Proprietary algorithms aren't what make their system better - it's that they have a larger corpus. Google has published a trillion token dataset for machine translation researchers but it's presumably just a subset of what they now have. The data that makes their system so good is already available public but it is not (yet) within the scope of the WMF to harvest all copyrighted information in order to increase the performance of already published machine translation algorithms.
It would cost the WMF dearly in resources to build such a system themselves based on published research. In other words, as long as the output of the black box is CC-BY-SA the other factors aren't very important. In my mind if you consider using a corporation's semi-proprietary translation engine to be a violation of the WMF's principles then accepting visitors that come from Google in the first place would be an analogous violation. We have no idea how the search engine that is the single largest source of visitors to Wikipedia works, and yet we accept them graciously. On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 1:45 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hoi, > Currently the translation engine by Goole works for some twenty languages. > We have Wikipedias in over 250 languages and we localise in over 300. If we > are to collaborate with Google on this, we should partner in the building > of > translation engines for our other languages. We could and we should > consider > this when the software was to be open source. > Thanks, > GerardM > > 2009/5/31 Foxy Loxy <foxyloxy.wikime...@gmail.com> > > > I would guess a partership with Google would be a good idea because: > > 1) They are the best (according to Brian) and > > 2) If we were to go through with this proposal we'd want the translation > > technology now, not in X years when the technology catches up with > > google, if at all. > > > > And with many OSS/free projects, the X could be insanely high. > > > > On Sunday, 31 May 2009 2:50 pm, Fajro wrote: > > > And why partner with Google? There are Free alternatives in > > > development: > > > > > > http://www.apertium.org/ > > > > > > http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page > > > > > > -- > > > △ ℱajro △ > > > > -- > > fl > > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user_talk:fl> > > _______________________________________________ > > foundation-l mailing list > > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
