[crazygringo]

> Translation is free and instant for web pages.

And also very often quite incorrect, and you don't know where.

I think the general idea of a "universal language" Wikipedia, that gets flawlessly rendered into local languages, is laudable.

But I don't think anybody would ever edit in it directly -- what I want to see is that when somebody edits Wikipedia to add a new sentence, it attempts to translate into the "universal language" and prompt you to select from ambiguities.

E.g. if you wrote:

  I saw someone on the hill with a telescope.

It would ask you to confirm which of the following was intended:

  [ ] "with a telescope" modifies "I saw"
  [ ] "with a telescope" modifies "someone on the hill"

And it would also ask to clarify meanings, e.g.:

  [ ] "saw" - spotted visually
  [ ] "saw" - dated romantically

It would be a real dream to have translated outputs that were guaranteed to be correct, because the intermediate representation was correct, because the translation from someone's native language to that intermediate translation was verified in this way.

[vasco]

I would still invest those resources into documenting more knowledge that currently doesn't exist online on their original languages and immediately translating to English. For better or for worse English is the "abstract" representation of language online and there's so much absent stuff that worrying about another universal format seems pointless.

[crazygringo]

It's not either/or. Different groups of people can do different things at once. And of the two things you're comparing, one is expert technical/engineering and the other requires expert archivists/translators. They're totally different groups.

[vrandecic]

exactly that! I have a design mockup that is quite similar to that.