Alternate headline: How one man spammed Wikipedia
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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This whole thing is just so incomprehensiblely stupid and real world usage numbers prove it:
According to Wikimedia Statistics, Cebuano Wikipedia currently reels in tens of thousands of page views from the Philippines each month.
English Wikipedia, meanwhile, gets more than 100 million Filipino viewers per month.
If people wanted AN AUTOMATED TRANSLATION they could just go to the English page and use one of the many free page translation tools that exist. Who even asked him to do this? Or is it just more white saviour complex?
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.
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!
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.
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.
They're so busy asking if they could they didn't ask if they should.
Same with the guys who made the AR glasses that use face recognition to automatically dox people.
It's weird to do this at all but at least he targeted a language with tens of millions of speakers (most of whom are multilingual) and not, say, Scots
The Scots wiki had the same problem. A teenage American who didn't speak Scots edited and created 10s of thousands of entries
For those not aware Scots is a Germanic language that split from Old English back about 700-800 years ago - closely related to modern english like frisian is, but also retaining many words lost to english (some of which are retained in Swedish / Dutch etc). It is distinct from standard scottish english.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
Edit
Articles on the fiasco
https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689
https://www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html?_fsig=8ckIe_eK7juchNpKgsYQww--%7EA
Little better because this guy is actually machine translating it and not just typing what a Scottish accent sounds like phonetically lol
He cited one “ridiculous” example where entries went wrong. In the submission for Telekinesis, the description was written in neither Scots nor English and read: “Telekinesis es a form of movnig ebjocts with yor maind.”
I'm sorry but even for a 12 year old that's comedically stupid.
woah! i speak Cebuano, yet I didn't know a Cebuano Wikipedia exists :0
Time to start editing....
Better than nothing I guess.
Unless it's inaccurate, in which case it's worse than nothing
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.
At best it's wordy fluff better presented as the original databases and at worst it's false information pretending to be fluff.
Except no, it's really not. The golden rule of automatic translation is to let the reader do it when they want to.