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submitted 2 months ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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[-] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 85 points 2 months ago

Alternate headline: How one man spammed Wikipedia

[-] thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 28 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 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 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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

[-] mediocreme_ow@lemm.ee 21 points 2 months ago

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

[-] Gregorech@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago

Time to start editing....

[-] Amoxtli@thelemmy.club 8 points 2 months ago

Better than nothing I guess.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 45 points 2 months ago

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

[-] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 24 points 2 months ago

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.

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

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