I am not sure how this would be implemented except by machine translation (probably from English). There are all sorts of problems with this—and since machine t

I am not sure how this would be implemented except by machine translation (probably from English). There are all sorts of problems with this—and since machine translation is already possible, switching to an English and translated Wiki would only really be justifiable if the disadvantages were very few. 1. Machine translation is highly uneven. The official status of certain languages means we have a large corpus of material from international organisations and multilingual governments. But there are still lots of languages where the corpus is much smaller—even if there are lots of users who contribute (e.g., Vietnamese.) The quality of these Wikipedias would decline substantially. 2. A few Wikipedia articles are a joy to read—they are idiomatic, easy to understand, and well-written. Machine translation simply cannot do this properly. This would be lost in every language but English. 3. What you want in an article probably differs by language. Frames of reference differ: one can probably expect e.g. certain pop culture analogies not to require explanation (or perhaps just a link) in some languages but to require fuller explanation in others. 4. The use of non-English sources would require much more work. At the moment, a French-language source may appear on French Wikipedia without any translation work. Now, it will only appear if a bilingual editor happens to find it and can be bothered to translate it. The pattern of course is general, and would be most undesirable. 5. There exist many perfectly good Wikipedia editors who do not know how to write in English, or would lack the confidence to do so. Are we to lose all their contributions? If not, we’d require legions of bilingual editors to verify machine translations from non-English languages. Experience suggests that there do not exist many such editors.