A single bot generated and published millions of articles on the largest non-English version of Wikipedia. The results caused a rift among editors — and a glimpse of what the online encyclopedia might face from AI.

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.

  • Chronographs@lemmy.zipEnglish
    19·
    7 days ago

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

    • Yoga@lemmy.caEnglish
      22·
      7 days ago

      He cited one “ridiculous” example where entries went wrong. In the submission for Telekinesis, the description was written in neither Scots nor English and read: “Telekinesis es a form of movnig ebjocts with yor maind.”

      I’m sorry but even for a 12 year old that’s comedically stupid.