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