Interlanguage links

[gravaera]

Hi: Listen,

It's an unnecessary hassle, and anyone who can't read English is already most likely not going to have an easy time. Most useful articles are written in English, with examples in C, a language which uses English keywords. All the more highly recommended tutorials which are making all of the newbies think inside of a small, illogical box and making them ask illogical questions are written in English, so for you to even begin to read them to get all the bad ideas in them, you have to know English.

I do not believe that tutorials are good supplements for proper reading. Providing more and more tutorials, and condensed, unofficial references, in more and more languages is going to make it even easier for people to avoid reading both official documentation, and proper supplementary material. Then we'll have an even bigger mess: You want to implement one of the EXT FSs for your kernel? Cool. Go google a broken tutorial, or read off a secondhand Wiki article which has been written based on the writer's interpretation of the original specification. Hey, it even comes in my language. No need for me to read the correct specification. Oh boy, the code in the tutorial isn't working. Oh noes, well it's time for me to go to the OSDev.org forums and post a question in broken English! Never mind that I've never even seen what the standard specification even looks like. I followed a Wiki! Wiki trumps official specification...EVERY time.

As a rule, specifications tend to be written in a long, dreary style, with lots of "fancy", "big" words. People think that this is a problem. The problem is that specifications need to be *extemely* precise in their wording, or else risk ambiguity. Ambiguity is the worst thing ever, since it means that different hardware vendors will implement the specification differently, and then kernel developers will have to spend time trying to find out which interpretation of the ambiguous part of the specification each vendor took after. Wikis are already not a good thing. Even worse are Wikis which have information which has been interpreted, then translated from a subjective understanding into a condensed reference. I think anyone who has studied languages should understand that translations usually don't get mapped 1:1, or keep their original intent precisely as first encoded. Far less for a person who's paraphrasing and translating that paraphrasal.

If someone decides to provide non-English articles, bless you: you've done well. However, the pool of reliable documentation is mostly in English, and people should be steered toward reading official documentation rather than trying to look for unofficial supplements and using those as a base for implementation. My dissent is not based on any kind of xenophobia: it's based on a reluctance to make inaccurate, unofficial documentation more easily available, in possibly less precise forms. Google is more than good enough: you're more likely to come across official documentation from googling than to encounter it while lazily looking for "short", "easy to read" supplements on a wiki, and following cross-language links.

If there is someone willing to do all of the work to get all this done, by all means, if Chase cares, have fun. However, I don't see a need to out of the way to go get these Interlanguage Links.

EDIT: All of that aside, that is just my opinion. By all means, if the majority support the beast, then the majority holds sway.

--All the best
gravaera

[Solar]

I'm not sure about the Japanese development community (or any other than the English one) being stronger than the German one. Germany has always been a very strong contender in hobbyist software development. Blame it on the Austrians, blame it on Germans enjoying a re-dubbed TV and bookshops full of translated literature and being too stubborn to do things in English, whatever. But that's not the point.

Do we link to both Hindi sites? If not, how do we decide fairly?

That's more of an issue here. But I believe MediaWiki can be tweaked to have "interlanguage links" extended into something more, like "German / Lowlevel" and "German / YaddaYadda", no?

As for "Oh, so many additional links per page", if you look at Wikipedia, you'll see that they tuck away nicely in the sidebar where they don't take up space.

And indeed, there have been repeated suggestions of localized versions of the OSDev Wiki. We always turned them down, because we felt (and rightly so, IMHO) that English as the lingua franca of software development should be enough for everyone, but there is interest for and effort by people to do things in their own language.

What it boils down to, I think, is this:

If information exists in other locales, should we 1) "pressure" for that information to be put into English, or 2) welcome (link) it as additional source of information for anyone speaking the language?

While I certainly think our Wiki and forum is a strong information source, I don't think we could consider ourselves exhaustive, or even capable of becoming "the one true source". I'd say link the information, it's not like that would be the instant end of our community in the babylonic language collapse.

What I would not want to see is any effort to translate / duplicate information that is provided in English. For me (as a German...), SE-related information in English has the "highest value", and information should flow towards it, not away from it.

