Less Wrong and non-native English speakers

For 2., I'm wondering if it would be possible to have some LW to volunteer to review articles done by non-native English speakers, and improve the English quality, before the article is published to LW in general. Do you think the idea is good overall ? Would any of you volunteer to do that ?

I would be happy to review articles. Could orthonormal or a mod add the following paragraph to the welcome thread, perhaps after the "note for theists" in "A few notes about the community"?

If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.

• Normal_Anomaly
• Randaly
• shokwave
• Barry Cotter

There are two classes of people among non-native English speakers

Most active participants who are not native English speakers seem to be safely fluent, so outside both of these categories.

In regards to a translation of the Sequences: Is there truly a significant segment of the population out there that would potentially be open to benefit from reading the Sequences, and yet they haven't prioritized learning English already?

Knowledge of English is probably the single most important piece of knowledge a person can have in the modern world -- it's utility highly multiplicative, because anything significant is currently translated to English, and sooner rather than later.

More importantly, anyone remotely rational will probably have already prioritized learning English.

So, in short, I'm not sure a cost-benefit analysis favors a translation of the Sequences to a different language.

If one does not speak much English at all,
then one should probably play in a different sandbox.

I would not discuss philosophy in Chinese, because I do not know the language. If there was a sufficiently awesome website in Chinese, then perhaps I could be inspired to learn the language. Perhaps I could return, and participate later.

Less Wrong has lower tolerance for sloppy thinking and sloppy writing than most other playgrounds on the Internet. This is great for at least two reasons. A high bar for entry helps weed out trolls. A high bar for entry gives one an incentive to improve.

The allergy to sloppiness likely harkens back to the unique and interesting moderation policy of Eliezer Yudkowsky's SL4.org, and its mailing list. Compared to SL4, Less Wrong is a welcoming and friendly place.

Because SL4 is liable to die quite soon, because many readers will not be familiar with it, and because the moderation policy includes some good writing advice, I find it pertinent to quote an excerpt here:

Our high standards:

It is the explicit policy of this list not to rehash the basics. SL4 is for advanced topics in futurism and technology. If we've discussed it once before, or if it's something we think posters should already know, you may be courteously referred to the archives, or to another list.

Check your spelling. Check your grammar. Check your punctuation and capitalization. Use apostrophes and commas. Don't quote entire messages in your reply. Don't use HTML. Don't post one-line replies. (If it's not worth a well-written paragraph, is it really worth posting?) Don't send attachments to the list. Around 200 people read this (as of September '02), so if it takes you one minute to save each reader two seconds, you've saved well over six minutes total.

Lurk for a week or read a few archived messages before you begin posting.

This is a science-literate mailing list. If you're still unclear about whether humans evolved or were planted on Earth by flying saucers, you're welcome to read SL4, but you probably won't like what you read, and your first post will probably be your last. There could be an exception to this rule. We just haven't encountered it yet.

Sniper-based moderation

"I had assumed that the function of a moderator was more akin to a sheepdog herding the outlying members than a sniper picking off the fringe." -- Mike Deering inadvertantly sums up SL4's exact philosophy of moderation.

English is not my mother tongue. As a non-native English user, I feel that my English mastery is good enough for most everywhere on the Internet other than Less Wrong.

It is frustrating to be called out on silly mistakes you would never make in your native language. Seize the opportunity to level up in English, be hard on yourself, use reference tools, and your fluency will slowly increase. Near-fluency will give way to fluency, you will be better off from the effort.

SUGGESTION: For speakers of foreign tongues who want to improve, maybe add an "editorial input solicited" - tag. As a signal that you welcome the picking of nits and other improvements. A "Crocker's Rules" of wordcraft? If there was one I would happily apply it to this reply.

"Editorial input solicited" is perhaps not a super catchy term. Better suggestions are welcome.

In my experience (as a dyslectic non-native English speaker) people are not so prone to correct spelling and minor grammar error on LW, but rather fastidious about choice of words and phrasing and that I guess can be a problem even for people who consider themselves as fluent in English, but I consider that a necessarily evil, cause one of the things I really like about LW is that you are encouraged to express yourself as precise as possible.

In my introductory post a few weeks ago I briefly mentioned a similar issue, so I basically second kilobug remarks. By the way, as soon as my job stops devouring all of my time, I would like to help translating part of the sequences in Italian.

More importantly, anyone remotely rational will probably have already prioritized learning English.

I want to reply to this point, and I'm interested to read the opinion of the community on the subject. In my opinion, part of your duty as a rationalist is to spread you knowledge to a wider audience. This is what I do, anyways, trying to popularize LW ideas among my friends. Needless to say, many of them haven't ever heard before about biases and Bayes theorem, and a fair number doesn't have a degree or can read English well enough. So, when I manage to raise some interest in one of the site's topics, I would like to be able to redirect them to some of the material of the site, but, unfortunately, I can't. I'm not saying that they would all have become perfet rationalists if they could read the Sequences, but even small improvements aren't to be discarded, in my opinion. To summarize, while the quote from ArisKatsaris is basically true, I think that we should also think to the potential positive effect for a wider, difference audience.

Is there any "official policy" on using other languages at LW site? If there is, perhaps it should be more visible. If there isn't, let's think about some guidelines.

I think it would be nice to provide a place for people speaking other languages, but on the hand, we should not fragment the community unnecessarily. Good new ideas that arise in non-English discussions should be translated back to English.

People speaking other languages than English should be encouraged to write an article in their language. The title of a non-English article should start with a ISO 639-1 language code, like this: "[sk] Môj článok". This convention could be later used by software to provide a list of articles in given language, or use a correct HTML language tag.

The discussion should be in the same language as the original article, if possible. If someone has only a passive knowledge of given language, they can answer e.g. in English, but generally it is preferred to answer in the same language.

If the article and the following discussion is just a translation of existing English content, or it is wholly related to use of the given language (for example discussions about LW wiki localization), or if it has very low karma, then it is not important for English speakers. In other cases someone should later translate the article in English, perhaps also with selected parts of discussion.

The author of non-English article by posting their article implicitly consents to anyone later posting the English translation of their article, on LW. I hope it is safe to assume that people who post on LW in English also wouldn't mind the translations of their texts, if the translation is published on LW.

There already is a translation project, but it seem that it is both fairly small and hard for potential users to find. Specifically, go to the sequences page on the wiki, the final section is for the translated versions.