Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dalmål

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. GRBerry 18:51, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dalmål

Dalmål (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

This is complete gibberish, obviously incompletely translated by machine from the Swedish Wikipedia article "Dalmål"[1]. A specialized subject like this requires somebody to translate it manually who knows both languages and understands the linguistic terminology. There is no reason to keep this around until a proper translation is made. (There are other issues with the "edits" of the creator of the page. With contributions such as this or this, I am surprised he isn't banned already.) Olaus (talk) 00:23, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

• Delete. The English name for this dialect is Dalecarlian[2] and we should probably have a stub. But this is such a mangled partial translation it's worse than useless. --Dhartung | Talk 00:50, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

There is a problem with the redirect from Dalecarlian to Elfdalian. Elfdalian is a peculiar dialect spoken in Älvdalen, which is one, peripheral part of Dalecarlia, but there are other varieties of Dalecarlian. Olaus (talk) 08:59, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

• Delete per both Olaus and Dhartung. Good work Mandsford (talk) 01:17, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per all above. Create article on subject matter! ---Iconoclast.Horizon (talk) 04:44, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per above. -- ¿Amar៛^{Talk to me/My edits} 05:32, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
• Delete or replace with a stub, if that can be done by someone who knows something about the subject (I certainly don't).--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 06:58, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Strong keep and move to dalecarlian, notify translation desk Dalecarlian and Elfsdalian are rather separate dialects. I've been working on Claude François de Malet, that also was an article from French wiki that also was machine translated [3]. Bad translation from another wiki isn't a reason to delete but for tagging it {{copyedit}}. Consider that machines are increasingly getting better, and very soon they'll provide quite adequate translations --victor falk 09:28, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

• Comment I think that the nominator's point is that it would be better to delete (or stubify) this poor effort unless there is someone who takes an interest in an article and has the skill to translate it accurately. I've buffed up machine translations of Spanish and Italian articles on subjects that I'm somwehat familiar with. Not only is the structure of Swedish more different froM English than French, the subject (linguistics) is specialized enough that most of us wouldn't know if we were doing the job correctly. I applaud you for translating the article on Malet, but there's no comparison. Even without a machine or knowledge of French, most of us can guess the meaning of: "Claude François de Malet, né à Dole (Jura) le 28 juin 1754 et mort le 29 octobre 1812, est un général d’Empire, auteur du coup d'État de 1812 contre Napoléon, durant la retraite de Russie." As far as a "translation desk", isn't that all of us? Mandsford (talk) 12:22, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

You're perfectly right. Both about there are many more and better anglofrench than angloswedish machine translators and that Dalmål is a tougher challenge than de Malet. Dalmål is an article I might be interested in editing, I speak swedish as well as french and I am interested in linguistics. Though I'm much better at improving translations than making them. For another example, look at France in the American Revolutionary War. It has improved from being badly translated to poorly written from the original fr:Guerre d'indépendance des États-Unis d'Amérique. The first step is to translate the swedish words and clarifying the most abstruse parts. From there, non-swedish-speaking editors can join in. Since I talk the talk, I have to walk the walk[4]. What about involving Elfsdalian and other swedish dialects editors?--victor falk 23:29, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Right, that is what I'm saying. You can't really "copyedit" this mess. Unless you look at the original Swedish text, you won't even have any idea what this page is trying to say. It needs to be translated from the original from scratch (or, even better, rewritten from more up-to-date sources - this is originally from Nordisk familjebok, a valuable but often rather out-of-date Swedish encyclopaedia from the early 20th century). Why would you (Victor) want to give the credit for creating a page to someone who appears to be a habitual Wikipedia vandal, rather than to whoever actually makes the effort to write a proper article? Olaus (talk) 12:33, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I think one can, see my comment above. As for its origin, I'd like to point that many articles are from Britannica 1911; some are little more than machine-translated and copypasted. This article is at a more advanced state than that, it has been wikified to some degree, categorised, it is sourced, and parts of it have been translated to wikipedia standard English. Whoever created this article is irrelevant, it is no longer theirs. Even if they've made thousands of vandal edits and only one legitimate contribution. Problems with vandals should be taken up at ANI or elsewhere, AfD is no place for requesting punishments against vandals. --victor falk 23:29, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, I don't see the point of doing it this way, but if you are prepared to massage this text into something useful, I am not going to insist on it being deleted. The important point is just that it shouldn't be left in its current state. As for the vandal issue, he seems to have been warned already and has had other aspects of his edits questioned (judging from his talk page), so I don't think there is anything more I can do. Olaus (talk) 00:03, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

And before anyone says, "It's not my job", yes, you're right, nobody is under any obligation to make this article readable. I don't think that Victor, or anyone else, actually has the time or the desire to make this article work, and that Olaus is 100% right that it's of no use in its current state. It's written in a bizarre Swenglish (Anglo-Svenskon?) pidgin that nobody understands. Maybe we can leave a stub that says, "And if you know Swedish, click here for more" Mandsford (talk) 00:24, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

• The author of the page has now moved the entire content, except the deletion box, to Dalecarlian language. He has also posted Norrlandic language in Swedish. (It is a copy of Norrländska mål on the Swedish Wikipedia. At least, it is in Swedish rather than Swinglish, but I don't see why it needs to be here to be the basis for a translation when it is already available there.) Olaus (talk) 07:37, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per above :-) Stwalkerster talk 11:35, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. A user had removed the AfD box on the page. -Yupik (talk) 20:08, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.