6 ms·

Sweden just claimed the world’s second-largest Wikipedia

68 points by lelf 12y ago

SEJeff 12y ago
Likely exclusively due to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033600 Who runs a bot that makes millions of shitty stub articles.
- smackfu 12y ago
  Which is most of what this article is about...
  - SEJeff 12y ago
    I thought it was fitting to link to the HN discussion, but actually linked it before reading TFA. Shame on me.
asgard1024 12y ago
This article poses a real question whether computer generated articles are suitable for encyclopedia consumed by humans. Speaking of this, I would love to see Wikipedia in machine-readable language. Something like CYC project. Edit: I know of WikiData, but there should be an unstructured analog to that.
- hav 12y ago
  As long as the content of those articles is relevant and accurate, I don't see how that would impact on the suitability of the articles in question. Does it really matter if a bot or a human has created an article as long as it contains facts and not thorough analysis? Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the bot generated articles (at least, I don't think so).
  - asgard1024 12y ago
    I agree with your point. It's generally better to have some article that no article. But Wikipedia is also supposed to be readable by humans, to provide insight and understanding. I am not sure that mere formatted collection of data, as opposed to a real article, does that. And I believe there are many Wikipedia editors who feel the same. Though, wouldn't it be more efficient to put the data into some machine readable form, if they were already processed by the machines anyway? This would then allow anybody to create algorithm to extract information (meaning) from the data. So I think there are also good reasons to keep the human and machine created articles separate.
    - pilsetnieks 12y ago
      It's not so much a formatted collection of data as it is like an excerpt from an encyclopedia. It's sparse and the articles are pretty similar to each other but it has proper sources, and someone might actually find the information useful. And it could serve as a starting point to improve by some enterprising Swedish biologist.
  - fdej 12y ago
    If you want to read any of the bot generated articles, just try http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida I tried it 10 times and got 6 bot articles.
  - Thaxll 12y ago
    You're better off reading the English version rather than the poorly translated Swedish one imo.
    - inetsee 12y ago
      If I understand the articles correctly, these are not Wikipedia entries that were translated from English into Swedish. These are entries created for the Swedish Wikipedia from original source material written in Swedish. The article mentions plans for creating articles for authors that do not have entries in the English Wikipedia. This means that the Swedish Wikipedia has a large number of entries on topics that do not have entries in the English Wikipedia. And will have even more in the future.
edpichler 12y ago
And the main page of Wikipedia is not updated, but: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
- pacofvf 12y ago
  It is now, that's what makes it so awesome!
_delirium 12y ago
I'm not sure I'd say it's the 2nd-largest. Second-most articles, yes, which is a different metric. Total size of an encyclopedia has to include not only the number of headings, but how much text is under them! For traditional paper encyclopedias, something like word-count is typically used, though that is tricky to use across languages, since languages have different notions of what constitutes a word (and different information rates, if you want to get into that). Something like "compressed size of the database" might be an approximation for encyclopedia size that normalizes for different languages' use of words & UTF-8 bytes.
- fiskpinne 12y ago
  I agree, I'm a swede myself but almost always use the English version because the Swedish articles usually contains very little information.
  - chton 12y ago
    It's exactly the same thing for me in Dutch. There are a lot of articles, sure, but the content is woeful. And there aren't even bots that artificially inflate the numbers there.
    - kalleboo 12y ago
      I agree for general articles, but for an article that has regional specificity, I'll look up the article in the local language and use an online translator.
      - _delirium 12y ago
        Yeah, I do that with French and German especially. For very well-known people and places, the English article is usually good, but if you want something only moderately known, like a French writer who is historically important, but not Voltaire-level famous, there's a good chance the other (in this case French) article will be more complete. Also true for Japanese Wikipedia articles on Japanese people and places. But Google-translated Japanese->English is hard to read, so I unfortunately rarely consult those. On the other hand, some of the smaller-language Wikipedias can be quite one-sided and nationalist when it comes to local topics, especially disputed history.
dschiptsov 12y ago
Isn't it about quality, not quantity?)
igravious 12y ago
> And it certainly doesn’t know that there are only 9 million people around to read its output, versus the 75 million who speak French, or the 78 million who speak German. Minor nitpick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... FR: 74m DE: 89m That's assuming Wiki P is correct-ish and that page is not some Teuto[+]-bot generated nonsense [+] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_nationality_prefixes https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_nationality_...
- legulere 12y ago
  There are over 80m people living in Germany which is already more than 78m, and this is totally ignoring German speakers in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Poland. I don't know how they came to those numbers.
  - barry-cotter 12y ago
    You forgot France, Lichtenstein and Namibia.
topbanana 12y ago
What a dreadful chart
- m_mueller 12y ago
  When a chart is harder to interpret than a simple table with the same information, you know something went wrong. Or at least you should.
a3_nm 12y ago
The number of articles is a terrible metric of the quantity of content of a Wikipedia. A far better way to measure this is to look at the size of the data dumps of http://download.wikimedia.org http://download.wikimedia.org (compressed so as to normalize differences in information density between languages). (Shameless plug: I tried to do that three years ago http://a3nm.net/blog/wikimedia_projects_by_size.html http://a3nm.net/blog/wikimedia_projects_by_size.html -- it could probably be done again today, though the code would probably need to be refreshed a bit.)
lucb1e 12y ago
Why actually spend all this effort on localized Wikipedia articles? Like someone commented, many people read the English Wikipedia because it contains more info. At least I do, I know most peers do, and a Swedish commenter (fiskpinne) just mentioned it. Sure, local articles are good to have for many basic subjects, but when you really want to get into something you probably know English. People shouldn't want to read articles like the one about cryptography (just picking something technical at random) in a non-English language beyond what the word means and a general overview. There are so many English resources and so many people able to read English if you'd contribute resources, learning it should be encouraged rather than translating everything just because we can.
