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How one man created 6 million Wikipedia articles, and why he stopped (www.abc.net.au)

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

Alternate headline: How one man spammed Wikipedia

[+] Yoga@lemmy.ca 43 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] x00z@lemmy.world 30 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[-] fristislurper@feddit.nl 5 points 2 months ago

Please don't! Or at least make it possible to change the app language instead of following the system if you do. Plenty of apps have faulty 'translations' that just make the app unusable. Especially because app text typically has no context, so you get these weird literal translations.

Enjoy finding a literal english translation that corresponds to something I may want to do in your app!

[-] x00z@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

My apps default to the system language and use English as a fallback. If I implement multiple translations users can change it in their settings.

Anyways, like many other open source developers, I work for free and am open to PRs.

[-] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

It gives Philippine people the ability to edit the translation directly

The minimum requirement for a page in their wiki should be exactly that. If it's just AI translation, don't do it. If it's a translation that a human then fixed and tweaked to make readable, do it.

[-] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] match@pawb.social 2 points 2 months ago

It's weird to do this at all but at least he targeted a language with tens of millions of speakers (most of whom are multilingual) and not, say, Scots

[-] 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

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