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.
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/
[2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... Pages 16-18
Well, it actually not that simple :)
Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff[1] is carbon fiber reinforced polymer[2]. But it seems like carbon fiber is also used as a short hand for carbon fiber reinforced polymer. Similarly, Germans often call Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff just Karbon.
But the translation of the technical term carbon fiber[3] is just Kohlenstofffaser[4] (which is quite a literal translation).
But indeed, it is really nice how transparent that is when looking that the wikipedia articles.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlenstofffaserverst%C3%A4rkt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fiber_reinforced_polyme... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fibers [4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlenstofffaser
In practice, this need is usually satisfied by the Talk pages and archives. The published article is sanitized, but if you really want to learn about the controversies in the topic, your best choice is to dig deep in the discussions that resulted in the controversy being excised from the visible version. It's quite rare that the talk pages are also purged as well.
I’ve heard it being called just “Carbon”, pronounced with a long “o”, frequently. Since the translation for the generic element, carbon, is “Kohlenstoff”, and that word is very commonly used, the opportunities for confusion between carbon and carbon fiber is less than it might seem.
The GP (G-G-G...P?) post seemed to be using the shorter expression, but as a shorthand for the longer (as most people do) in English but not in German, which may have caused some confusion.
But it's the same in both (all) languages: The shorter expression technically means just the reinforcing fibers; the actual material used to make stuff is technically called the longer expression; but in ordinary usage most people use the shorter expression to mean the longer one.
Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff == Kohlen (literally coal but understood more broadly as any carbon) stoff (material) faser (thread) verstärkter (reinforced) Kunststoff (plastic).
> Since 2002, Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia's accuracy. ... [In 2007], Sanger again criticized Wikipedia, stating it was "broken beyond repair" and had a range of problems "from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals".
Another bit of anecdotal evidence on translation: I recently wanted to find the idiomatic French for "electronics packaging." Google Translate gets it wrong, and there's no French wiki page to refer to. The source that came up with the goods was the "translations in context" snippets here: https://www.linguee.com/english-french/translation/electroni...
Deepl, from the same company, is much better and is currently the best online translator.
Or tell them on your gardening website to fill a chaudière to water their garden.
I'd hope that a person with Sanger's experience and insight would at least float suggestions, proposals, wish list, or any thing at all, to achieve something he'd consider more neutral, objective, or something.
everipedia.org I guess does some stuff differently. But if it has a different take on neutrality, it's not jumping out at me.
Sanger has some role with Ballotpedia? Maybe his vision for neutrality is there?
Just sitting here, I can imagine at least three different crazy experiments to play with neutrality. And I know nothing.
Also:
I was willing to at least consider anything Sanger had to offer, given his CV. But generally I fast fail (flip the bozo bit, summarily dismiss, shove into the memory hole) any media critic leading with "liberal bias".
I think he just has muddled reasoning. For example, his essay says something about Jesus, the Christ label, how the wiki is wrong... Or something. I was raised Christian, so I'm moderately inclined towards biblical navel gazing. But if Sanger had a point, it's lost on me. I'm just more confused after trying to parse his thesis.
Further:
I'll read any proposals for mitigating social media. I honestly can't even criticize whatever this is:
How to Fix Social Media in Three Easy Steps [2020/09/20]
https://larrysanger.org/2020/09/how-to-fix-social-media-in-t...
Non sequitur?
Especially when one of the main criticisms is "It's biased to say a false statement is false".
Sanger's fundamental misunderstanding is that a neutral point of view doesn't mean that the thing you're writing about is also going to be neutral.
It just now occurs to me that you're probably referring to the epistemological crisis. I don't actually know what that means, but please humor me.
Sanger teaches philosophy. To him, maybe there is no truth? Or that all truths are equal? Or something like that.
More than a handful of the geeks I've worked with were afflicted by the recursive discursive thing. Most bad was the philosopher software architect. Actually repeatedly debated metametadata, the data about metadata. I wanted to kill myself.
Tying this back to current events: It might be useful to have some canary questions, to determine the epistemological bent of the other participants. It's pointless to argue about facts if the other party doesn't believe in facts.
Some of the political ones show what is more easily described as bias, but his points about Global Warming or the MMR vaccine show exactly why "NPOV" for any extent is a bad idea, and why the new policy of "avoiding false balance" actually makes a lot of sense.
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.
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/2...
(in case it's relevant, I'm half Croat, and have a massive dislike against NDH supporters and any other fascist/fascist apologets)
So much so that I've made a dedicated tool for this: 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.
See the tips at 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 [email protected] and we might be able to help further. And welcome to the state change of HN-commenting!
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.
So "electronics packaging" would translate to "emballage/empaquetage de composants électroniques".
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
"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
"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?
Sounds like they're going to repeat that mistake again.
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.
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.
Exactly.
That's a great idea, I'm gonna do exactly that tonight. Thank you very much!
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.