[Kevin]

It's an unnecessary hassle, and anyone who can't read English is already most likely not going to have an easy time. Most useful articles are written in English, with examples in C, a language which uses English keywords. All the more highly recommended tutorials which are making all of the newbies think inside of a small, illogical box and making them ask illogical questions are written in English, so for you to even begin to read them to get all the bad ideas in them, you have to know English.

I think you're completely missing the point. Most Germans do understand and speak English. Even though it may not be perfect, what I write can be recognized as English, right? I'm also capable of reading English specs. Still, it's not the language that I use for everyday purposes and you're not going to change that. English is a language that I can and do use happily whereever it helps for communication, but it remains a foreign language. If there's some information in both German and English, I'll start with reading the German one and only quickly scan the English one for additional information.

it's based on a reluctance to make inaccurate, unofficial documentation more easily available, in possibly less precise forms. Google is more than good enough:

Well, in a lot of your reply you're arguing for shutting down the osdev.org wiki. That's really not related to interlanguage links or to the language the wiki articles are written in, but to your dislike of using anything other than official specs (and it's not as if specs were always clear: sometimes you'll find the correct interpretation of an ambiguous statement in the wiki).

Though there's one thing I'd like to know: When you started off with a Hello World kernel, did you read all related specs, or did you just take a tutorial? I find it hard to believe that you would actually have achieved your goal if you had started with the former.

you're more likely to come across official documentation from googling than to encounter it while lazily looking for "short", "easy to read" supplements on a wiki, and following cross-language links.

Actually, to be honest, I usually use the links at the end of a wiki article to find the specs. Googling them is often too hard and you'll find anything (including worse tutorials than on the wiki) but the official specs.

Even worse are Wikis which have information which has been interpreted, then translated from a subjective understanding into a condensed reference. I think anyone who has studied languages should understand that translations usually don't get mapped 1:1, or keep their original intent precisely as first encoded. Far less for a person who's paraphrasing and translating that paraphrasal.

Why do you presume that English articles are always based directly on the spec whereas non-English ones must be translations of the English articles? In my experience, both is wrong. In fact, I don't know of any Lowlevel article that was translated rather than written from scratch.

In other places you basically say that non-English articles have inherently lower quality than English ones. Do you have a really good justification for such bold claims?

[Combuster]

It's an unnecessary hassle, and anyone who can't read English is already most likely not going to have an easy time. Most useful articles are written in English, with examples in C, a language which uses English keywords. All the more highly recommended tutorials which are making all of the newbies think inside of a small, illogical box and making them ask illogical questions are written in English, so for you to even begin to read them to get all the bad ideas in them, you have to know English.

I think you're completely missing the point. Most Germans do understand and speak English. Even though it may not be perfect, what I write can be recognized as English, right? I'm also capable of reading English specs. Still, it's not the language that I use for everyday purposes and you're not going to change that. English is a language that I can and do use happily whereever it helps for communication, but it remains a foreign language. If there's some information in both German and English, I'll start with reading the German one and only quickly scan the English one for additional information.

The main point of his post was that avoiding the need to read the official documents will imminently result in a lower quality of the end product, and a larger influx of notorious "incapable n00bs". If you really are the wizard you claim to be, you must also know that there are far more inferior people, of which I consider we have some duty to protect them. Using yourself as an example is flawed: Can all aspiring OS developers in Germany read technical English? Obviously, No.

Though there's one thing I'd like to know: When you started off with a Hello World kernel, did you read all related specs, or did you just take a tutorial? I find it hard to believe that you would actually have achieved your goal if you had started with the former.

I learned my lesson the hard way: I started with a tutorial and it broke.

In other places you basically say that non-English articles have inherently lower quality than English ones. Do you have a really good justification for such bold claims?

Simple: In English, you can quote. In German, you cant. Think about it



As for the way to go, you can have your links if you really want - after all it's a wiki and I can't just stop you from editing, but I will keep up the anti-translation propaganda because things work better that way.

[gravaera]

Hi:

It's an unnecessary hassle, and anyone who can't read English is already most likely not going to have an easy time. Most useful articles are written in English, with examples in C, a language which uses English keywords. All the more highly recommended tutorials which are making all of the newbies think inside of a small, illogical box and making them ask illogical questions are written in English, so for you to even begin to read them to get all the bad ideas in them, you have to know English.

