this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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How one man created 6 million Wikipedia articles, and why he stopped (www.abc.net.au)
submitted 6 days ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] Amoxtli@thelemmy.club 10 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Better than nothing I guess.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 46 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 25 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Yoga@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 days ago

At best it's wordy fluff better presented as the original databases and at worst it's false information pretending to be fluff.

[–] orcrist@lemm.ee 4 points 5 days ago

Except no, it's really not. The golden rule of automatic translation is to let the reader do it when they want to.