A concensus has been reached regarding the limitation or prohibition of machine translation for users in Chinese Wikipedia (zhwiki). The discussion is available here.
A brief overview of the concensus
Background. Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of badly-prosed articles that defy Chinese language conventions, including but not limited to improper use of punctuations and oddly-long clauses that are unorthodox in Chinese language. We have noticed that the existence of these articles (eligible for speedy deletion) are related with machine translation and content translation. Extreme cases of malicious use of content translation include some machine-translated personal attack pages. This has become a burden for editors, patrollers, and readers.
Request. Our request is to limit or inhibit access to machine translation (MT). No request is made regarding to content translation (CX). Specifically, our request is to-
- Preferably limit access to machine translation to extended confirmed users and sysops. Only users in these groups can utilize machine translation as a starting point when using content translation.
- If the above request is not technically viable, we also accept disabling machine translation in its entirety. That is, nobody can access machine translation when using content translation.
Related prior acts. English Wikipedia and Japanese Wikipedia T323973: Disable machine translation for Japanese have already disabled machine translation for everyone. English Wikipedia even has gone so far as to limit the access to content translation tool to extended confirmed users and sysops. While we have not determined to put restrictions on content translation tool, we believe that our situation is close to Japanese Wikipedia, and request a restriction on machine translation.
I hereby offer my appreciation in advance.
