10 ms·

The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly by one bot

140 points by jxub 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
qwerty456127 7y ago
So they mean to tell us "insignificant" facts and articles must be deleted?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- brodo 7y ago
  The German Wikipedia would be twice as big if mods weren’t obsessed with some made up criteria of relevance.
  - linksnapzz 7y ago
    Wait, the Germans are being picky and pedantic? Way to travel in unfortunate national stereotypes...:-)
    - markdown 7y ago
      All articles that fail to meet criteria are to be purged.
  - FalconSensei 7y ago
    That sad. In the end, all this would (if not already) make then just go for the English version. I already do this (I'm Brazilian) as the Portuguese version is nowhere near the international (English) version in terms of completeness and being up-to-date. BTW, do you have a link for their terms on "relevance"?
    - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      The English version isn't particularly free. I attempted to add a page about a file format that is fairly well used but doesn't have a huge amount of information online about it. The only real source is a zip file from a companies website which contains a pdf with the file spec and some example programs. Unfortunately the editors decided that due to the lack of referencable sources, they would rather no article exist at all.
      - qwerty456127 7y ago
        This bullshit policy drives me mad. I will start donating regularly once it's cancelled. Not sooner, nor later.
        Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        I understand it for some cases where the mods just need to stop people making up random crap on topics that don't exist or can't be verified. But in this case a single reference is more than enough to write the whole page because the spec is literally the only source of truth on the topic. Unfortunately I think the mods may be too passionate about "protecting the integrity of wikipedia" that they let legitimate content be deleted. It also doesn't help that the wikipedia UI for disputes and edits is really confusing and I had a hard time trying to work out what was going on or how I communicate to this moderator. The whole system is designed for power users only.
        scandinavegan 7y ago
        It's important to note that there are not only "the mods", but two opposing factions in Wikipedia: the Deletionists and the Inclusionists. [1] I too agree that we don't need articles on someone's cat, but I've had articles deleted as not notable on indie web comics and indie role-playing games with hundreds or thousands of readers or copies sold. I thought that the fact that the RPG was published and publicly available, and was being discussed in RPG forums would make it notable enough, especially when it was mentioned as an inspiration for rules in more traditional RPGs. But since they hadn't been mentioned in any published articles they were deleted and there was no real way for me to fight it. I had added stuff like the list of contributors, publishing year, and overview of the rules and setting, with no personal discussion of the game. The result was that I stopped trying to improve Wikipedia, because I don't have the time or interest to fight people with an infinite amount of time that deletes my additions. My main contribution to Wikipedia wouldn't have been on the articles on Barack Obama or World War II anyway, as they already have people who are experts that add information. I could have brought information on my specialized topics of interest, but realized that they would all seem non-notable to someone who's not interested in the same thing and would be deleted. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...
brokensegue 7y ago
Slightly pedantic but the largest "Wikipedia" (depending on how you define it) is http://wikidata.org/ http://wikidata.org/ and it's also primarily written by bots.
- playpause 7y ago
  That’s a wiki, not a Wikipedia.
  - brokensegue 7y ago
    but both are wikimedia projects
- suprfsat 7y ago
  And it's a data model that's actually suited to being written by bots. Instead of … whatever this is.
peterburkimsher 7y ago
I discovered this in 2018, when comparing lists of languages supported by different software and the number of speakers. https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/#wikipedia https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/#wikipedia Having machine-translated content is powerful for SEO, but I don't know how practical that is for Cebuano. It would be nice for English to no longer be practically required for people to become computer literate.
- airstrike 7y ago
  > It would be nice for English to no longer be practically required for people to become computer literate. In turn, you'll get "every other language becomes practically required for people to be able to communicate about computers"
  - FalconSensei 7y ago
    Yes. In the end, we need one common language so that we can communicate with people around the globe, and that's not only about computers, but everything.
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  > It would be nice for English to no longer be practically required for people to become computer literate. French here. We are terrible at english in my country. Still, the fact most information in computing is shared in english is a god send. Sure, you have to learn it, but then: - no need to search for it in so many languages - no need to produce translations of tutorials/docs/comments in so many languages - the community to share and communicated with is huge and diverse - english is way more efficient than french, spanish, german or chinese to talk about technical stuff
  - seventh-chord 7y ago
