h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And the profanity filter (although I think we should still have some guidelines on that).


>> a manhole cover in her front lawn??????

How come they ended up sounding so similar?

I'm with KB on that one.

Also as far as language goes, a little more freedom in slipping in the odd foreign phrase would be helpful, even if we remained mostly English.

Although Taff was talking about keeping the bbc guidelines until we get up and running. It's probably a good idea.

arse, in welsh is descriptive, twll dyn, hole of a man

manhole is an english word and a direct translation is dyn-man, twll-hole

well you see

When there were other languages on h2g2 I always felt like I was missing out because I couldn't join in, but that's not to say I would say we shouldn't have other languages.

I'm not sure how to easily explain it, but I wouldn't like to be reading an Edited Entry, follow a link to another entry and find out it's in another language that I can't read, so would there be an 'English version', German version, French version etc, or may an area at the bottom of entries for related links in other languages (which would probably be my preference but not sure how other people think about that).

Personal Spaces, journals etc should be in whatever language the Researcher wants! Threads as well! Although busy places like Ask h2g2 I'd like to see an icon on the title that gives us a clue what language a thread is in, and the ability to sort it - although obviously such a big forum that might now work now I think about it...

Might *not* work...

Peer Review would need a lot of work to get back to being busy enough to supporta variety of languages, and we'd need a lot of volunteers for the Editing/Scouting process.

From time to time I've worked in multinational companies' offices which use English at a corporate level, but local languages on the various sites. Being in IT support, I'd get a mixture of e-mailed requests in either English, if the user felt they were strong enough in it, or a local language if they didn't. I'd have to survive on my pidgin French(or whatever) or use Google Translate. Fortunately, most requests were standard fare like "J'ai oublié mon mot de passe".

The point is, we can work multilingually to communicate on a simple level, but I can't see collaboration in terms of the h2g2 written product, which has to remain high quality.

Yes. If someone was able to do the editing of an entry, it would still leave the issue of PR.

I'm keen to hear what Mal and others who have more than one language have to say on this.

If I may quote Brecht quoting Napoleon in the Dreigroschenroman, "on s'engage et puis on voit".

I'd say, let's just allow foreignese and see where it leads us. It will always be time to adjust the house rules if the needs arise. There could be a rule of Edited Entries needing at least an English version (for peer review convenience), but the current language rules are just too tight, in my view. Heck, I even got my nickname modded once because it was "mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale"

How would you assess the risk of the site owners being sued for defamatory or other illegal posts?

First a little disclaimer: I am totally unfamiliar with that, so please excuse me if what I write is rose-tinted wishful thinking

If someone complains about a posting being defamatory, would there not be still time to pull the post, and afterwards either examine its legality if practicable, or keeping it pulled if not?

Or could it happen that the site's owner (or whoever is responsible) would be dragged to court or fined or something without a chance to amend the offending material first?

I wonder if Google translate may be enough to look at posts purely for that purpose, I will see how other sites do it, we've met quite a few message board owners over the last few months.

I guess Google Translate would be enough to weed out the most ridiculous claims (for example, someone complaining about the "Lufkissenfahrzeug" quote).

>>
Or could it happen that the site's owner (or whoever is responsible) would be dragged to court or fined or something without a chance to amend the offending material first?
<<

Yes. Although unlikely, it's still something to consider. Everything on this website is published. You can't publish defamatory statements and think you'll never be sued. This is why the bbc employs lawyers. Also they're big and well known so more likely to be sued.

Google translate might work. It will come down to how many non-English posts there are relative to moderator numbers I guess.

This post has been removed.

It's funny you should say about updating the code base to work with over character sets... I've been doing that very thing last week for another site written in Zend.

Ooohkay, technical limitations of auto-translation...

Not actually that much these days. Especially the Google Translate service. You're able (well you were last year when I last used it) to send it a chunk of text and have it returned in english. And it's pretty good english too now that it takes phrases into account, not just the individual words.

There's nothing really to say that when a researcher posts to a forum the code sends it over to GT to do an auto-detect and translate, sending back the english version if it wasn't already in english as well as letting us know what language it was in. This then would get stored in the database alongside the original. And the moderation could be done on that.

That would also mean that a researcher could put something in their settings that says "Only show English posts" which would mean that when they go to a forum the posts that get shown are the auto-translated posts, with an icon type thing to say which language it was originally posted in, and the option to show the original.

Downside to this, you become reliant on third party software. If GT goes down, or they decide to pull the service, well, you're left with a great big hole in your site.

Damn! The post that's hidden was me saying, more or less, this:

Would it work to have researchers who speak more than one language to volunteer to be on stand-by to help the mods? So - Taff - would you be willing to check over a post in Welsh that looked a bit dodgy once it had gone through Google Translate and either say "nah, it's fine" or "a boyo after my own heart, you're going to have to pull that one"?

I'd certainly trust any current researcher to sanity-check a post in their own language on behalf of the site.

Ben