- M2Ys4U 12y ago
  >Why actually spend all this effort on localized Wikipedia articles? Because most people can't read English. If the world's best encyclopaedia was only available in Swahili, would you still be asking "Why actually spend all this effort on localised articles?", assuming of course that you're not a Swahili speaker.
  - lucb1e 12y ago
    If almost everyone in the developed world spoke Swahili, it seems pretty reasonable to say that.
    - emilsundberg 12y ago
      What? Wikipedia is for everyone. Most of the worlds population does not speak english. As a swede I use both swedish and english Wikipedia. It depends on what I'm looking at. Swedish Wikipedia contains more in depth content on a lot of topics.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    > Because most people can't read English. That's a good argument for some languages, but for Swedish in particular it's less strong, because the number of people who can read Swedish but not read English is fairly small, and rapidly declining. That doesn't mean there's no point to a Swedish Wikipedia, but whatever point there is can't really be because Swedes are unable to read English. That's also true of Danish, which is one reason I believe the Danish Wikipedia has been languishing. There are many Danish people who are Wikipedians, but many of them do more English editing than Danish editing. The Swedish Wikipedia seems to be more active in comparison. It would be interesting to understand why; is it just the population difference (9.5m vs. 5.5m)?
arketyp 12y ago
Before Wikipedia there was a Swedish collaborative encyclopedia called susning.nu [1]. It eventually shut down due to problems with vandalism and in the meantime sv.wikipedia had grown larger. I suspect a lot of articles were migrated to wiki from susning, or at the very least the community did. Interestingly, susning roughly translates to grasp, as in a short format understanding. "Because of this, Susning grew and became Sweden's biggest and the world's next biggest wiki." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning.nu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning.nu
- iamtew 12y ago
  I remember we relied a lot on it in the early 2000's, as Wikipedia at that time contained more general information, and susning.nu was useful for more local (to Sweden at least) information.
- JoachimS 12y ago
  Actually, not that much from Susning could be migrated due to license, rights issues. The creator of Susning, Lars Aronsson is very active on Swedish Wikipedia. As far as I understood him, the content he knew the rights to (his own) could be migrated. But since the wiki is a collaborated effort and Susning had such licensing terms most stuff could not be attributed and is stuck in Susning.
ilaksh 12y ago
I wonder if there is an alternative to Wikipedia that doesn't suffer from the same insular type of "Self-Appointed Guardians of the Galaxy"? I mean one with a more sophisticated system for decision making rather than just bureaucracy, fiefdom, politics, and bribery?
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  If you are looking for a crowdsourced news archive and biography information (which accounts for around half of Wikipedia's pages) you can check out my site, Newslines [1], which fixes many of Wikipedia's software, data presentation, and policy issues. We do this by 1) having a simplified data structure based on news events 2) having a non-combative editorial approval system and 3) paying our writers to post. [1] http://newslines.org/ http://newslines.org/
kylebgorman 12y ago
Why is this attributed to "Sweden" rather than to "Swedes" or "Swedish speakers"? * Swedish is the first language of about 5% of the population of Finland * Swedish is supposedly mutually comprehensible with Norwegian * Many minority languages are governmentally recognized and spoken by significant minorities in Sweden, including Saami and Finnish There should be name for this fallacy of equating language and nationality. (edit: newlines)
krick 12y ago
The first my reaction is to say it's pretty cool or something, but actually it isn't if I look at it more closely. You see, I don't really care about lots of information gathered on the website with one domain. In fact, ideally I would wish for exactly the opposite: if some information can be easily classified, then it should. What I mean is that adding every new article to wikipedia has its own drawbacks as well as value. Recently I was thinking about how cool it would be to have wikipedia accessible offline on some portable device — and it's nothing new, I remember edited versions of wikipedia for mobile devices before smartphones become popular, but this sort of things isn't very useful in many ways. On the other hand, realistically I would assume that all content I will need to look up in my portable wiki easily fits on modern storage cards even with some media-data. Even more than that: many articles become useless to me if images are removed. The only real problem is that I don't know what I will look up and it's very hard to define what's useful. Anyway, perfect layout for animal articles is significantly different from perfect layout for math articles, so instead of populating wikipedia with rather obscure non-verified by humans information the really useful work would be making easy-to-use thematic resources as the existing ones made by academic people usually are totally unusable. That's where structured information should go in the first place. However bots on wikipedia often do some useful work, what really makes wikipedia useful is mindful human work. Media-wiki engine isn't perfect for structuring information and is useful specifically for free-form, unstructured data populated by humans. I don't really see what is the use of populating wikipedia with thousands of auto-generated texts.
Shivetya 12y ago
If they want to get past the English side they can get a good start by translating all the anime and music related pages, what good are three million or more articles in english when a good number are about individual songs or anime characters?
EarthLaunch 12y ago
So they're fine with a bot filling in obscure information that no person decided was worthwhile to add manually, but if you add something manually it can easily be deemed too obscure to be useful? In a strange way, this policy is a logical extension of the actual (not the claimed) nature of deletionism.
butler14 12y ago
“Wikipedia is written by affluent white nerds, in languages only affluent white nerds know" so his solution to this problem was to expand the volume of content for a language spoken almost exclusively by white nerdy people
rasz_pl 12y ago
Of course it is, because it is full of GARBAGE made by this guy http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-this-author-10-000-wikipedia-articles-is-a-good-days-work-1405305001 http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-this-author-10-000-wikipe... His stupid bot pollutes wiki with useless crap like this: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepechiniella_persica https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepechiniella_persica
- antocv 12y ago
  Hehe, that guy was my physics professor. He is a genious. Had a majestic beard as well. His stories and teaching methods reminded me of Carl Sagans style. But his bot is quite annoying yes.