    Genuinely curious about your last point (don't know much about the topic). Is english intrinsically better at this, or is it because of the presence of jargon? Is it a studied phenomena, or is it something most people feel?
4cao 7y ago
This endeavor looks largely orthogonal to what the objectives of an online encyclopedia should be. Creating as many stub articles as possible and filling them with "formulaic, generic, and reusable templated sentences with spots for specific information" seems more like a recipe for an automated content farm than for "disseminating the sum of human knowledge." It would be most interesting to know what the 148 active Cebuano Wikipedia users think of the 5,331,028 articles the bot created, ostensibly for them. Too bad nobody apparently cared to ask. In particular, since Cebuano speakers are likely to be fluent in Tagalog and/or English as well, they can easily use one of the other Wikipedia editions too. Without the hyperactive bot, the much smaller Cebuano Wikipedia would arguably be more relevant, reflecting topics truly of interest to the community. While the number of articles is a convenient way of comparing Wikipedia language editions, it only works as such to the extent that the articles are kept to a certain standard. It seems to me that what we are observing here is yet another example of the situation that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  There are many viewpoints. As a counter example, consider the article for one of the topics you mention ("truly of interest to the community"). A user could come across a concept (or person, place, etc.) that they aren't familiar with, click a link, find a short and formulaic but truthful summary, then return to continue reading - all within their own wikipedia. That's useful.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    How can you ensure that it's truthful? Machine translation garbles meaning all the time.
    - metalliqaz 7y ago
      The bot in question essentially takes a good external database of facts, and populates a stub article with a fill-in-the-blank method. It's not that complicated.
- 7y ago
sings 7y ago
I always thought it was a bit bizarre that different language editions of Wikipedia contain different information. It seems the focus should be more on translation than content creation. Maybe that isn’t practical with the current structure, but surely the aim should be a definitive knowledge graph rather than a disparate and unevenly duplicated set of articles. Just my two cents – I am sure many have put a lot of thought into how to best tackle this.
- telesilla 7y ago
  I'd rather see Wikipedia find a way to link these different sites in more interesting ways, for example if I go to the entry for Carnival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival), why doesn't it link me to the Brazilian (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval), Spanish (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval) or Italian (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnevale https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnevale) entries for which I might learn more, using auto-translate?
  - wodenokoto 7y ago
    It links to articles in over 80 languages. So on one hand it does a really good job at cross linking. On the other hand, missing out on linking to the languages you mention seems like a huge error.
    - samatman 7y ago
      It does link to all those languages. I think what the grandparent was referring to is that there's no way to indicate that an article in another language might be interesting in some way. Such as, for Carnival, being written in a language spoken by a people who celebrate it, or for Alexander the Great, highlighting the languages spoken in territories he conquered. It's an interesting proposal, but I get a headache just thinking about the politics of implementing it.
  - carlinmack 7y ago
    All of those languages and more are linked in the sidebar, what would you prefer to see?
tangoalpha 7y ago
Clicking on random article on https://ceb.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:Random#/random https://ceb.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:Random#/random , looks like every article is that of either a tree, or an animal, or an insect, or a place...
- acqq 7y ago
  And looking at one whole initial article it generated: https://ceb.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klakkabekken_(suba_sa_Noruwega,_Odda)&oldid=14081773 https://ceb.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klakkabekken_(su... it describes where the place is and gives the citation as "found in the Geonames.org database".
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  The bot in question was originally created for plants and animals, so that makes sense.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tomrod 7y ago
I like this because growth and progress of knowledge base, regardless of language or hosting platform, is incremental and cumulative. Wikipedia shows this effectively in the English channel because it happened so quickly. But even the legacy encyclopedias did this through centuries. Whether a bot lays the groundwork from other reference points or dedicated humans do it is sort of immaterial, I think, because the very long run this benefits the people who speak this language. In an age where languages are dying with their last speakers, Visayan has done much to preserve their diversity -- although not a written/codified language, volunteers give radio broadcasts in the language, books are published in it (here the lack of codification shows by variance in spelling, verb conjugation, and sentence structure), and similar. Thank you to this wikipedian for doing something to preserve a wonderful language (I mention in another comment I am fluent and miss the regular speaking of it).

