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

Ooh, good point.

Does anyone remember Terri's Franglais thread?

To quote Korben Dallas, "Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English."

If using languages other than English is going to cause such a problem, I don't think new h2g2 is going to be somewhere I belong.

Ditto.

Repeating part of what I said in post 97:

> We have enough problems already. Let's get it working as close to what it is now as we reasonably can - and then build on it. <

There'll be time then, to think about it clearly - we seem to be a touch jumpy at present.

The way I would like to see it would be that each post is displayed in the original language. I can be directed to a place that will auto-translate it for me at the click of a button if I so wish.

If a post is flagged for moderation, we find a way of getting it translated properly, be that in-house or paid for if we have no expertise in that language, and we accordingly. Same as any other post.

Getting Entries into the Guide though... Hmm. It's more that we couldn't Peer Review effectively until we had a core of reviewers of every language, and we can't do that right now. I would rather that Entries are in English, but we offer the same on-request translation button for speakers of other languages that we offer in posts.

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If a post is flagged for moderation, we find a way of getting it translated properly, be that in-house or paid for if we have no expertise in that language, and we accordingly. Same as any other post.
<<

How would something be flagged for moderation? What say we had 3 or 4 new researchers here all speaking in Klingon. No-one else here understands Klingon. The newbies aren't that familiar with the HRs or legal issues and post a number of things that are potentially a legal problem for the site. How would we know? In English, it's much more likely that someone would pick up on the conversation, either a concerned researcher or a moderator.

>If using languages other than English is going to cause such a problem, I don't think new h2g2 is going to be somewhere I belong.,<

And I think if h2g2/noohootoo is going to be the kind of place that people can't come right out and voice concerns and anxieties about such a fundamental change, and having reasons for that, but bottle them up for fear of offending some people, it won't be somewhere I'll want to be.

It's bound to come out sooner or later and may well be far more destructive. The more people feel safe to express stuff now and then compromise, because they haven't felt constrained to shut the up, the healthier our long term future will be IMO.

It does seem like there are some concerns and I agree it's good there is space to air them.

I'd still like to see the advantages of making the site multilingual spelt out by people that would use that. I think this will take time, as people become aware of this discussion.

We don't have to reach a consensus at this time

h2g2's job is to react to posts that are flagged as breaking the rules. As soon as it's flagged it's hidden.

If nobody flags it, that's OK. Even if it's a libellous post, it doesn't matter because until it's flagged, it's not the website's responsibility. That sounds a little bit like I'm trying to shirk responsibility, but it's exactly the way that it operates now.

There are a lot of posts currently on h2g2 that break the House Rules; as an ACE I run into them a lot (especially advertising). Nobody reads them because they are on out-of-the-way non-Edited Entries. It doesn't mean that they aren't offensive/libellous/spitting. But until they are reported they will always remain up there.

If we are to remain as reactive moderation (what we have now) we can't prevent this happening.

I'm having a hard time putting my thought about this into words, sorry. It's coming across a lot like 'it's not our problem' but I actually believe that in a positive way.

If it turns out this is a legal problem, and we are responsible for every word ever posted here, then we're going to end up with pre-moderation. As I don't think this is the case (or the BBC would have implemented it), we can remain with a flagging system. Until it's flagged (by anyone, not just a logged in Researcher) it is not a legal problem for the site.

I hope at least some of that makes sense.

"...then we're going to end up with pre-moderation."

In every language including English, I mean.

>We don't have to reach a consensus at this time<

I agree..that's why I think it is a good time to be able to voice stuff.

Yes I'd like to see the case for making it multi lingual, which will be the change position..to be spelt out clearly by people who want that on h2g2. I think the cost case has been put..but I'm still quite hazy about specific benefits to h2g2 for the change, in light of the possible disadvantages.

Obviously change is always costs/benefits.

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If nobody flags it, that's OK. Even if it's a libellous post, it doesn't matter because until it's flagged, it's not the website's responsibility. That sounds a little bit like I'm trying to shirk responsibility, but it's exactly the way that it operates now.
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Not quite. AFAIK the bbc pays someone to go through certain threads and yank posts that could cause legal problems (as opposed to ones that merely break the HRs in other ways). Eg the Maddy Mcain threads, election ones, one's that Hoo is active in

Breaking the HRs isn't the issue. Breaking the law is. AFAIK anything on the internet that's public is publishing and there are laws around that. In practice UK law may not actively police this, and it may be nothing to be concerned about. I guess we'll get legal opinion on that eventually.

I agree retaining reactive moderation is the way to go, but we also need some back up to that.

As this has drifted slightly towards moderation, I recommend reading a whitepaper called Delete Expletives. It was commissioned in part by the BBC and sets out levels of profanity.

Several years ago I built an automatic moderator/filter system for a message board that took these levels of profanity as its base. We built up a very large database of swear words and phrases and assigned them to the levels. A user was then able to set the level of profanity that they didn't mind seeing. New users got it restricted by default, so a user had to make a choice to see these words. It also mean that moderation was a lot easier, because in general there wasn't any.

A system similar to that could be used, but you'd need to build and maintain those databases in several languages.

The other thing is had going for it, posts weren't automatically hidden on one yikesing, but needed to hit a certain point level, gained usually through lots of profanitiy, although a "known user" or a "hot thread" had multipliers automatically attached.

If anyone took my Korben Dallas quote as a complaint against multilingualism, don't. I was watching The Fifth Element on TV and when I heard him say that (in reply to Leeloo trying to explain her situation in "The Divine Language" Which was wonderfully created by Milla Jovovich and director Luc Besson) I just got a giggle and thought of this discussion.

My personal opinion on the matter is I don't mind the use of other languages. If it is in small phrases in a convo I'm in such that I can grasp the gist by context, great. If it's long posts then I'll probably just ignore it (Although I still think a babelfish feature would be brilliant even if it's highly inaccurate). If it is entire conversations in a language I don't speak (all those that Korben doesn't speak) then I won't be subscribed to it in the first place.

I've never been a big fan of the current rules banning ALL use of foreign languages.

I still think it won't be a very big issue. I honestly don't think we'll suddenly have a large enough influx of folks writing articles in other languages (which would be required if we were to implement having separate language options for the site). Maybe years down the road when we're a huge sprawling website with hundreds of thousands of users around the world it will make complete sense to do so then and when that happens we'll have enough active users fluent in those languages to be able to cope with the situation. For now, we're a proscribed English only site. If we have a say on how it goes post "disposal", I vote for removing the restriction on other languages and see where it goes from there.

> It's all very well for twitter, a mighty giant when thousands break the Law.

The point isn't the relative sizes of H2G2 and Twitter, but that Twitter is not hosted, owned, or managed in the UK and therefore is not subject to UK legislation or courts. H2G2 would be.

TRiG.

This post has been removed.

I hate seeing removed posts. I look forward to a day when the number of those dwindles by a significant percentage.

no idea what was wrong with that post
It just said that twitter choose that location because it could make more money there and not because of any laws.

I always feel that every time I see a yikesed post there's roughly a 90% chance that I wouldn't have considered it worth yikesing.