Swmmng
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editHello, Swmmng. Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum if you need help with something (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!
David Woodard translations
editHello. As a member of the Small Wiki Monitoring Team, I have recently noticed that you have been creating a lot of stub articles on the musician w:David Woodard in a wide range of languages. The translation project apparently started in 2018. It appears as though you want to translate this article into every single edition of Wikipedia. Some translations (such as pt:David Woodard, sw:David Woodard and vi:David Woodard) are quite long and detailed. Others, such as ff:David Woodard and ik:David Woodard, are completely devoid of content other than his birth date, photo, and links. Some are in between; most of these are just one or two sentence stubs. Since it is rather implausible that one person is capable of translating this article into so many languages, I am curious where they are getting the translations from. For the stubs, you could have just adapted text from other articles on musicians and writers. For example, it looks like you copied the first sentence from gn:Mark Twain to gn:David Woodard, almost verbatim. However, the larger articles were either translated using Google Translate, or by other people who speak the language. If the former is the case, then the quality of the articles is probably not going to be very high. If the latter is the case, then who is doing the translations for you, and why aren't you crediting them? There are precedents for allowing massive cross-wiki translation projects to continue unimpeded, even if the quality of the translations is suspicious, but I would still be interested in the answer to the question.
My second question is: why? I'm absolutely going to assume good faith, but I think you can see why some people might be a bit suspicious that this is part of a paid ad campaign promoting Woodard. PiRSquared17 (talk) 18:42, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
- Any comments? PiRSquared17 (talk) 22:22, 26 March 2019 (UTC)