68 points by lelf 12y ago

Likely exclusively due to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033600 Who runs a bot that makes millions of shitty stub articles.

smackfu 12y ago
Which is most of what this article is about...
- SEJeff 12y ago
  I thought it was fitting to link to the HN discussion, but actually linked it before reading TFA. Shame on me.

asgard1024 12y ago

This article poses a real question whether computer generated articles are suitable for encyclopedia consumed by humans. Speaking of this, I would love to see Wikipedia in machine-readable language. Something like CYC project. Edit: I know of WikiData, but there should be an unstructured analog to that.

hav 12y ago
As long as the content of those articles is relevant and accurate, I don't see how that would impact on the suitability of the articles in question. Does it really matter if a bot or a human has created an article as long as it contains facts and not thorough analysis? Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the bot generated articles (at least, I don't think so).
- asgard1024 12y ago
  I agree with your point. It's generally better to have some article that no article. But Wikipedia is also supposed to be readable by humans, to provide insight and understanding. I am not sure that mere formatted collection of data, as opposed to a real article, does that. And I believe there are many Wikipedia editors who feel the same. Though, wouldn't it be more efficient to put the data into some machine readable form, if they were already processed by the machines anyway? This would then allow anybody to create algorithm to extract information (meaning) from the data. So I think there are also good reasons to keep the human and machine created articles separate.
  - pilsetnieks 12y ago
    It's not so much a formatted collection of data as it is like an excerpt from an encyclopedia. It's sparse and the articles are pretty similar to each other but it has proper sources, and someone might actually find the information useful. And it could serve as a starting point to improve by some enterprising Swedish biologist.
- fdej 12y ago
  If you want to read any of the bot generated articles, just try http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Slumpsida I tried it 10 times and got 6 bot articles.
- Thaxll 12y ago
  You're better off reading the English version rather than the poorly translated Swedish one imo.
  - inetsee 12y ago
    If I understand the articles correctly, these are not Wikipedia entries that were translated from English into Swedish. These are entries created for the Swedish Wikipedia from original source material written in Swedish. The article mentions plans for creating articles for authors that do not have entries in the English Wikipedia. This means that the Swedish Wikipedia has a large number of entries on topics that do not have entries in the English Wikipedia. And will have even more in the future.

edpichler 12y ago

And the main page of Wikipedia is not updated, but: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

pacofvf 12y ago
It is now, that's what makes it so awesome!

