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RE: Resources
they should get the wikipedia people to moderate...
this is somewhat reminiscent of a story i read a long time ago--one of those science fiction day-after-tomorrow kind of deals--where the UN put webcams all over an Iranian nuclear reactor, or something to that effect, and volunteers all over the world peeked in on it during their lunch breaks to make sure that nobody was breaking the seals.
here's a question: out of a sample of people
1. fluent in both arabic and english
2. with internet connections
3. with enough interest in the topic at hand to participate
are there more:
1. people with an interest in supporting the bush administration
2. people with an interest in giving it a black eye
3. people out for the truth, and nothing more?
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RE: Resources
Once again, much like the experiences of soldiers in Iraq, there will be an opportunity to skip the hype-injecting media and get closer to the source.
Yeah, and that's precisely why I personally think some of the sources I linked went out of their way to discredit this program. I mean, come on. 48k boxes of documents in Arabic and the Bush administration is going to cherry-pick documents to justify their reasons for going to war!? There was also a lot of repeating the slogan "If they knew where the WMD were or that al Qaeda was involved, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops".
I also like the "open source" aspect of this. Many people think translation is a straight forward process, that A=>B. There are a lot of subtleties and nuances to translating some languages, and some things do not translate well and are open to interpretation. Things like body language, tone, etc. play a factor in the spoken word. Translators can also screw you over if you trust them without verification. The US (and other countries) have had problems, notably in Bosnia, Somalia, and in Iraq, with heavily biased translators lying to us or to the locals because they were from a group the translator opposed. This will be more like scientific method at work here. So if person A makes some fantastic claim as to what document #41446BAQ says, then all the other readers can shift to that document and verify what it says to confirm or deny. It's not at all like Rush Limbaugh's or Al Franken's personal Arabic translator is going to be doing the translating without someone checking behind them, as one of the articles implied.
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