This article is several years old, but as of 2019, their machine translation tool was quite poor and my experience is that articles can have vastly different levels of depth in different languages, so simply getting French/Spanish/etc. articles up to the level of their English language analogues might be an easy win.
I believe that translators of EA articles should have a quality mindset and not only a mindset of translating x articles or y words in z time. Translators should translate from the articles with the most depth and those articles are mostly in English. Current article pageviews may determine priorities but we also need a depth of content on the subject and not only a handful of articles that are predicted to have more pageviews in the target language.
Translating articles about EA is low hanging fruit especially in Wikipedia language versions with more than several million speakers. We should not underestimate that one or 100 articles that we translate today will most likely remain in Wikipedia for decades even if not centuries even if totally changed by editors along the way.
There is a visibility gap of Effective Altruism in the Internet in general and in Wikipedia specifically. This and the fact that the impact of Wikipedia as a source of knowledge for the general public and to policy makers and decisors should not be ignored.
What I vehemently recommend is that there should not be payed editing promotion and investment. If individual EAs insist on this path what could happen is that EA will have a label for payed editing in Wikipedia. Payed editing in Wikipedia has a very bad reputation in the Wikipedian community and also outside of it and it stains EA and repels people.
Voluntary translators are harder to come by perhaps but that should lead to an even more strong will by EA communities to reach out to its fellow members and argue for voluntary work on this matter. Edit-a-thons should be promoted by EA communities but with clear guidelines of Neutral Point of View (NPOV) editing and non-remunerized.
This article is several years old, but as of 2019, their machine translation tool was quite poor and my experience is that articles can have vastly different levels of depth in different languages, so simply getting French/Spanish/etc. articles up to the level of their English language analogues might be an easy win.
Thank you for your comment.
I believe that translators of EA articles should have a quality mindset and not only a mindset of translating x articles or y words in z time. Translators should translate from the articles with the most depth and those articles are mostly in English. Current article pageviews may determine priorities but we also need a depth of content on the subject and not only a handful of articles that are predicted to have more pageviews in the target language.
Translating articles about EA is low hanging fruit especially in Wikipedia language versions with more than several million speakers. We should not underestimate that one or 100 articles that we translate today will most likely remain in Wikipedia for decades even if not centuries even if totally changed by editors along the way.
There is a visibility gap of Effective Altruism in the Internet in general and in Wikipedia specifically. This and the fact that the impact of Wikipedia as a source of knowledge for the general public and to policy makers and decisors should not be ignored.
What I vehemently recommend is that there should not be payed editing promotion and investment. If individual EAs insist on this path what could happen is that EA will have a label for payed editing in Wikipedia. Payed editing in Wikipedia has a very bad reputation in the Wikipedian community and also outside of it and it stains EA and repels people. Voluntary translators are harder to come by perhaps but that should lead to an even more strong will by EA communities to reach out to its fellow members and argue for voluntary work on this matter. Edit-a-thons should be promoted by EA communities but with clear guidelines of Neutral Point of View (NPOV) editing and non-remunerized.
Edited: Corrected several typos by my part.