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Comment by amirkdv | Hacker News Reader

> I almost never use the left hand side bar (and I have a feel almost no one does)

The left sidebar has two killer features for me:

1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms. You need to know what the standard way to translate "hardware acceleration" or "differentiable manifold" is in French? Go to the wikipedia page and hover over the language switcher link in the left sidebar. Done. This has become one of my indispensable tools.

2. Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives. For example, want to know about the Islamic Golden Age? The English, French, and Farsi versions have significantly different content from different perspectives (I would assume the Spanish and Arabic ones are also equally interesting). I highly recommend this exercise especially for history that one is taught in school, e.g. if you're American and can read Spanish, I bet the Spanish entry on Mexican-American War will teach you a few things you had never heard of.

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I second using Wikipedia for translating, most of the time is better than using a translator or using a dictionary and sometimes is the only option for more technical or specific terms.

I don't use it for comparing between languages much because I'm bilingual and my native tongue Wikipedia is not that big, but sometimes is really interesting to see the different perspectives.

Regarding the comments about the importance of language links in the sidebar: if you look here you can see that the language links will be moved to a button/menu in the article header — https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improveme... The conclusions of the user testing show that people have a much easier time finding them in the new location.

Their test group for this feature consists of 8 to 9 people, with 5 in a control group. You'd think that for one of the most visited sites in the world, they'd have larger test groups?

Testing large amounts of people doesn’t always produce better results. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...

Will the new menu require JS to access?

I just hope you can still simply hover your mouse over the languages links to see the translation without having to click and go to the foreign language article.

Absolutely, the only time I've ever used the sidebar is for language change, but with this change they are moving that to a more accessible place (Which is nice), but it also means the sidebar is now truly useless :)

Changing the language, yes. But translating at a glimpse will get lost this way.

Go to the wikidata page and it has the translations.

That's a click more though, while the current method doesn't necessitate a single additional click.

I've never realized how often I do both scenarios but now that you said it, that's exactly right, it is very useful. Being multi-lingual myself, the benefit of the switching language is not just for bias but also because some topics are just more expanded in other languages. I keep Google in English so obviously English wikipedia articles are the ones showing up, but let's say I look at some francophone music artist, i'm more likely to get a longer wikipedia page once I switch to French.

I also find your first point to be a truly indispensable tool. How else do you know what they call carbon fiber in German? [0]

But the second is a touchy area. In fact, Wikipedia's co-founder recently wrote a blog post detailing how its neutral point-of-view policy has flopped, in the name of fighting false balance. [1] His examples are pretty embarrassing, but more important in that Google points human "Search Quality Raters" to Wikipedia to understand "reputation" and maintain a supposedly even political bias. [2]

[0] Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff, of course.

[1] https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

[2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... Pages 16-18

I don't understand Larry Sanger's complaint about NPOV. If a neutral encyclopedia was required to list all minority points of view on every topic then nothing would be knowable. It wouldn't be able to say that the earth is round. If saying that the earth is round is biased then neutrality is worthless and not worth pursuing.

In even simpler terms, the use of editorial judgment is required to write an encyclopedia. Always has been, always will be. A website free of editorial judgment looks like 8chan, not an encyclopedia.

Even 8chan had some level of editorial judgement, however small it was. It was there.

The Admin has been very active in preserving QAnon's presence on the board. Potentially to the point of hijacking the QAnon tripcodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Identity_of_%22Q%22

Well, i dare say, that would be an example of an editorial judgement. Agreeable or not.

The original statement of NPOV was to at least mention any significant view supported by a significant minority of experts or people involved; not EVERY topic. It makes sense that, if you want the encyclopedia to be a starting point for investigating a subject, it informs you of the existence of significant non-sanctioned views.

In practice, this need is usually satisfied by the Talk pages and archives. The published article is sanitized, but if you really want to learn about the controversies in the topic, your best choice is to dig deep in the discussions that resulted in the controversy being excised from the visible version. It's quite rare that the talk pages are also purged as well.

When I've been to the talk pages they were populated by even-less-neutral discussion about how to expunge anything that might offer support to people who believed the right-wing position.

Though that’s a rather technical term for carbon fiber that I suspect nobody uses when speaking or even writing to each other in a less formal context.

I’ve heard it being called just “Carbon”, pronounced with a long “o”, frequently. Since the translation for the generic element, carbon, is “Kohlenstoff”, and that word is very commonly used, the opportunities for confusion between carbon and carbon fiber is less than it might seem.

The literal translation for carbon fiber would be "Kohlefaser" and that is also used quite commonly.

