Setswana Wikipedia Challenge kicks off

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The first article has been submitted in Google’s challenge to translate articles for the Setswana Wikipedia:
http://tn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nko (“Nose”)
Around 130 participants have been trained to attend the competition in Botswana. The grand prize, sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, is an all-expenses paid trip to attend Wikimania 2012 in Washington D.C.!
Asaf Bartov, Head of Global South Relationships


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Why do we keep encouraging this while we have had overwhelmingly negative experiences with google and its toolkit? 1) Tamil http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_translation_project_-_Tamil_Wikipedia.pdf http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/A_Review_of_Google_Translation_project_in_Tamil_Wikipedia:_Role_of_voluntarism,_free_and_organically_evolved_community_in_ensuring_quality_of_Wikipedia 2) Kannada http://hpnadig.net/blog/2011/10/22/how-google-irreparably-wounded-kannada-wikipedia/755 3) Swahili http://muddybtz.blog.com/2010/07/16/what-happened-on-the-google-challenge-the-swahili-wikipedia/ 4)Bengali http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100714/jsp/frontpage/story_12681775.jsp Google is interested in only one thing – translation memory for their translate product. And we are letting them use Wikipedia as a test bed. Read what happened to Swahili wikipedia after such a “google challenge”. Have we learnt nothing from these experiences?. I pity the Setswana guys. They are going to get a boatload of junk articles dumped on them. Google will get its translation memory and good publicity… Read more »

I fail to understand why WMF should sponsor the prize for a competition which mandates the use of a tool(which other communities made noise about) to create article. It could be a general article contest over the period and the winner should be getting the prize irrespective of using of tool/not while the judging criteria can remain same.

@Bala, @Logicwiki — we have indeed had mostly negative experiences with content infusions from Google (of the machine and human kinds), when contributed to active editing communities. However, that is not the case in the Setswana Wikipedia Challenge: the Setswana Wikipedia is entirely inactive, and never has been active (and is not even completely interface-localized), so the output of this competition would not interfere with the Setswana editing community, because there isn’t one. One very good thing that came out of the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge (which, admittedly, was not very successful in contributing quality content to the Kiswahili Wikipedia) was… Read more »

is thare anything left to attend to as per the competition is concerned

MOAGI SAM: you can sign up here: http://www.google.com/events/setswana-wiki/

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