this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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How one man created 6 million Wikipedia articles, and why he stopped (www.abc.net.au)
submitted 1 week ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] x00z@lemmy.world 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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 1 week 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 1 week 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.