I admit I'm not in any field that deals with materials a lot, but OP said "Kohlefaserverstärkter Kunststoff" (which I likely wrongly called "carbon fiber" in English), is "Kohlefaser" really the same? Maybe it is and I'm just ignorant about that.

My German-as-second-language understanding is:

Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff == Kohlen (literally coal but understood more broadly as any carbon) stoff (material) faser (thread) verstärkter (reinforced) Kunststoff (plastic).

Depends. (As everything always does.) “Carbon fiber” literally means just the black threads, in English as in any language. When you say “This bicycle / fishing rod / automobile part is made of carbon fiber”, what you _actually mean_ is that it's made from carbon fiber- reinforced polymer (=“plastic”). Stuff isn't built from _just_ the fibers; the plastic needs to be there to keep them together / they're just there to reinforce the plastic (or both).

The GP (G-G-G...P?) post seemed to be using the shorter expression, but as a shorthand for the longer (as most people do) in English but not in German, which may have caused some confusion.

But it's the same in both (all) languages: The shorter expression technically means just the reinforcing fibers; the actual material used to make stuff is technically called the longer expression; but in ordinary usage most people use the shorter expression to mean the longer one.

In my experience 'Kohlefaser' is a pretty common technical term, I've only ever encountered 'Karbon' w.r.t. bicycles (but that just be my limited view).

> His examples are pretty embarrassing

Some of the political ones show what is more easily described as bias, but his points about Global Warming or the MMR vaccine show exactly why "NPOV" for any extent is a bad idea, and why the new policy of "avoiding false balance" actually makes a lot of sense.

As a couple of other responses have indicated, this is not a reliable way to translate terms.

Another bit of anecdotal evidence on translation: I recently wanted to find the idiomatic French for "electronics packaging." Google Translate gets it wrong, and there's no French wiki page to refer to. The source that came up with the goods was the "translations in context" snippets here: https://www.linguee.com/english-french/translation/electroni...

Linguee is not a reference either for English to French, simply because most of the side-by-side translations it uses are bad translations; and also because it mixes French and Canadian sources, which are sometimes completely unrelated to the point that a native French won't understand a Canadian translation and vice-versa.

Deepl, from the same company, is much better and is currently the best online translator.

France French and Canadian French are not that different and are certainly mutually intelligible, kind of like US English and Australian English. (Except of course if you're a rude Parisian and act like any accent except yours is undecipherable).

You can certainly understand them if you're talking with a Canadian, because you can always ask for clarifications. But my point is not about accent, it's about taking a Canadian translation on an online translation service and mistakenly using it in a French document if you're not a French speaker. Good luck having your French readers understand what's a balado (podcast), a Bazou (a car) or a Boucane (the smoke), and that's just a handful of the B words. It doesn't matter whether you are a rude Parisian or not (what's with the stereotyping?)

Or tell them on your gardening website to fill a chaudière to water their garden.

Un bazou doesn't mean a car, it's a slang word that means jalopy. In France French, one would say une guimbarde, and I suspect lots of Canadian French speakers wouldn't understand that word. Slang words tend to differ a lot from country to country, no matter the language. A translation service that translates car to bazou or guimbarde is broken, but this has nothing to do with Canadian vs. France French.

> How else do you know what they call carbon fiber in German? [0] > [0] Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff, of course.

Well, it actually not that simple :)

Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff[1] is carbon fiber reinforced polymer[2]. But it seems like carbon fiber is also used as a short hand for carbon fiber reinforced polymer. Similarly, Germans often call Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter Kunststoff just Karbon.

But the translation of the technical term carbon fiber[3] is just Kohlenstofffaser[4] (which is quite a literal translation).

But indeed, it is really nice how transparent that is when looking that the wikipedia articles.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlenstofffaserverst%C3%A4rkt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fiber_reinforced_polyme... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fibers [4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlenstofffaser

It's not my mother language but I speak German, and I keep reading "server" when trying to read "Kohlenstofffaserverstärkter". IT sector ruined my brain.

The combination of political opinion expressed in [1] + the author's wildly incorrect past statements is all I need to know that Wikipedia is doing things right:

> Since 2002, Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia's accuracy. ... [In 2007], Sanger again criticized Wikipedia, stating it was "broken beyond repair" and had a range of problems "from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Post-Wikipedia

I guess you don't need to know much to ascertain the truth of something.

I know A. the examples he gave do not justify his position that the "false balance" policy is bad due to his clear extreme political bias in favor of Trump and B. he has a track record of being very, very wrong about systemic issues at Wikimedia which discredits his position on this particular (supposed) issue.

