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.

  • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
    242·
    8 months 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.

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      8 months 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.