Analysis of Discussion Contributions in Translated Wikipedia Articles

摘要

Translation of articles in Wikipedia is one of the most prominent methods for increasing the quality of different language Wikipedias. Discussion pages in Wikipedia contribute to a large portion of the online encyclopedia, and are used by Wikipedia contributors for communication and collaboration. Although the discussion pages are the main channel between Wikipedia contributors all over the world, there have been relatively few in-depth studies conducted on communication in Wikipedia, especially regarding translation activities. This paper reports the results of an analysis of discussions about translated articles in the Finnish, French and Japanese Wikipedias. The results highlight the main problems in Wikipedia translation requiring interaction with the community. Unlike in previous work, community interaction in Wikipedia translation activities focuses on solving problems in the translation of proper nouns, transliteration and citing sources in articles rather than mechanical translation of words and sentences. Based on these findings we propose directions for designing supporting tools for Wikipedia translators.