4 ms·

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 w

by 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.
yorwba 7y ago
Many Wikipedia articles start out as just a few sentences and then slowly accumulate content. To give an example I noticed recently, compare https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pu-Xian_Min&oldid=141354280 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pu-Xian_Min&oldid... in 2007 vs. now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-Xian_Min https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-Xian_Min Having some basic information already present means that potential editors won't have to start from an empty page, making it easier to see where content can be added. Of course if what you're interested in is actually how much humans contribute to Wikipedia in a given language, you'll need to ignore bot activity, but that doesn't make it useless.
skywhopper 7y ago
Indeed, I found myself very curious about why the bot of "Swedish physicist Sverker Johansson" was writing articles in Cebuano (a language mainly spoken in the southern Philipines). It turns out that Cebuano is his wife's native language. I'm curious about the actual quality of these articles. The OP says "the majority [of a random 1000] were surprisingly well constructed", but it's not clear what that even means. Does the author of the article know Cebuano (or Swedish or Waray-Waray, which are other languages this bot writes in) well enough to judge? Or does it just mean the articles looked like regular articles (ie they have all the infoboxes and other trappings of human-editor-driven articles)?
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  "Well constructed" sounds like a measure that a content farm would use. The measure for an encyclopedia should be "accurate", and based on the number of times I've seen machine translation completely garble meaning (while maintaining correct structure), I doubt these articles would score highly on that measure.
tomrod 7y ago
I'm fluent in Visayan (Cebuano & Waray-Waray). The articles are hard to read, but no harder than, say, the translated Bible. I honestly didn't realize they were bot-constructed. very cool!
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  How often are they inaccurate though? I worked for a content-heavy startup that thought it was a good idea to machine-translate all our content. A brief skim through the translations easily found many instances where the meaning of sentences was entirely reversed.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    The articles I have read have generally been history / geography. They tend to be okay. Can't speak to tech / science / art in the Visayan space.
rcthompson 7y ago
The counterpoint is that automatically-created stub articles serve to encourage community editing. It's much easier to edit an existing article than create a new one from scratch. This is one of the key principles behind the Gene Wiki project[1], which creates stub articles for human genes for this reason: > Basic articles (called “stubs”) were systematically created based on content extracted from structured databases. These stubs are then edited by the broader Wikipedia community, while “bots” keep the structured content in sync with the source databases. (The "structured content" mentioned is the info box on the right-hand side of a gene article. Nowadays I believe this is populated directly from Wikidata[2].) Note: I am a member of the lab that runs Gene Wiki, but my work is unrelated. --- [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5944608/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5944608/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26989148 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26989148
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  This seems fine as long as the articles are clearly marked as machine-generated. Machine translation regularly garbles the meaning of text, while producing readable text that has correct sentence structure etc. This is a major problem in an encyclopedia.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    The subtitle of the article makes it sound like the text in question is machine-translated, but it is created by filling a template with structured data. So long as the template is correct and the data source is accurate, the meaning won't be garbled.
    - _-___________-_ 7y ago
      I can't really see how the number of translated articles could be as huge as it is using only that approach.
      - rcthompson 7y ago
redis_mlc 7y ago
> since Cebuano speakers are likely to be fluent in Tagalog and/or English as well Likely, but not always. I've encountered areas, for example Bohol, in that region where only the local language was well-understood. And "Taglish" is about as understandable as Japlish - lots of similarities to English, but what does it mean? Same in Indonesia. Outside of the main cities on Sumatra, especially with older people, only the local language is used daily.

by 4cao 7y ago

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.

yorwba 7y ago

Many Wikipedia articles start out as just a few sentences and then slowly accumulate content. To give an example I noticed recently, compare https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pu-Xian_Min&oldid=141354280 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pu-Xian_Min&oldid... in 2007 vs. now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-Xian_Min https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-Xian_Min Having some basic information already present means that potential editors won't have to start from an empty page, making it easier to see where content can be added. Of course if what you're interested in is actually how much humans contribute to Wikipedia in a given language, you'll need to ignore bot activity, but that doesn't make it useless.

skywhopper 7y ago

Indeed, I found myself very curious about why the bot of "Swedish physicist Sverker Johansson" was writing articles in Cebuano (a language mainly spoken in the southern Philipines). It turns out that Cebuano is his wife's native language. I'm curious about the actual quality of these articles. The OP says "the majority [of a random 1000] were surprisingly well constructed", but it's not clear what that even means. Does the author of the article know Cebuano (or Swedish or Waray-Waray, which are other languages this bot writes in) well enough to judge? Or does it just mean the articles looked like regular articles (ie they have all the infoboxes and other trappings of human-editor-driven articles)?

_-___________-_ 7y ago
"Well constructed" sounds like a measure that a content farm would use. The measure for an encyclopedia should be "accurate", and based on the number of times I've seen machine translation completely garble meaning (while maintaining correct structure), I doubt these articles would score highly on that measure.

tomrod 7y ago

I'm fluent in Visayan (Cebuano & Waray-Waray). The articles are hard to read, but no harder than, say, the translated Bible. I honestly didn't realize they were bot-constructed. very cool!

_-___________-_ 7y ago
How often are they inaccurate though? I worked for a content-heavy startup that thought it was a good idea to machine-translate all our content. A brief skim through the translations easily found many instances where the meaning of sentences was entirely reversed.
- tomrod 7y ago
  The articles I have read have generally been history / geography. They tend to be okay. Can't speak to tech / science / art in the Visayan space.

rcthompson 7y ago

The counterpoint is that automatically-created stub articles serve to encourage community editing. It's much easier to edit an existing article than create a new one from scratch. This is one of the key principles behind the Gene Wiki project[1], which creates stub articles for human genes for this reason: > Basic articles (called “stubs”) were systematically created based on content extracted from structured databases. These stubs are then edited by the broader Wikipedia community, while “bots” keep the structured content in sync with the source databases. (The "structured content" mentioned is the info box on the right-hand side of a gene article. Nowadays I believe this is populated directly from Wikidata[2].) Note: I am a member of the lab that runs Gene Wiki, but my work is unrelated. --- [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5944608/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5944608/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26989148 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26989148

_-___________-_ 7y ago
This seems fine as long as the articles are clearly marked as machine-generated. Machine translation regularly garbles the meaning of text, while producing readable text that has correct sentence structure etc. This is a major problem in an encyclopedia.
- yorwba 7y ago
  The subtitle of the article makes it sound like the text in question is machine-translated, but it is created by filling a template with structured data. So long as the template is correct and the data source is accurate, the meaning won't be garbled.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    I can't really see how the number of translated articles could be as huge as it is using only that approach.
    - rcthompson 7y ago

redis_mlc 7y ago

> since Cebuano speakers are likely to be fluent in Tagalog and/or English as well Likely, but not always. I've encountered areas, for example Bohol, in that region where only the local language was well-understood. And "Taglish" is about as understandable as Japlish - lots of similarities to English, but what does it mean? Same in Indonesia. Outside of the main cities on Sumatra, especially with older people, only the local language is used daily.