_delirium 12y ago

I'm not sure I'd say it's the 2nd-largest. Second-most articles, yes, which is a different metric. Total size of an encyclopedia has to include not only the number of headings, but how much text is under them! For traditional paper encyclopedias, something like word-count is typically used, though that is tricky to use across languages, since languages have different notions of what constitutes a word (and different information rates, if you want to get into that). Something like "compressed size of the database" might be an approximation for encyclopedia size that normalizes for different languages' use of words & UTF-8 bytes.

fiskpinne 12y ago
I agree, I'm a swede myself but almost always use the English version because the Swedish articles usually contains very little information.
- chton 12y ago
  It's exactly the same thing for me in Dutch. There are a lot of articles, sure, but the content is woeful. And there aren't even bots that artificially inflate the numbers there.
  - kalleboo 12y ago
    I agree for general articles, but for an article that has regional specificity, I'll look up the article in the local language and use an online translator.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      Yeah, I do that with French and German especially. For very well-known people and places, the English article is usually good, but if you want something only moderately known, like a French writer who is historically important, but not Voltaire-level famous, there's a good chance the other (in this case French) article will be more complete. Also true for Japanese Wikipedia articles on Japanese people and places. But Google-translated Japanese->English is hard to read, so I unfortunately rarely consult those. On the other hand, some of the smaller-language Wikipedias can be quite one-sided and nationalist when it comes to local topics, especially disputed history.

dschiptsov 12y ago

Isn't it about quality, not quantity?)

igravious 12y ago

> And it certainly doesn’t know that there are only 9 million people around to read its output, versus the 75 million who speak French, or the 78 million who speak German. Minor nitpick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... FR: 74m DE: 89m That's assuming Wiki P is correct-ish and that page is not some Teuto[+]-bot generated nonsense [+] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_nationality_prefixes https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_nationality_...

legulere 12y ago
There are over 80m people living in Germany which is already more than 78m, and this is totally ignoring German speakers in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Poland. I don't know how they came to those numbers.
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  You forgot France, Lichtenstein and Namibia.

topbanana 12y ago

What a dreadful chart

m_mueller 12y ago
When a chart is harder to interpret than a simple table with the same information, you know something went wrong. Or at least you should.

a3_nm 12y ago

The number of articles is a terrible metric of the quantity of content of a Wikipedia. A far better way to measure this is to look at the size of the data dumps of http://download.wikimedia.org http://download.wikimedia.org (compressed so as to normalize differences in information density between languages). (Shameless plug: I tried to do that three years ago http://a3nm.net/blog/wikimedia_projects_by_size.html http://a3nm.net/blog/wikimedia_projects_by_size.html -- it could probably be done again today, though the code would probably need to be refreshed a bit.)

lucb1e 12y ago

Why actually spend all this effort on localized Wikipedia articles? Like someone commented, many people read the English Wikipedia because it contains more info. At least I do, I know most peers do, and a Swedish commenter (fiskpinne) just mentioned it. Sure, local articles are good to have for many basic subjects, but when you really want to get into something you probably know English. People shouldn't want to read articles like the one about cryptography (just picking something technical at random) in a non-English language beyond what the word means and a general overview. There are so many English resources and so many people able to read English if you'd contribute resources, learning it should be encouraged rather than translating everything just because we can.

M2Ys4U 12y ago
>Why actually spend all this effort on localized Wikipedia articles? Because most people can't read English. If the world's best encyclopaedia was only available in Swahili, would you still be asking "Why actually spend all this effort on localised articles?", assuming of course that you're not a Swahili speaker.
- lucb1e 12y ago
  If almost everyone in the developed world spoke Swahili, it seems pretty reasonable to say that.
  - emilsundberg 12y ago
    What? Wikipedia is for everyone. Most of the worlds population does not speak english. As a swede I use both swedish and english Wikipedia. It depends on what I'm looking at. Swedish Wikipedia contains more in depth content on a lot of topics.
- _delirium 12y ago
  > Because most people can't read English. That's a good argument for some languages, but for Swedish in particular it's less strong, because the number of people who can read Swedish but not read English is fairly small, and rapidly declining. That doesn't mean there's no point to a Swedish Wikipedia, but whatever point there is can't really be because Swedes are unable to read English. That's also true of Danish, which is one reason I believe the Danish Wikipedia has been languishing. There are many Danish people who are Wikipedians, but many of them do more English editing than Danish editing. The Swedish Wikipedia seems to be more active in comparison. It would be interesting to understand why; is it just the population difference (9.5m vs. 5.5m)?

