a devastating loss of traffic to other languages and, ultimately, a quiet reversal. Sounds like they're going to repeat that mistake again.
jdranczewski 6y ago
I have been reading HN for a while and never commented, but the translation thing is very close to my heart, what with learning Physics both in Polish and English at different stages of my life. So much so that I've made a dedicated tool for this: https://wikitranslator.github.io/ https://wikitranslator.github.io/ It uses Wikipedia's APIs to "click the language links" for you. It also displays short summaries of both languages' articles, so the translation can be verified. I know I'm a small sample, but I end up using it reasonably often.
- dang 6y ago
  You should make a Show HN out of that! Just wait a while (perhaps a couple weeks) for the hivemind caches to clear. See the tips at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638, especially the one about adding a comment explaining how you came to work on this and what's different about it. If you do submit it, email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we might be able to help further. And welcome to the state change of HN-commenting!
  - jdranczewski 6y ago
    Thank you very much for the tips!
berkes 6y ago
> 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. I use this so often, that I've thought to turn this into a full-blown tool on several occassions. A simple "translate" webapp that opens wikipedia (API) in the background, looks for the inserted term and then returns the translated articles (with links to the article!) for that term.
murrayhenson 6y ago
My wife (native Polish speaker) and I (native English speaker) both use Wikipedia's left-hand list of articles in other languages to get quick translations of the title/subject of a given article.
Timpy 6y ago
I came here to say the language part. Sometimes no dictionary will translate the thing that you want, you have to use Wikipedia to translate it. It's also great for language study, hopping back and forth between your target language to see how similar ideas are expressed differently.

tasogare 6y ago

You summarize it very well. Those are the two big usage I have from that bar. In fact I switch so often between languages I wish they were displayed upper in the bar (btw I don’t like switch language on mobile), and personalized with my 4 most used languages on top. Sometimes a language I want to read is hidden and it’s super annoying to get it.

dheera 6y ago

> 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. OMG yes I do this as well. Google translate is unreliable for technical terms, regional vegetables/fruits, cultural concepts, and lots of other things. EDIT: Wikipedia is also good at differentiating regional variants of a language, e.g. the country of Laos is 老撾 in Beijing Mandarin and 寮國 in Taiwanese Mandarin and Wikipedia knows this. Likewise, a USB drive is almost universally called "U盤" in Mainland China but this word is virtually unknown outside Mainland China. It's actually a good way for native speakers to look up one-off words like this when writing documents intended to be read by another region because you really just need to replace a few nouns here and there.

ttsda 6y ago

The direct link to the commons page is also useful for finding pictures related to a topic.

nbadg 6y ago

I personally had no idea this existed, even though I would (and now will) use it avidly. So that's probably an indication that the UX needs to change to improve discoverability!

blewboarwastake 6y ago

I second using Wikipedia for translating, most of the time is better than using a translator or using a dictionary and sometimes is the only option for more technical or specific terms. I don't use it for comparing between languages much because I'm bilingual and my native tongue Wikipedia is not that big, but sometimes is really interesting to see the different perspectives.

waldofrank 6y ago
Regarding the comments about the importance of language links in the sidebar: if you look here you can see that the language links will be moved to a button/menu in the article header — https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements/Language_Switching_User_Tests https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme... The conclusions of the user testing show that people have a much easier time finding them in the new location.
- dirktheman 6y ago
  Their test group for this feature consists of 8 to 9 people, with 5 in a control group. You'd think that for one of the most visited sites in the world, they'd have larger test groups?
  - DHPersonal 6y ago
    Testing large amounts of people doesn’t always produce better results. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...
- account42 6y ago
  Will the new menu require JS to access?
- seszett 6y ago
  I just hope you can still simply hover your mouse over the languages links to see the translation without having to click and go to the foreign language article.

thoughtleader31 6y ago

I look at the different language wikis all the time for that reason (and because I'm a native Spanish speaker who prefers the English Wikipedia), but it's just routine to scroll to the language selection list completely ignoring the controls of the left pane, that I may have used twice in the last 10 years merely out of curiosity.

