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
      282·
      3 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.

      • fristislurper@feddit.nlEnglish
        7·
        3 months 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·
          3 months 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·
        3 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.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      39·
      3 months ago

      Unless it’s inaccurate, in which case it’s worse than nothing

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
        22·
        3 months ago

        Lsjbot generates articles by taking information from online databases, mostly on biology and geography, and fitting the data into a set number of pre-written sentences.

        Volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, called Wikipedians, found many of the Cebuano-language pages had grammatical and sometimes factual errors, thanks to imperfect translations.