How one man created 6 million Wikipedia articles, and why he stopped (www.abc.net.au)
from Tea@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 15 Apr 12:39
https://programming.dev/post/28653021

With nearly 7 million articles, the English-language edition of Wikipedia is by many measures the largest encyclopedia in the world.

The second-largest edition of Wikipedia boasts just over 6 million articles. It isn’t French, or Spanish, or Chinese Wikipedia.

It’s Cebuano: a language spoken mostly in the southern Philippines.

But Cebuano Wikipedia didn’t grow with the help of thousands of volunteer editors, as its English counterpart did. Most of the articles come from one person: Swedish linguist Sverker Johansson.

Dr Johansson designed a program, dubbed “lsjbot”, which generated millions of articles in several languages, but particularly Cebuano.

It also laid bare a debate which Wikipedia has been grappling with since its inception, and which artificial intelligence (AI) is making ever more pressing.

#technology

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Amoxtli@thelemmy.club on 15 Apr 13:24 next collapse

Better than nothing I guess.

catloaf@lemm.ee on 15 Apr 13:36 collapse

Unless it’s inaccurate, in which case it’s worse than nothing

Aatube@kbin.melroy.org on 15 Apr 13:57 collapse

Lsjbot generates articles by taking information from online databases, mostly on biology and geography, and fitting the data into a set number of pre-written sentences.

Volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, called Wikipedians, found many of the Cebuano-language pages had grammatical and sometimes factual errors, thanks to imperfect translations.

Yoga@lemmy.ca on 15 Apr 15:10 collapse

At best it’s wordy fluff better presented as the original databases and at worst it’s false information pretending to be fluff.

GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml on 15 Apr 13:25 next collapse

Alternate headline: How one man spammed Wikipedia

mediocreme_ow@lemm.ee on 15 Apr 13:44 next collapse

woah! i speak Cebuano, yet I didn’t know a Cebuano Wikipedia exists :0

Gregorech@lemmy.world on 15 Apr 15:07 collapse

Time to start editing…

thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe on 15 Apr 14:33 next collapse

The Scots wiki had the same problem. A teenage American who didn’t speak Scots edited and created 10s of thousands of entries

For those not aware Scots is a Germanic language that split from Old English back about 700-800 years ago - closely related to modern english like frisian is, but also retaining many words lost to english (some of which are retained in Swedish / Dutch etc). It is distinct from standard scottish english.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language

Edit

Articles on the fiasco

inews.co.uk/…/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-n…

www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html?_…

thenational.scot/…/18679711.scots-wikipedia-us-te…

Chronographs@lemmy.zip on 15 Apr 14:51 collapse

Little better because this guy is actually machine translating it and not just typing what a Scottish accent sounds like phonetically lol

Yoga@lemmy.ca on 15 Apr 15:25 collapse

He cited one “ridiculous” example where entries went wrong. In the submission for Telekinesis, the description was written in neither Scots nor English and read: “Telekinesis es a form of movnig ebjocts with yor maind.”

I’m sorry but even for a 12 year old that’s comedically stupid.

Yoga@lemmy.ca on 15 Apr 15:19 collapse

This whole thing is just so incomprehensiblely stupid and real world usage numbers prove it:

According to Wikimedia Statistics, Cebuano Wikipedia currently reels in tens of thousands of page views from the Philippines each month.

English Wikipedia, meanwhile, gets more than 100 million Filipino viewers per month.

If people wanted AN AUTOMATED TRANSLATION they could just go to the English page and use one of the many free page translation tools that exist. Who even asked him to do this? Or is it just more white saviour complex?

sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 15 Apr 16:48 next collapse

They’re so busy asking if they could they didn’t ask if they should.

Same with the guys who made the AR glasses that use face recognition to automatically dox people.

x00z@lemmy.world on 15 Apr 17:29 collapse

It gives Philippine people the ability to edit the translation directly, eventually having their own version of it. As long as the information is correct and it’s only an occasional grammatical error, this is quite a good thing to do.

I have translations in the apps I write, and I just generate an automatic translation for languages I do not speak. If anything is wrong, people will correct it and I’ll end up with a fully correct translation.

It is very common.