Analysis of discussion contributions in translated Wikipedia articles

Abstract

Translation of articles in Wikipedia is one of the most prominent methods for increasing the quality of different language Wikipedias. Discussion pages in Wikipedia contribute to a large portion of the online encyclopedia, and are used by Wikipedia contributors for communication and collaboration. Although the discussion pages are the main channel between Wikipedia contributors all over the world, there have been relatively few in-depth studies conducted on communication in Wikipedia, especially regarding translation activities. This paper reports the results of an analysis of discussions about translated articles in the Finnish, French and Japanese Wikipedias. The results highlight the main problems in Wikipedia translation requiring interaction with the community. Unlike in previous work, community interaction in Wikipedia translation activities focuses on solving problems in the translation of proper nouns, transliteration and citing sources in articles rather than mechanical translation of words and sentences. Based on these findings we propose directions for designing supporting tools for Wikipedia translators.

Using WikiProjects to Measure the Health of Wikipedia

“…Wikipedia studies are varied, from examining the structure articles and contributors [13], to the motivations, participation and demographics of contributors, to editing conflicts and disputes [7], to barriers to adoption [6]. Efforts have been made to understand the collaborative process of article creation [8], and devising methods to measure the quality of an article [1].…”

Examining Wikipedia across linguistic and temporal borders

“…Increasingly, there is a growing area of interest with regards to the multi-lingual support that Wikipedia offers [23] [24] [25] [16]. Within this area, research offers insights to understand the communities involved with the translation process of articles, identifying barriers to adoption, and the social processes of an articles lifecycle [16].…”

“…Within this area, research offers insights to understand the communities involved with the translation process of articles, identifying barriers to adoption, and the social processes of an articles lifecycle [16]. Research has also examined the effects of culture within the collaborative environment, identifying how Wikipedia is far from culturally neutral, which directly influence the collaborative efforts in article creation [15], and how external factors such as political, regional, or linguistic differences affect the policy and governance of Wikipedia in different countries [26].…”

Tracking Inconsistencies in Parallel Multilingual Documents

“…With the expertise needed for making the changes in the conceptual model for propagating changes consistently in multilingual authoring tools such as DRAFTER, PILLS [2][6] we focus on simplified task of making changes to contents directly with necessary support in tracking changes in different languages. The use of languages resources such as Language Grid already useful in multi-language discussion platform for translation activities [9][10] can also be used in such authoring activities. Some of the constraints in translation practices for content reuse is explored in LizzyWiki and WikiBABEL which provides insight into the usefulness of tool support in tracking inconsistencies in community collaboration [1] [7].…”