I think you're completely missing the point. Most Germans do understand and speak English. Even though it may not be perfect, what I write can be recognized as English, right? I'm also capable of reading English specs. Still, it's not the language that I use for everyday purposes and you're not going to change that. English is a language that I can and do use happily whereever it helps for communication, but it remains a foreign language. If there's some information in both German and English, I'll start with reading the German one and only quickly scan the English one for additional information.

It's not my intention to try to change what language you use everyday, and honestly, I'm not trying to change anything in fact. My previous post was just me expressing concern over something I think is a problem: take it at its face value.

it's based on a reluctance to make inaccurate, unofficial documentation more easily available, in possibly less precise forms. Google is more than good enough:

Well, in a lot of your reply you're arguing for shutting down the osdev.org wiki. That's really not related to interlanguage links or to the language the wiki articles are written in, but to your dislike of using anything other than official specs (and it's not as if specs were always clear: sometimes you'll find the correct interpretation of an ambiguous statement in the wiki).

The closest I came to suggesting closing the Wiki was when I said that "Wikis are already not a good thing": but given the overall idea behind my post, looking at this line, it should be interpreted not as gunning for a closing down of the Wiki, but simply a building statement to support my argument; I was trying to make it clear that Wikis are likely to contain possibly unreliable, second-hand interpretations of information, and are more likely to be less reliable than official documentation, and I used that statement to concrete it. It wasn't really a snipe at the OSDev.org wiki.

Though there's one thing I'd like to know: When you started off with a Hello World kernel, did you read all related specs, or did you just take a tutorial? I find it hard to believe that you would actually have achieved your goal if you had started with the former.

I've never written a kernel which printed "Hello world" to my screen, or that did anything similar: it makes no sense to me. In my current kernel, I wrote a full PMM + VMM without having a "printf()" for debugging. You may want to know what's so great about that. My PMM layer is not "normal" so to speak. I have support for certain things that other people don't which would have made that a bit harder than "writing a bitmap allocator". I wrote in small increments and tested furiously, debugging several deadlocks and other problems using for (;;){} loops and bochs' single stepping, and nothing more.

You're pretty much asking, "how did you begin, if not from tutorials?". That implied question is faulty at its base: you shouldn't be asking that, but "How did you begin, if not from a simple base?", and the answer would be: I did begin from a simple base: but that base was not tutorial-derived. It was more reading-oriented. I began overall, by looking at the "Bare Bones" article. On the first day, I realized that I only vaguely understood it. I took two weeks off from actually doing any further work, and read all kinds of articles, mostly using Wikipedia as a starting point, then spiraling outward to more documentation. After those two weeks, I moved on to attempt to implement a simple "skeleton" of what I thought I wanted my kernel to be. Within about two days it became obvious to me that my work was highly unportable, and very childish, and I didn't like the feel of it. I halted development, began reading again but this time, I kept a set of notebooks and used a push-point pencil and kept writing to myself in the first person, about designs that made sense to me, and kept reading without any implementation for about nine months. Along with this, I looked through LKML, and a clone of linux master and kept going until I understood my target topic, then moved on. an extremely important thing that newcomers are *not* getting is a set of comprehensive examples of "the common case", and then "the variations".

Portable, correct design is founded on knowing what is "platform dependent" and what is not. Most of these tutorials are steeped in the x86/IBM-PC-compatible platform, and even worse, too many of them don't state this, and even go so far as to imply that their concrete, PC-specific example code and the relevant explanation is actually cohesive, abstract theory. That is a fatal problem. So the newcomer gets flooded with a set of static ideas which are fixed to a highly ugly platform, and even thinks that these PC-specifics are all what the overall picture of kernel development looks like. In my opinion, it's a terrible trap.

I used this OSDev.org forum as a grounds for testing my learning: I tried answering other peoples' questions, both here and on #osdev even though I was not using the generally recommended learning base, and confirmed that I was learning well when I was becoming increasingly able to answer other peoples' questions, and shed light on issues that their tutorial bases could not. Anytime I encountered something that I didn't understand, I googled, and I read. What does this mean? It means that with hard work, and enough RTFM, you can do much better than if you were to follow tutorials. And the static, incorrect ideas that people who read tutorials get are less likely to come up when you prefer to read broadly. Am I saying that people should be able to get by without any starting point whatsoever, or trying to be elitist? No. Every complex system requires a simple base, and every long journey begins with one step.

