Released in April 2002, eBook #5000 was “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci” (written in the early 16th century), as an English translation from Italian, its original language. Since its release, it has regularly stayed in the top 100 downloaded ebooks.
There were works in 25 languages in early 2004, in 42 languages in July 2005, including Sanskrit and the Mayan languages, and in 59 languages in October 2010. The ten main languages were English (with 28,441 ebooks on 7 October 2010), French (1,659 ebooks), German (709 ebooks), Finnish (536 ebooks), Dutch (496 ebooks), Portuguese (473 ebooks), Chinese (405 ebooks), Spanish (295 ebooks), Italian (250 ebooks), and Greek (101 ebooks). The next languages were Latin, Esperanto, Swedish and Tagalog.
When machine translation will be judged 99% satisfactory, we may be able to read literary classics in a choice of many languages. The machine translated ebooks won't compete with the work of literary translators and their labor of love during days and months if not years, but they will allow readers to get the gist of some literary works that have never been translated so far, or only translated in a few languages for commercial reasons.
The output of translation software could then be proofread by human translators, in a similar way the output of OCR software is proofread by the volunteers of Distributed Proofreaders. So, may be, we will see the creation of Distributed Translators one day, as a partner or sister project of Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg.
2001 > WIKIPEDIA, A COLLABORATIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA
[Summary] Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry resigned later on) as a global free collaborative online encyclopedia, financed by donations, with no advertising. Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can write, edit, correct and improve information throughout the encyclopedia, with people contributing under a pseudonym. The articles stay the property of their authors, and can be freely used according to Creative Commons or GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License). Wikipedia quickly became the largest reference website. It was in the top ten websites in December 2006, and in the top five websites in 2008. In May 2007, Wikipedia had 7 million articles in 192 languages, including 1.8 million articles in English, 589,000 articles in German, 500,000 articles in French, 260,000 articles in Portuguese, and 236,000 articles in Spanish. Wikipedia celebrated its tenth anniversary in January 2011 with 17 million articles in 270 languages et 400 million individual visits per month for all websites.
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Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry resigned later on) as a global free collaborative online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia was financed by donations, with no advertising. Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can write, edit, correct and improve information throughout the encyclopedia, with people contributing under a pseudonym. The articles stay the property of their authors, and can be freely used according to Creative Commons or GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License).
Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, founded in June 2003, which has run a number of other projects, beginning with Wiktionary (launched in December 2002) and Wikibooks (launched in June 2003), followed by Wikiquote, Wikisource (texts from public domain), Wikimedia Commons (multimedia), Wikispecies (animals and plants), Wikinews and Wikiversity (textbooks).