140 points by jxub 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

qwerty456127 7y ago

So they mean to tell us "insignificant" facts and articles must be deleted?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
brodo 7y ago
The German Wikipedia would be twice as big if mods weren’t obsessed with some made up criteria of relevance.
- linksnapzz 7y ago
  Wait, the Germans are being picky and pedantic? Way to travel in unfortunate national stereotypes...:-)
  - markdown 7y ago
    All articles that fail to meet criteria are to be purged.
- FalconSensei 7y ago
  That sad. In the end, all this would (if not already) make then just go for the English version. I already do this (I'm Brazilian) as the Portuguese version is nowhere near the international (English) version in terms of completeness and being up-to-date. BTW, do you have a link for their terms on "relevance"?
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    The English version isn't particularly free. I attempted to add a page about a file format that is fairly well used but doesn't have a huge amount of information online about it. The only real source is a zip file from a companies website which contains a pdf with the file spec and some example programs. Unfortunately the editors decided that due to the lack of referencable sources, they would rather no article exist at all.
    - qwerty456127 7y ago
      This bullshit policy drives me mad. I will start donating regularly once it's cancelled. Not sooner, nor later.
      - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        I understand it for some cases where the mods just need to stop people making up random crap on topics that don't exist or can't be verified. But in this case a single reference is more than enough to write the whole page because the spec is literally the only source of truth on the topic. Unfortunately I think the mods may be too passionate about "protecting the integrity of wikipedia" that they let legitimate content be deleted. It also doesn't help that the wikipedia UI for disputes and edits is really confusing and I had a hard time trying to work out what was going on or how I communicate to this moderator. The whole system is designed for power users only.
        scandinavegan 7y ago
        It's important to note that there are not only "the mods", but two opposing factions in Wikipedia: the Deletionists and the Inclusionists. [1] I too agree that we don't need articles on someone's cat, but I've had articles deleted as not notable on indie web comics and indie role-playing games with hundreds or thousands of readers or copies sold. I thought that the fact that the RPG was published and publicly available, and was being discussed in RPG forums would make it notable enough, especially when it was mentioned as an inspiration for rules in more traditional RPGs. But since they hadn't been mentioned in any published articles they were deleted and there was no real way for me to fight it. I had added stuff like the list of contributors, publishing year, and overview of the rules and setting, with no personal discussion of the game. The result was that I stopped trying to improve Wikipedia, because I don't have the time or interest to fight people with an infinite amount of time that deletes my additions. My main contribution to Wikipedia wouldn't have been on the articles on Barack Obama or World War II anyway, as they already have people who are experts that add information. I could have brought information on my specialized topics of interest, but realized that they would all seem non-notable to someone who's not interested in the same thing and would be deleted. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...

brokensegue 7y ago

Slightly pedantic but the largest "Wikipedia" (depending on how you define it) is http://wikidata.org/ http://wikidata.org/ and it's also primarily written by bots.

playpause 7y ago
That’s a wiki, not a Wikipedia.
- brokensegue 7y ago
  but both are wikimedia projects
suprfsat 7y ago
And it's a data model that's actually suited to being written by bots. Instead of … whatever this is.

peterburkimsher 7y ago

I discovered this in 2018, when comparing lists of languages supported by different software and the number of speakers. https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/#wikipedia https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/#wikipedia Having machine-translated content is powerful for SEO, but I don't know how practical that is for Cebuano. It would be nice for English to no longer be practically required for people to become computer literate.

airstrike 7y ago
> It would be nice for English to no longer be practically required for people to become computer literate. In turn, you'll get "every other language becomes practically required for people to be able to communicate about computers"
- FalconSensei 7y ago
  Yes. In the end, we need one common language so that we can communicate with people around the globe, and that's not only about computers, but everything.
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
> It would be nice for English to no longer be practically required for people to become computer literate. French here. We are terrible at english in my country. Still, the fact most information in computing is shared in english is a god send. Sure, you have to learn it, but then: - no need to search for it in so many languages - no need to produce translations of tutorials/docs/comments in so many languages - the community to share and communicated with is huge and diverse - english is way more efficient than french, spanish, german or chinese to talk about technical stuff
- seventh-chord 7y ago
  Genuinely curious about your last point (don't know much about the topic). Is english intrinsically better at this, or is it because of the presence of jargon? Is it a studied phenomena, or is it something most people feel?

