The problem denoted by the Swahili language Wikipedia is so scary… Too much of anything is not good!!

What happened on the Google Challenge @ the Swahili Wikipedia

A Review on Google Translation project in Tamil Wikipedia

I don’t know much about this tool, so please forgive me if my question is stupid: Most “big” Wikipedia language versions are quite strict in copyright issues, e.g. respecting the license and attributing authors properly. Large efforts, like transwikiimport or importupload are taken to ensure that translated articles contain the history of the original page. So my question is: how does author attribution work with the google toolkit? Are the authors of the original article properly attributed? Is the history imported?

Seeing that this is a medium/large software project, one would expect that license issues are considered as well. On the other hand, Wikipedia versions evolve as they grow, and usually they develop an understanding for copyright issues in late parts of the project – so “write articles first, care about copyright later” is a valid argument. Additionally, GFDL was much stricter than CC-BY-SA, so the strictness of policies (which sometimes require a copy of the page history) might not be needed anymore; I’m not sure about that.