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.

  • thanksforallthefish@literature.cafeEnglish
    29·
    7 days 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--~A

    https://www.thenational.scot/news/18679711.scots-wikipedia-us-teen-wrote-swathes-articles-devastated-reactions/

    • 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.

  • Yoga@lemmy.caEnglish
    579·
    7 days ago

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

    According to Wikimedia Statistics, Cebuano Wikipedia currently reels in tens of thousands of page views from the Philippines each month.

    English Wikipedia, meanwhile, gets more than 100 million Filipino viewers per month.

    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?

    • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
      332·
      6 days 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.nlEnglish
        7·
        6 days 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.worldEnglish
          3·
          6 days 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.worldEnglish
        22·
        6 days 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.zoneEnglish
      162·
      6 days 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.socialEnglish
      3·
      6 days 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

    • orcrist@lemm.eeEnglish
      51·
      6 days ago

      Except no, it’s really not. The golden rule of automatic translation is to let the reader do it when they want to.