Sanger will never forgive Wikipedia for getting along just fine without him.

I just read [1].

I'd hope that a person with Sanger's experience and insight would at least float suggestions, proposals, wish list, or any thing at all, to achieve something he'd consider more neutral, objective, or something.

everipedia.org I guess does some stuff differently. But if it has a different take on neutrality, it's not jumping out at me.

Sanger has some role with Ballotpedia? Maybe his vision for neutrality is there?

Just sitting here, I can imagine at least three different crazy experiments to play with neutrality. And I know nothing.

Also:

I was willing to at least consider anything Sanger had to offer, given his CV. But generally I fast fail (flip the bozo bit, summarily dismiss, shove into the memory hole) any media critic leading with "liberal bias".

I think he just has muddled reasoning. For example, his essay says something about Jesus, the Christ label, how the wiki is wrong... Or something. I was raised Christian, so I'm moderately inclined towards biblical navel gazing. But if Sanger had a point, it's lost on me. I'm just more confused after trying to parse his thesis.

Further:

I'll read any proposals for mitigating social media. I honestly can't even criticize whatever this is:

How to Fix Social Media in Three Easy Steps [2020/09/20]

https://larrysanger.org/2020/09/how-to-fix-social-media-in-t...

Non sequitur?

I was willing to at least consider anything Sanger had to offer, given his CV. But generally I fast fail [...] any media critic leading with "liberal bias".

Especially when one of the main criticisms is "It's biased to say a false statement is false".

Sanger's fundamental misunderstanding is that a neutral point of view doesn't mean that the thing you're writing about is also going to be neutral.

Keen point. Thanks.

It just now occurs to me that you're probably referring to the epistemological crisis. I don't actually know what that means, but please humor me.

Sanger teaches philosophy. To him, maybe there is no truth? Or that all truths are equal? Or something like that.

More than a handful of the geeks I've worked with were afflicted by the recursive discursive thing. Most bad was the philosopher software architect. Actually repeatedly debated metametadata, the data about metadata. I wanted to kill myself.

Tying this back to current events: It might be useful to have some canary questions, to determine the epistemological bent of the other participants. It's pointless to argue about facts if the other party doesn't believe in facts.

> 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms.

OMG yes I do this as well. Google translate is unreliable for technical terms, regional vegetables/fruits, cultural concepts, and lots of other things.

EDIT: Wikipedia is also good at differentiating regional variants of a language, e.g. the country of Laos is 老撾 in Beijing Mandarin and 寮國 in Taiwanese Mandarin and Wikipedia knows this. Likewise, a USB drive is almost universally called "U盤" in Mainland China but this word is virtually unknown outside Mainland China. It's actually a good way for native speakers to look up one-off words like this when writing documents intended to be read by another region because you really just need to replace a few nouns here and there.

> 2. Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives.

Interesting anecdote: Linguistically, Serbian and Croatian are almost identical, except for the obvious thing that Serbs write in Cyrillic alphabet, while Croatians use the Latin alphabet. Politically however? Holy what a can of worms. "Inevitably biased" is putting it mildly, outright history revisionism puts it better, and it has been twice a subject of widespread outrage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

(in case it's relevant, I'm half Croat, and have a massive dislike against NDH supporters and any other fascist/fascist apologets)

I look at the different language wikis all the time for that reason (and because I'm a native Spanish speaker who prefers the English Wikipedia), but it's just routine to scroll to the language selection list completely ignoring the controls of the left pane, that I may have used twice in the last 10 years merely out of curiosity.

I have been reading HN for a while and never commented, but the translation thing is very close to my heart, what with learning Physics both in Polish and English at different stages of my life.

So much so that I've made a dedicated tool for this: https://wikitranslator.github.io/

It uses Wikipedia's APIs to "click the language links" for you. It also displays short summaries of both languages' articles, so the translation can be verified. I know I'm a small sample, but I end up using it reasonably often.

You should make a Show HN out of that! Just wait a while (perhaps a couple weeks) for the hivemind caches to clear.

See the tips at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638, especially the one about adding a comment explaining how you came to work on this and what's different about it.

If you do submit it, email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we might be able to help further. And welcome to the state change of HN-commenting!

Thank you very much for the tips!

I personally had no idea this existed, even though I would (and now will) use it avidly. So that's probably an indication that the UX needs to change to improve discoverability!

> 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms.

I use this so often, that I've thought to turn this into a full-blown tool on several occassions. A simple "translate" webapp that opens wikipedia (API) in the background, looks for the inserted term and then returns the translated articles (with links to the article!) for that term.

