Wikimedia’s mission is to be ‘the sum of all human knowledge’. That
Wikipedia has amassed over 43 million articles in over 295 languages in
its short existence is quite incredible and a testament to the
dedication of its community of volunteers. Yet the distribution of
articles in these different language Wikipedias is nowhere near evenly
spread.
Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool offers an impactful means of
sharing open knowledge globally between languages as it brings up an
article on one side of the screen in one language and helps translate
it, paragraph by paragraph, to create the article in a different
language taking all the formatting across to the new article so a native
speaker just has to check to make sure the translation is as good as it
can be.
This presentation from Thursday 6th April 2017 at the Open Educational Resources Conference in London by the University of Edinburgh's Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, outlines the successful models already employed
in a Higher Education context where one editor was able to translate
five articles on notable Women in STEM onto Portuguese Wikipedia in one
afternoon and where thirty Translation Studies MSc students were able to
complete the translation of Wikipedia articles of 4000 words into
different language Wikipedias. In this way, sharing open knowledge
between languages and improving areas of under-representation.
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