arketyp 12y ago

Before Wikipedia there was a Swedish collaborative encyclopedia called susning.nu [1]. It eventually shut down due to problems with vandalism and in the meantime sv.wikipedia had grown larger. I suspect a lot of articles were migrated to wiki from susning, or at the very least the community did. Interestingly, susning roughly translates to grasp, as in a short format understanding. "Because of this, Susning grew and became Sweden's biggest and the world's next biggest wiki." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning.nu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning.nu

iamtew 12y ago
I remember we relied a lot on it in the early 2000's, as Wikipedia at that time contained more general information, and susning.nu was useful for more local (to Sweden at least) information.
JoachimS 12y ago
Actually, not that much from Susning could be migrated due to license, rights issues. The creator of Susning, Lars Aronsson is very active on Swedish Wikipedia. As far as I understood him, the content he knew the rights to (his own) could be migrated. But since the wiki is a collaborated effort and Susning had such licensing terms most stuff could not be attributed and is stuck in Susning.

ilaksh 12y ago

I wonder if there is an alternative to Wikipedia that doesn't suffer from the same insular type of "Self-Appointed Guardians of the Galaxy"? I mean one with a more sophisticated system for decision making rather than just bureaucracy, fiefdom, politics, and bribery?

sparkzilla 12y ago
If you are looking for a crowdsourced news archive and biography information (which accounts for around half of Wikipedia's pages) you can check out my site, Newslines [1], which fixes many of Wikipedia's software, data presentation, and policy issues. We do this by 1) having a simplified data structure based on news events 2) having a non-combative editorial approval system and 3) paying our writers to post. [1] http://newslines.org/ http://newslines.org/

kylebgorman 12y ago

Why is this attributed to "Sweden" rather than to "Swedes" or "Swedish speakers"? * Swedish is the first language of about 5% of the population of Finland * Swedish is supposedly mutually comprehensible with Norwegian * Many minority languages are governmentally recognized and spoken by significant minorities in Sweden, including Saami and Finnish There should be name for this fallacy of equating language and nationality. (edit: newlines)

krick 12y ago

The first my reaction is to say it's pretty cool or something, but actually it isn't if I look at it more closely. You see, I don't really care about lots of information gathered on the website with one domain. In fact, ideally I would wish for exactly the opposite: if some information can be easily classified, then it should. What I mean is that adding every new article to wikipedia has its own drawbacks as well as value. Recently I was thinking about how cool it would be to have wikipedia accessible offline on some portable device — and it's nothing new, I remember edited versions of wikipedia for mobile devices before smartphones become popular, but this sort of things isn't very useful in many ways. On the other hand, realistically I would assume that all content I will need to look up in my portable wiki easily fits on modern storage cards even with some media-data. Even more than that: many articles become useless to me if images are removed. The only real problem is that I don't know what I will look up and it's very hard to define what's useful. Anyway, perfect layout for animal articles is significantly different from perfect layout for math articles, so instead of populating wikipedia with rather obscure non-verified by humans information the really useful work would be making easy-to-use thematic resources as the existing ones made by academic people usually are totally unusable. That's where structured information should go in the first place. However bots on wikipedia often do some useful work, what really makes wikipedia useful is mindful human work. Media-wiki engine isn't perfect for structuring information and is useful specifically for free-form, unstructured data populated by humans. I don't really see what is the use of populating wikipedia with thousands of auto-generated texts.

Shivetya 12y ago

If they want to get past the English side they can get a good start by translating all the anime and music related pages, what good are three million or more articles in english when a good number are about individual songs or anime characters?

EarthLaunch 12y ago

So they're fine with a bot filling in obscure information that no person decided was worthwhile to add manually, but if you add something manually it can easily be deemed too obscure to be useful? In a strange way, this policy is a logical extension of the actual (not the claimed) nature of deletionism.

butler14 12y ago

“Wikipedia is written by affluent white nerds, in languages only affluent white nerds know" so his solution to this problem was to expand the volume of content for a language spoken almost exclusively by white nerdy people

rasz_pl 12y ago

Of course it is, because it is full of GARBAGE made by this guy http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-this-author-10-000-wikipedia-articles-is-a-good-days-work-1405305001 http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-this-author-10-000-wikipe... His stupid bot pollutes wiki with useless crap like this: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepechiniella_persica https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepechiniella_persica

antocv 12y ago
Hehe, that guy was my physics professor. He is a genious. Had a majestic beard as well. His stories and teaching methods reminded me of Carl Sagans style. But his bot is quite annoying yes.