Discussion about Translation in Wikipedia

Abstract

Discussion pages in individual Wikipedia articles are a channel for communication and collaboration between Wikipedia contributors. Although discussion pages contribute to a large portion of the online encyclopedia, there have been relatively few in-depth studies conducted on the type of communication and collaboration in the multilingual Wikipedia, especially regarding translation activities. This paper reports the results on an analysis of discussion about translation in the Finnish, French and Japanese Wikipedias. The analysis results highlight the main problems in Wikipedia translation requiring interaction with the community. Unlike reported in previous works, community interaction in Wikipedia translation focuses on solving problems in source referencing, proper nouns and transliteration in articles, rather than mechanical translation of words and sentences. Based on these findings we propose future directions for supporting translation activities in Wikipedia.