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Comment by Eiriksmal | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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