4cao 7y ago

This endeavor looks largely orthogonal to what the objectives of an online encyclopedia should be. Creating as many stub articles as possible and filling them with "formulaic, generic, and reusable templated sentences with spots for specific information" seems more like a recipe for an automated content farm than for "disseminating the sum of human knowledge." It would be most interesting to know what the 148 active Cebuano Wikipedia users think of the 5,331,028 articles the bot created, ostensibly for them. Too bad nobody apparently cared to ask. In particular, since Cebuano speakers are likely to be fluent in Tagalog and/or English as well, they can easily use one of the other Wikipedia editions too. Without the hyperactive bot, the much smaller Cebuano Wikipedia would arguably be more relevant, reflecting topics truly of interest to the community. While the number of articles is a convenient way of comparing Wikipedia language editions, it only works as such to the extent that the articles are kept to a certain standard. It seems to me that what we are observing here is yet another example of the situation that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

metalliqaz 7y ago
There are many viewpoints. As a counter example, consider the article for one of the topics you mention ("truly of interest to the community"). A user could come across a concept (or person, place, etc.) that they aren't familiar with, click a link, find a short and formulaic but truthful summary, then return to continue reading - all within their own wikipedia. That's useful.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  How can you ensure that it's truthful? Machine translation garbles meaning all the time.
  - metalliqaz 7y ago
    The bot in question essentially takes a good external database of facts, and populates a stub article with a fill-in-the-blank method. It's not that complicated.
7y ago

sings 7y ago

I always thought it was a bit bizarre that different language editions of Wikipedia contain different information. It seems the focus should be more on translation than content creation. Maybe that isn’t practical with the current structure, but surely the aim should be a definitive knowledge graph rather than a disparate and unevenly duplicated set of articles. Just my two cents – I am sure many have put a lot of thought into how to best tackle this.

telesilla 7y ago
I'd rather see Wikipedia find a way to link these different sites in more interesting ways, for example if I go to the entry for Carnival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival), why doesn't it link me to the Brazilian (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval), Spanish (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval) or Italian (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnevale https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnevale) entries for which I might learn more, using auto-translate?
- wodenokoto 7y ago
  It links to articles in over 80 languages. So on one hand it does a really good job at cross linking. On the other hand, missing out on linking to the languages you mention seems like a huge error.
  - samatman 7y ago
    It does link to all those languages. I think what the grandparent was referring to is that there's no way to indicate that an article in another language might be interesting in some way. Such as, for Carnival, being written in a language spoken by a people who celebrate it, or for Alexander the Great, highlighting the languages spoken in territories he conquered. It's an interesting proposal, but I get a headache just thinking about the politics of implementing it.
- carlinmack 7y ago
  All of those languages and more are linked in the sidebar, what would you prefer to see?

tangoalpha 7y ago

Clicking on random article on https://ceb.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:Random#/random https://ceb.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:Random#/random , looks like every article is that of either a tree, or an animal, or an insect, or a place...

acqq 7y ago
And looking at one whole initial article it generated: https://ceb.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klakkabekken_(suba_sa_Noruwega,_Odda)&oldid=14081773 https://ceb.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klakkabekken_(su... it describes where the place is and gives the citation as "found in the Geonames.org database".
metalliqaz 7y ago
The bot in question was originally created for plants and animals, so that makes sense.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tomrod 7y ago

I like this because growth and progress of knowledge base, regardless of language or hosting platform, is incremental and cumulative. Wikipedia shows this effectively in the English channel because it happened so quickly. But even the legacy encyclopedias did this through centuries. Whether a bot lays the groundwork from other reference points or dedicated humans do it is sort of immaterial, I think, because the very long run this benefits the people who speak this language. In an age where languages are dying with their last speakers, Visayan has done much to preserve their diversity -- although not a written/codified language, volunteers give radio broadcasts in the language, books are published in it (here the lack of codification shows by variance in spelling, verb conjugation, and sentence structure), and similar. Thank you to this wikipedian for doing something to preserve a wonderful language (I mention in another comment I am fluent and miss the regular speaking of it).