Languages in Newsvine

News Type: none — Mon Jan 30, 2006 1:34 PM EST

Here's an experiment for you: go to Newsvine's tag search, and fill it with the name of any country that comes to mind - I've tried "algeria", "israel", "africa" (it's a continent, not a country, I know), "china", "russia", "germany" and "norway". You'll notice the vast majority (if not all) of seeded links and articles are in English. Now try searching for "brazil", and you'll get an avalanche of pages in Portuguese.

Actually, that's not a new phenomenon at all. Brazilians on foreign exchange programs tend to gather in groups, always speaking Portuguese, instead of trying to blend with local people. Go to any virtual community, like Orkut or even Flickr, and you'll see the same thing. And it seems Newsvine, already gathering quite some attention from Brazilians who follow new media more closely, is going down the same path.

As much as I would like for my fellow countrymen to stick to English, in order to make their ideas and insights available to as most people as possible, I know any sort of language restriction on Newsvine would be foolish (we'd have guides on how to bypass the restrictions in no time, I'm sure) and sure to drive many users away.

But I wonder whether it would be possible to implement some tool for users to mark which language they're using, and then make it possible for readers to filter the languages of articles and links presented to them. For example, if I search for the tag "germany", any article written in German is wasted space in my page which I'd much rather was occupied by something written in English.

Or maybe I'm the only actually worried with this, heh.

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Solon Brochado's Column, All of Newsvine
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{"commentId":16742,"authorDomain":"josh"}

josh

Obrigado, Solon. We appreciate the feedback.

The problems with multiple language support really aren't technical. . we have plans in place to mark content language and filter results by user language as you've described. Our problem is much more social. We just don't have the resources to moderate content in every possible language, and we run the risk of content in some language degenerating terribly without us being able to monitor it.

The solution may involve volunteer moderators or some such. In the meantime, the semi-official policy is that newsvine is an English-language site, but we're not going to interfere with any content or communities unless and until some significant problem arises. We're proud to have the Brazilian community here and will try to make everyone feel welcome.

{"commentId":16742,"threadId":"6498","contentId":"75583","authorDomain":"josh"}

#1 - Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:13 PM EST

{"commentId":16750,"authorDomain":"solonbro"}

Solon Brochado

Josh, does that mean that non-English content is currently not being monitored at all?

{"commentId":16750,"threadId":"6498","contentId":"75583","authorDomain":"solonbro"}

#2 - Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:20 PM EST

{"commentId":16755,"authorDomain":"josh"}

josh

It's possible for users to use the same reporting tools for any language, so we still receive abuse reports. But our ability to verify the abuse is limited. In some cases the problem is obvious regardless of language, in other cases not so much.

{"commentId":16755,"threadId":"6498","contentId":"75583","authorDomain":"josh"}

#3 - Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:27 PM EST

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SOLON BROCHADO

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Languages in Newsvine

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