I'm not against the idea of paid translation /per se/, but it shouldn't be managed by the WMF, should it be only to ensure that it doesn't cross too far the line of non-intervention regarding editorial decisions.

Debate can go on to which level it stands with this line, but to my mind WMF always have been mainly about hosting works, not about what will be published by who under which (non-)remunerated conditions. I think that it is important that it stay so for example due to legal reasons regarding responsibility of what is stated in this works.

From this perspective, it would be probably better to have locale collective initiatives which decide what seems the more important to be translated and means to achieve them, should it be through paid editing with money coming from the said collective itself. Directly financing that kind of initiative would blur the line of the hosting position I think. But giving visibility to this kind of locale fund raising initiatives could be a donation in kind that would be maybe less problematic, wouldn't it?


Le 24/02/2018 à 13:51, John Erling Blad a écrit :
This discussion is going to be fun! =D

A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.

What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
"List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
articles from the expanded list[2].

Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
good translation tools.

I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
have to be full translations of the source article.

A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
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