For English-French translation in Québec, have a look at http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/index.aspx

Just out of interest, I tried "electronics packaging" (which other sources seem to indicate is called either "habillage" or "packaging" in French). I got this http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=1893553... result which says "electronics packaging designer" translates to "concepteur d'assemblage électronique." So now I'm not sure what to think. The suggested translation doesn't include the word "habillage" which I previously thought was the term I needed.

"Habillage" (literally "dressing") in this context relates to packaging of a concept/proposition i.e. the marketing around it (or "spin"). The french word for "packaging" in the physical sense would be "emballage" (literally "wrapping"). Some would use "empaquetage" but that is less common.

So "electronics packaging" would translate to "emballage/empaquetage de composants électroniques".

Are you sure about this?

I know linguee.fr has been criticised, but check out these two analogous pages found via a search for "electronics packaging" there:

https://schroff.nvent.com/en/schroff/about-us

"The brand Schroff, which belongs to the business unit of nVent Technical Solutions, has been a world leader in electronics packaging for over five decades."

https://schroff.nvent.com/fr/schroff/about-us

"La marque Schroff, qui appartient à l’entité légale nVent, est leader mondial dans le domaine de l’habillage électronique depuis plus de cinquante ans."

This makes it look extremely like habillage doesn't just mean what you claim it does "in this context."

Emballage was indeed my initial guess for the appropriate French word, but I, you know, did some research before jumping to a conclusion?

That's quite a stack of subdomains, any sense to those? .qc.ca I can recognize, and gouv is for gouvernment.

So you've got 3, the m at the start is obvious - there's only two left and they're both spelt out in the header of the webpage.

You summarize it very well. Those are the two big usage I have from that bar. In fact I switch so often between languages I wish they were displayed upper in the bar (btw I don’t like switch language on mobile), and personalized with my 4 most used languages on top. Sometimes a language I want to read is hidden and it’s super annoying to get it.

Years ago Wikimedia external-to-community "UX" staff previously forcefully hid the inter-language links against substantial community outcry. The result caused a devastating loss of traffic to other languages and, ultimately, a quiet reversal.

Sounds like they're going to repeat that mistake again.

The direct link to the commons page is also useful for finding pictures related to a topic.

I came here to say the language part. Sometimes no dictionary will translate the thing that you want, you have to use Wikipedia to translate it. It's also great for language study, hopping back and forth between your target language to see how similar ideas are expressed differently.

I guess monolingual people simply don't understand some things. That there is so much information not represented in English Wikipedia, or, say, that some foreign person with a stub article is many times more valuable, interesting, relevant than other foreign person with a decent article (when it is clear from the content in another language). Or that “information on the internet” doesn't simply appear out of nowhere, that people work on it, and the process is far from being optimal or comprehensive (never was, and never will be, sadly).

The difference of perspectives is also quite enlightening. I'm not talking about obvious transitory trifles like Obama vs Trump vs Clinton — it is pathetic that a free encyclopedia, of all things, wastes so much time on those, — or who's at war with whom for which reasons. I mean deeper differences in the world view. So there's some “highly controversial” (whatever this means) topic, and there is a completely regular article on it in other language, no signs of editing wars or flame wars, doesn't seem all that important altogether. You obviously start to meditate on why it couldn't be written the same way in the first language.

Just like many pop-science fans believe that the cardboard presented to them is a “real science” and the only true world view, most people talking about “approaching neutrality” assume that basically everything can be analyzed from the same common base, and, of course, their own beliefs are that common base. This, obviously, is not a good way to understand anything that belongs to a different culture.

My wife (native Polish speaker) and I (native English speaker) both use Wikipedia's left-hand list of articles in other languages to get quick translations of the title/subject of a given article.

I do 1. quite often, but I've also noticed that sometimes, the list of languages the term is available in varies between languages, which makes no sense to me.

> Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives

Not just historical events. For example, Vladimir Putin's Russian page looks very different from the English page. If I suspect bias, one quick check I always do is to read the page from another language using Google Translate. Does not always work, but sometimes you get more information.

> Finding canonical translations for technical terms

Exactly.

> if you're American and can read Spanish, I bet the Spanish entry on Mexican-American War will teach you a few things you had never heard of.

That's a great idea, I'm gonna do exactly that tonight. Thank you very much!

In addition to these, I also use the sidebar's random button when learning a new language. Instead of committing to reading a book or reading the news its nice to just flip through random articles and trying to power through them, sometimes with the aide of wiktionary.

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