Eiriksmal 6y ago

I also find your first point to be a truly indispensable tool. How else do you know what they call carbon fiber in German? [0] But the second is a touchy area. In fact, Wikipedia's co-founder recently wrote a blog post detailing how its neutral point-of-view policy has flopped, in the name of fighting false balance. [1] His examples are pretty embarrassing, but more important in that Google points human "Search Quality Raters" to Wikipedia to understand "reputation" and maintain a supposedly even political bias. [2] [0] Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff, of course. [1] https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ [2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... Pages 16-18

bosswipe 6y ago
I don't understand Larry Sanger's complaint about NPOV. If a neutral encyclopedia was required to list all minority points of view on every topic then nothing would be knowable. It wouldn't be able to say that the earth is round. If saying that the earth is round is biased then neutrality is worthless and not worth pursuing.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  In even simpler terms, the use of editorial judgment is required to write an encyclopedia. Always has been, always will be. A website free of editorial judgment looks like 8chan, not an encyclopedia.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Even 8chan had some level of editorial judgement, however small it was. It was there.
    - Talanes 6y ago
      The Admin has been very active in preserving QAnon's presence on the board. Potentially to the point of hijacking the QAnon tripcodes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Identity_of_%22Q%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Identity_of_%22Q%22

eepp 6y ago

For English-French translation in Québec, have a look at http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/index.aspx http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/index.aspx

giddhhgcfygfg 6y ago
Just out of interest, I tried "electronics packaging" (which other sources seem to indicate is called either "habillage" or "packaging" in French). I got this http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=18935538 http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=1893553... result which says "electronics packaging designer" translates to "concepteur d'assemblage électronique." So now I'm not sure what to think. The suggested translation doesn't include the word "habillage" which I previously thought was the term I needed.
- xf00 6y ago
  "Habillage" (literally "dressing") in this context relates to packaging of a concept/proposition i.e. the marketing around it (or "spin"). The french word for "packaging" in the physical sense would be "emballage" (literally "wrapping"). Some would use "empaquetage" but that is less common. So "electronics packaging" would translate to "emballage/empaquetage de composants électroniques".
  - sefsdfsdfdsf 6y ago
    Are you sure about this? I know linguee.fr has been criticised, but check out these two analogous pages found via a search for "electronics packaging" there: https://schroff.nvent.com/en/schroff/about-us https://schroff.nvent.com/en/schroff/about-us "The brand Schroff, which belongs to the business unit of nVent Technical Solutions, has been a world leader in electronics packaging for over five decades." https://schroff.nvent.com/fr/schroff/about-us https://schroff.nvent.com/fr/schroff/about-us "La marque Schroff, qui appartient à l’entité légale nVent, est leader mondial dans le domaine de l’habillage électronique depuis plus de cinquante ans." This makes it look extremely like habillage doesn't just mean what you claim it does "in this context." Emballage was indeed my initial guess for the appropriate French word, but I, you know, did some research before jumping to a conclusion?

mschuster91 6y ago

> 2. Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives. Interesting anecdote: Linguistically, Serbian and Croatian are almost identical, except for the obvious thing that Serbs write in Cyrillic alphabet, while Croatians use the Latin alphabet. Politically however? Holy what a can of worms. "Inevitably biased" is putting it mildly, outright history revisionism puts it better, and it has been twice a subject of widespread outrage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2019-08-30/Opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... (in case it's relevant, I'm half Croat, and have a massive dislike against NDH supporters and any other fascist/fascist apologets)

jeromegv 6y ago

I've never realized how often I do both scenarios but now that you said it, that's exactly right, it is very useful. Being multi-lingual myself, the benefit of the switching language is not just for bias but also because some topics are just more expanded in other languages. I keep Google in English so obviously English wikipedia articles are the ones showing up, but let's say I look at some francophone music artist, i'm more likely to get a longer wikipedia page once I switch to French.

