As of 2008-04-01, the paper does not exhibit much cohesiveness.

Let's see if we can come up with a "vision" for the paper. What exactly are we trying to say in this paper?

Below are a number of important questions that need to be answered in a good paper.

Q0: What do you want the reader to remember from this paper?

This is the most important one.

In 3 short sentences or less describe what you want people to remember from this paper, 6 months after they have read it.

Or... what kind of transformation do you want to effect on the reader, which will still be there 6 months after they have read the paper?

• AD: I would say that: "I want people to know that translation the wiki way is an important thing, and that if they want to know how to do it, they should come to us, or follow what we are doing".

• OMS: "Translation the Wiki way is a critical new way to assure that translations WILL BE done, on time and within budget by harnessing the full potential of the Wiki community and its features. If you want to know how to do it, come to us, or follow what we are doing".

• AD: Also, message to devs and researchers: translation the wiki way can be done for more than 2 langs, without master language, and without requiring that at all points in time, at least one of the versions (not necessarily always the same one) be "up to date". That's the main thing I have learned from LPH's work, compared to what I did with LizzyWiki.

Q1: Why should anybody care?

This question has to be answered very clearly and simply in the introduction.

• Who should care about this, and why?
• What are the main goals?

• AD: I think I gave a pretty good shot in the Intro. Is this enough?
• LPH: I think it's important to show that the project solves a real need, but we don't need to explain the why too much in detail... alain did that before
• OMS: Important points:
  • 1. You have something concrete, that works;
  • 2. It will help get translations done (speed, efficiency, cross-checks for completeness etc.)
  • 3. It will save time and money (and time IS money)
    • Crowdsourcing, that sort of thing
  • 4th point: you can demo it, prove it,
• AD: Also, allow content to be translated into languages where it would simply not be
  • Let minority communities help themselves.

Q2: What are the original contributions of this work?

• What previous work was done?
• Why is this better than previous work?

Here's what I (AD) wrote in the Intro:

In this paper, we describe features that were implemented in the TikiWiki engine, in order to facilitate this sort of collaborative translation of wiki content. These features build heavily on the designs implemented in the LizzyWiki system (Desilets et al., 2005), but they innovate in several ways:

• Support truly multilingual sites (LizzyWiki only supported bilingual sites).
• Allow original modifications to a page at any point in time (LizzyWiki required that the user first bring the page in synch with other linguistic versions of the same page, before doing any new original changes).
• Implementation in a full-featured wiki engine (LizzyWiki was a proof-of-concept system, and while it had very advanced multilingual support features, it lacked many of the other features that the market has come to expect from a wiki engine).
• Allow readers to get a better idea of up to dateness of a particular linguistic version of a page (LizzyWiki only told the reader if the page was out of date, without quantifying it by how much).
• AD: There may be other innovations. I need to think about it.

• Seb: i think the idea of not bothering with marking or tracking actual text segments at all, of treating edits as "atoms", is significant.

Q3: How do you know that this is good?

• What methodology did you use to evaluate what you did?
  • Doesn't have to be highly quantitative and precise. But you need to have a way to (ex: qualitative criteria) to decide if you are doing well.

Q4: What were the main challenges, and how did you resolve them?

• AD: I think LPH talks a lot about those in WS08Paper:Tracking Changes and WS08Paper:Assessing Translation Progress, but we need to have a clear summarized view in our head of what the important challenges were. We also need to relate the challenges to the goals of the project (in other words, explain why those challenges are worth addressing). LPH, how would you summarize those challenges?
• OMS: Giving the original content owner the power to withhold release of (some) translations until the owner has vetted them.
• AD: Also, translating from language you can't read (we don't deal with it at this point)

Q5: What was learned from this project, that can be useful to others?

Q6: What might be the impacts of this?

• OMS: The impact of this will be as dramatic as the impact of Wikipedia has been. Initially there will be a lot of scepticism, but as more and more content is available in more languages, thanks to TikiWiki, the criticism will turn into increasing acceptance and eventually grudging admiration.