On the contrary I'm saying that people should have a *better* starting base than the tutorials which are being promoted as good starting material currently. See, my beef is not with the idea of starting material, but with which starting material is used, and the way this starting material addresses the relevant points. Where can this "better" starting base be found? The answer is "no particular location". It's currently distributed across multiple locations, but if you look enough, you'll always be able to find it. Whether you need to email people from mailing lists, or some other tedious activity, the correct material is there. You may ask, "so how can people get to it if it's that hard to find?": the best answer is: "If you, seeing that this information is too difficult to obtain, feel daunted by it, go ahead and write a series of articles which should provide a core for a newcomer, then provide those resources at a single location".

As a result, I am against the idea of providing *more* of this, IMHO faulty starting material, in more languages, and linking to it more furiously from places where newcomers are likely to frequently browse. It does no good IMHO, and is simply a recipe for more and more disaster.

you're more likely to come across official documentation from googling than to encounter it while lazily looking for "short", "easy to read" supplements on a wiki, and following cross-language links.

Actually, to be honest, I usually use the links at the end of a wiki article to find the specs. Googling them is often too hard and you'll find anything (including worse tutorials than on the wiki) but the official specs.

This was an "I do it, so it must be right" type of argument, and I don't fare well with those since they're hard to counter: the person has effectively presented a subjective experience as argumentative material. I believe in the validity of the personal experience, so I usually don't argue those. So I'll skip it

Even worse are Wikis which have information which has been interpreted, then translated from a subjective understanding into a condensed reference. I think anyone who has studied languages should understand that translations usually don't get mapped 1:1, or keep their original intent precisely as first encoded. Far less for a person who's paraphrasing and translating that paraphrasal.

Why do you presume that English articles are always based directly on the spec whereas non-English ones must be translations of the English articles? In my experience, both is wrong. In fact, I don't know of any Lowlevel article that was translated rather than written from scratch.

Notice my wording: "Even worse are Wikis which do X", and not "Even worse is that Wikis do X": the former implies the set of Wikis that do X, and the latter implies that all Wikis as a collective set do X.

In other places you basically say that non-English articles have inherently lower quality than English ones. Do you have a really good justification for such bold claims?

I'm sorry, but I simple implied that translations of subjective understanding of a specification are likely to introduce inaccuracies. I'm not too sure, but I'm willing to stick my neck out to say that I don't think you can logically argue with that: it's a fact, or at least I believe so.

EDIT: Combuster posted while I was writing this up, so this is all written without having read his response.

--All the best
gravaera

[MasterLee]

Your are right it is most times better to read the untranslated original ( http://www.loongson.cn/product_info.php?id=31 ). As you can see there are more informations or at least pictures then in the translation ( http://www.loongson.cn/EN/product_info.php?id=35 ). But the problem is i can't read anything on original version. Not only that i didn't understand the language, also it seems i have the wrong font installed.
But learning Chinese will be an investment in the future anyway.

[Combuster]

If you are trying to include China's Firewall as designed by George Orwell, it is a whole different matter. And so is linking to a chinese manufacturer...

EDIT: They are selling MIPS-architecture processors. The MIPS specifications are still in English. Whatever relevant point you might have had, it looks like it failed.

[XanClic]

Can all aspiring OS developers in Germany read technical English? Obviously, No.

What do you mean by “obviously”? Anyway, I have to admit that's true. But I noticed that those who were unable to do so eventually read English specifications. Until then, I think they never visited osdev.org, but stayed in the German community.

In English, you can quote. In German, you cant. Think about it

I wouldn't be too sure about that; actually, we (Lowlevel) didn't quote anything so far, afaik. So let's take the German Wikipedia as an example: Whenever it quotes something, it uses the original language (which is e.g. English) and adds the translation of the statement. So why should quoting be impossible?

but I will keep up the anti-translation propaganda because things work better that way.

Well, actually I haven't seen any argument which supports the thesis that one shouldn't point to the German wiki, as far as I understood you, you just pointed out why that wiki must be worse than the osdev.org one. I could take your statement that there are people who cannot read technical English and want to write an OS, but those won't be using your wiki anyway. However, you could reply that those would be unable to write an OS then, and that'd be good because one should only be able to do so if one can read official specifications. But in my opinion, that's completely off-topic (interlanguage links won't change that).

