Evaluating with Wikipedia

One of the ways of improving your MT system, and at the same time improve and add content in Wikipedias is to use Wikipedias as a test bed. You can translate text from one Wikipedia to another, then either post-edit yourself, or wait for, or ask other people to post-edit the text.

Guidelines

• Don´t just start translating texts and waiting for people to fix them. The first thing you should do, is create an account on the Wikipedia, and then find the "Community notice board". Ask there how regular contributors would feel about you using the Wikipedia for tests. The community notice board should be linked from the front page. It might be called something like "La tavèrna" in Occitan, or "Geselshoekie" in Afrikaans. When you are asking them, be sure to mention:
  • This is ´free software / open source´ machine translation.
  • You would like to help the community and are doing these translations both to help their Wikipedia expand the range of articles, and to improve the translation software.
  • The translations will be added only with the consent of the community, you do not intend to flood them.
  • The translations will be added by a human not by a bot.
  • Ask them if there are any subjects that they prefer you would cover, perhaps they have a page of "requested translations".

An example of the kind of conversation you might have is found here.