pueblito 6y ago

> if you're American and can read Spanish, I bet the Spanish entry on Mexican-American War will teach you a few things you had never heard of. That's a great idea, I'm gonna do exactly that tonight. Thank you very much!

ogurechny 6y ago

I guess monolingual people simply don't understand some things. That there is so much information not represented in English Wikipedia, or, say, that some foreign person with a stub article is many times more valuable, interesting, relevant than other foreign person with a decent article (when it is clear from the content in another language). Or that “information on the internet” doesn't simply appear out of nowhere, that people work on it, and the process is far from being optimal or comprehensive (never was, and never will be, sadly). The difference of perspectives is also quite enlightening. I'm not talking about obvious transitory trifles like Obama vs Trump vs Clinton — it is pathetic that a free encyclopedia, of all things, wastes so much time on those, — or who's at war with whom for which reasons. I mean deeper differences in the world view. So there's some “highly controversial” (whatever this means) topic, and there is a completely regular article on it in other language, no signs of editing wars or flame wars, doesn't seem all that important altogether. You obviously start to meditate on why it couldn't be written the same way in the first language. Just like many pop-science fans believe that the cardboard presented to them is a “real science” and the only true world view, most people talking about “approaching neutrality” assume that basically everything can be analyzed from the same common base, and, of course, their own beliefs are that common base. This, obviously, is not a good way to understand anything that belongs to a different culture.

glandium 6y ago

I do 1. quite often, but I've also noticed that sometimes, the list of languages the term is available in varies between languages, which makes no sense to me.

simula67 6y ago

> Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives Not just historical events. For example, Vladimir Putin's Russian page looks very different from the English page. If I suspect bias, one quick check I always do is to read the page from another language using Google Translate. Does not always work, but sometimes you get more information.

tambourine_man 6y ago

> Finding canonical translations for technical terms Exactly.

guerrilla 6y ago

In addition to these, I also use the sidebar's random button when learning a new language. Instead of committing to reading a book or reading the news its nice to just flip through random articles and trying to power through them, sometimes with the aide of wiktionary.

nullc 6y ago

Years ago Wikimedia external-to-community "UX" staff previously forcefully hid the inter-language links against substantial community outcry. The result caused a devastating loss of traffic to other languages and, ultimately, a quiet reversal. Sounds like they're going to repeat that mistake again.

jdranczewski 6y ago

I have been reading HN for a while and never commented, but the translation thing is very close to my heart, what with learning Physics both in Polish and English at different stages of my life. So much so that I've made a dedicated tool for this: https://wikitranslator.github.io/ https://wikitranslator.github.io/ It uses Wikipedia's APIs to "click the language links" for you. It also displays short summaries of both languages' articles, so the translation can be verified. I know I'm a small sample, but I end up using it reasonably often.

dang 6y ago
You should make a Show HN out of that! Just wait a while (perhaps a couple weeks) for the hivemind caches to clear. See the tips at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638, especially the one about adding a comment explaining how you came to work on this and what's different about it. If you do submit it, email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we might be able to help further. And welcome to the state change of HN-commenting!
- jdranczewski 6y ago
  Thank you very much for the tips!

berkes 6y ago

> 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. I use this so often, that I've thought to turn this into a full-blown tool on several occassions. A simple "translate" webapp that opens wikipedia (API) in the background, looks for the inserted term and then returns the translated articles (with links to the article!) for that term.

murrayhenson 6y ago

My wife (native Polish speaker) and I (native English speaker) both use Wikipedia's left-hand list of articles in other languages to get quick translations of the title/subject of a given article.

Timpy 6y ago

I came here to say the language part. Sometimes no dictionary will translate the thing that you want, you have to use Wikipedia to translate it. It's also great for language study, hopping back and forth between your target language to see how similar ideas are expressed differently.