I was trying to make it clear that Wikis are likely to contain possibly unreliable, second-hand interpretations of information, and are more likely to be less reliable than official documentation, and I used that statement to concrete it. It wasn't really a snipe at the OSDev.org wiki.

Wikis are likely to contain less reliable information, thus, this also concerns the osdev.org wiki.

As a result, I am against the idea of providing *more* of this, IMHO faulty starting material, in more languages, and linking to it more furiously from places where newcomers are likely to frequently browse. It does no good IMHO, and is simply a recipe for more and more disaster.

This is no argument (imho) against interlanguage links but against wikis at all.

Notice my wording: "Even worse are Wikis which do X", and not "Even worse is that Wikis do X": the former implies the set of Wikis that do X, and the latter implies that all Wikis as a collective set do X.

Thus, this argument doesn't apply to Lowlevel.

[MasterLee]

If you are trying to include China's Firewall as designed by George Orwell, it is a whole different matter. And so is linking to a Chinese manufacturer...

EDIT: They are selling MIPS-architecture processors. The MIPS specifications are still in English. Whatever relevant point you might have had, it looks like it failed.

Not True. They added Vector operation and about 200 Operations targeted on x86 Emulation. So only the basic information is in English.

[Solar]

Can all aspiring OS developers in Germany read technical English? Obviously, No.

What do you mean by “obviously”?

And what about the plethora of developers in Great Britain, Australia and the US of A who can't read technical English? Or even write a halfway intelligible forum post?

(Sorry, I wanted to put something lighthearted in this. I fear the tone here is a bit slipping as both sides dig in for the slaughter of "my wiki is better than yours".)

but I will keep up the anti-translation propaganda...

Note: There is no such thing as a pro-translation propaganda. This is about linking existing material into the OSDev wiki, which just so happens to be not English.

Unless I have severely misunderstood the Lowlevel fellows.

[Kevin]

(Sorry, I wanted to put something lighthearted in this. I fear the tone here is a bit slipping as both sides dig in for the slaughter of "my wiki is better than yours".)

That's not what I wanted to express. I think both wikis have valuable content - which is the reason why I would like to have the links in the first place. Now that we see that people seem to have all kinds of odd concerns, maybe it's best if I just recommend to Lowlevel that we stop the experiment and disable the interwiki links to osdev.org again.

The only reason that I even replied to gravaera was that I can't stand being told that my native language is inferior because it's not English.

Note: There is no such thing as a pro-translation propaganda. This is about linking existing material into the OSDev wiki, which just so happens to be not English.

Unless I have severely misunderstood the Lowlevel fellows.

I don't think you misunderstood - though you always have to consider that I read German wiki articles, so it's likely that just my English isn't good enough to notice.

[Brynet-Inc]

I can't stand being told that my native language is inferior because it's not English.

Your native language is inferior because it's not English.

But seriously, he didn't say that.

[Solar]

Your native language is inferior because it's not English.

/me slaps Brynet-Inc playfully over the head. Schnauze, Lübke.

@ Kevin:

Nothing can keep you from linking the OSDev wiki. Anyone who tells you what to link or not to link from your own website is a dork. Actually, we here should all feel honored to be linked by another OS development related website.

I suggest we let this rest a few days, on our side, to let the arguments sink in, then pick the thread up again with a vote. How does that sound?

[Kevin]

Maybe you should feel honoured. But in fact, the majority seems to annoyed already by our existence. As long as this is the case, I don't feel inclined to send even more people here who don't speak proper English. Feel free to do with this thread whatever you want and vote on it in a few days if you like. I'll accept the result, though I don't expect that it will be any different from the discussion, and so I'm not going to waste my time any longer on this.

Wer nicht will, der hat schon.

[Thomas]

Hi Folks,
Manuals may not be the most accurate things in the planet though. Manuals are written by the documentation team , they do not have much knowledge about the component than we engineers do. Actually they gets reviewed by us before going public.

It is foolish to assume that good engineers have good communication/documenting skills. Although it is good to have , I have seen many a bright engineers who does not have them. I think there is nothing wrong with supplementing information with info in other languages too. Just my 2 paisa .

--Thomas