Tech:Autotranslation of seed content

From Wikitravel Shared

Moved from en:Wikitravel:Feature requests by Evan

There has been talk about this in the past, but I'd like to try and move forward with this feature again as we've got a great crop of new language versions.

When we first launched Wikitravel in English one of the things we did was to 'seed' the site with content from the CIA World Factbook. This gave people something to work with besides blank pages and created the beginnings of the site hierarchy. This is something that didn't happen when we started having other language versions: they all had to start from scratch, with zero articles.

What I've been working on is a script that takes a translation list of place names (ie Geneva|Genf Lisbon|Lisboa) and headers then uses Babelfish to translated the content, sticks the original English into comments for reference, slaps disclaimer on the top and adds the new article to the target page. Note this only happens where an article doesn't currently exist. I want to emphasise that no one thinks that these pages will work as-is any more than the Factbook pages did, but I think that, even with all the editing needed, this can help give other language versions a good push forward.

There is already some talk about this going on on the Italian version]. I'm hoping to get some examples up in a Sandbox or on the talk pages today or tomorrow. If there's a lot of discussion about this I can move it off to its own talk page. Majnoona 10:57, 28 June 2006 (EDT)

First decent example up at en:User:Maj/Sandbox/Milford Sound... still some clean-up to do of course... comments / suggestions welcome! Majnoona 16:22, 3 July 2006 (EDT)

Just to make my defacto support offical - I support this idea. Great way to get other language versions up and walking or a great way to get En articles that lack compared to other language versions in shape (I.e. en:Mobile and en::de:Mobile). -- Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 16:47, 3 July 2006 (EDT)