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How one man created 6 million Wikipedia articles, and why he stopped (www.abc.net.au)
submitted 3 months ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[-] thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 28 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language

Edit

Articles on the fiasco

https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689

https://www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html?_fsig=8ckIe_eK7juchNpKgsYQww--%7EA

https://www.thenational.scot/news/18679711.scots-wikipedia-us-teen-wrote-swathes-articles-devastated-reactions/

[-] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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

this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
185 points (97.9% liked)

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