Despite its articles available in many languages, Wikipedia remains Anglo-centric. A Microsoft research team in India is working to change that.

Given that high-tech savvy and multilingual communication meet in the sub-continent, it is not surprising that an Indian Microsoft research team has developed Wikibhasha, a “multilingual content creation tool for Wikipedia.”

A Kumaran is the head researcher for the team that has been working on the platform, now in its Beta version, for the past four and a half years. The tool combines aspects of machine translation, crowdsourcing, and localization in order to facilitate translation of existing Wikipedia articles while enabling contributors to add new information at the same time.

“For the version now being released, Kumaran and his team worked to create an intuitive Wikipedia experience, focus users more on the final content creation and less on the original translated document, and ensure that any users’ work in WikiBhasha becomes part of a collaborative experience,” explains a recent article from RDmag. “The latter element was key to winning over the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization to the global Wikipedias.”

Although the actual workings of the platform may still appear complex to some, the creators are convinced that the tool is now decidedly user-friendly compared to earlier versions.

Time – and stats – will tell if the platform actually leads to increases in multilingual content on Wikipedia.

Betty Carlson

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• Language Translation, In.c
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