[HN Gopher] The second largest version of Wikipedia is written m...
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The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly by one
bot
Author : jxub
Score : 86 points
Date : 2020-02-24 12:59 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| brokensegue wrote:
| Slightly pedantic but the largest "Wikipedia" (depending on how
| you define it) is http://wikidata.org/ and it's also primarily
| written by bots.
| playpause wrote:
| That's a wiki, not a Wikipedia.
| brokensegue wrote:
| but both are wikimedia projects
| suprfsat wrote:
| And it's a data model that's actually suited to being written
| by bots. Instead of ... whatever this is.
| tangoalpha wrote:
| Clicking on random article on
| https://ceb.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:Random#/random , looks
| like every article is that of either a tree, or an animal, or an
| insect, or a place...
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| I discovered this in 2018, when comparing lists of languages
| supported by different software and the number of speakers.
|
| https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/#wikipedia
|
| Having machine-translated content is powerful for SEO, but I
| don't know how practical that is for Cebuano. It would be nice
| for English to no longer be practically required for people to
| become computer literate.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > It would be nice for English to no longer be practically
| required for people to become computer literate.
|
| French here. We are terrible at english in my country.
|
| Still, the fact most information in computing is shared in
| english is a god send. Sure, you have to learn it, but then:
|
| - no need to search for it in so many languages
|
| - no need to produce translations of tutorials/docs/comments in
| so many languages
|
| - the community to share and communicated with is huge and
| diverse
|
| - english is way more efficient than french, spanish, german or
| chinese to talk about technical stuff
| seventh-chord wrote:
| Genuinely curious about your last point (don't know much
| about the topic). Is english intrinsically better at this, or
| is it because of the presence of jargon? Is it a studied
| phenomena, or is it something most people feel?
| FalconSensei wrote:
| In my opinion, jargon helps, but English is just easier to
| learn and shorter to communicate.
|
| My first language is Portuguese, and English was not so
| hard for me to learn. I studied a bit of French and it was
| ok, but not as easy as English. And this considering it
| should be a bit easier since Portuguese is my main
| language.
|
| Now I'm studying German and... it's way harder than English
| and French. At least, way more verbose and which more
| complex grammar rules and conjugations.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I can see that being true. Many of the web sites I build
| are multi-lingual, and when designing for many languages,
| you have to take into consideration that certain languages
| take many more characters or words to express an idea than
| in English.
|
| Off the top of my head, I believe we factor in 15% more
| text space for Spanish. German is something like 60% more.
| kevingadd wrote:
| When localizing software also it's a general rule of
| thumb that your on-screen UI spaces need to be something
| like 40% bigger than the English text that goes in them
| since the German equivalent is always going to be way
| bigger. It's common for it to turn out half-way through
| localization that some of your text doesn't fit anymore.
|
| (FWIW, this also happens when swapping from ideographic
| languages to English - western localizations of Japanese
| video games often end up with very small text as a
| result.)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| English is usually shorter than other latin-based
| languages. It's longer than ideogram based ones but you
| don't have to learn 100000 symbols to express yourself in
| it.
|
| It also has a very simple grammar compared to most
| languages. Take this sentence:
|
| "I would like not to go to school today"
|
| The french equivalent would be:
|
| "Je voudrais ne pas aller a l'ecole aujourd'hui."
|
| "would like" is a simple combination of two words, but in
| french you need to know the precise conjugation of it.
|
| "not" is actually expressed as 2 words with "ne pas", which
| can be positioned in several ways.
|
| Infinitive, like with "to go", is simple in english: just
| add "to". In french, each verb is different, like "aller".
|
| Then you got "the" in any circumstances in english, but the
| "l'", could also be "le, la, or les" depending of the word
| after it. A;so remember that each word is either feminine
| or masculine in french, even a stone or the sun.
|
| Then "a" and "ecole" got an accent. French has many of
| them, you need to know the right one, where to place it,
| how to pronunciation it and type it on the keyboard.
|
| Finally, "today" vs "aujourd'hui". I know which one is
| easier to type in a bug report.
|
| Not to say English doesn't have weird traps, but it's very,
| very relaxing compared to the rest. And much more
| efficient.
|
| Also describing a view of the country side with it feels a
| bit limiting. But I'm not Shakespear :)
| airstrike wrote:
| English has an incredibly simple grammar, comparatively
| speaking. There are only three verb conjugations (if you
| don't count auxiliary verbs) and one gender. Even naming
| variables is easier!
| FanaHOVA wrote:
| > It would be nice for English to no longer be practically
| required for people to become computer literate.
|
| That's already case in other mission critical industries, like
| aviation. Hard to build businesses with cross-border
| collaboration without using English. (This is also how I
| learned English in the first place, it was a good motivator!)
| airstrike wrote:
| > It would be nice for English to no longer be practically
| required for people to become computer literate.
|
| In turn, you'll get "every other language becomes practically
| required for people to be able to communicate about computers"
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Yes. In the end, we need one common language so that we can
| communicate with people around the globe, and that's not only
| about computers, but everything.
| [deleted]
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| So they mean to tell us "insignificant" facts and articles must
| be deleted?
| brodo wrote:
| The German Wikipedia would be twice as big if mods weren't
| obsessed with some made up criteria of relevance.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Wait, the Germans are being _picky_ and _pedantic_? Way to
| travel in unfortunate national stereotypes...:-)
| markdown wrote:
| All articles that fail to meet criteria are to be purged.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| That sad. In the end, all this would (if not already) make
| then just go for the English version. I already do this (I'm
| Brazilian) as the Portuguese version is nowhere near the
| international (English) version in terms of completeness and
| being up-to-date.
|
| BTW, do you have a link for their terms on "relevance"?
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| The English version isn't particularly free. I attempted to
| add a page about a file format that is fairly well used but
| doesn't have a huge amount of information online about it.
| The only real source is a zip file from a companies website
| which contains a pdf with the file spec and some example
| programs. Unfortunately the editors decided that due to the
| lack of referencable sources, they would rather no article
| exist at all.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| This bullshit policy drives me mad. I will start donating
| regularly once it's cancelled. Not sooner, nor later.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| I understand it for some cases where the mods just need
| to stop people making up random crap on topics that don't
| exist or can't be verified. But in this case a single
| reference is more than enough to write the whole page
| because the spec is literally the only source of truth on
| the topic.
|
| Unfortunately I think the mods may be too passionate
| about "protecting the integrity of wikipedia" that they
| let legitimate content be deleted. It also doesn't help
| that the wikipedia UI for disputes and edits is really
| confusing and I had a hard time trying to work out what
| was going on or how I communicate to this moderator. The
| whole system is designed for power users only.
| [deleted]
| sings wrote:
| I always thought it was a bit bizarre that different language
| editions of Wikipedia contain different information. It seems the
| focus should be more on translation than content creation. Maybe
| that isn't practical with the current structure, but surely the
| aim should be a definitive knowledge graph rather than a
| disparate and unevenly duplicated set of articles. Just my two
| cents - I am sure many have put a lot of thought into how to best
| tackle this.
| telesilla wrote:
| I'd rather see Wikipedia find a way to link these different
| sites in more interesting ways, for example if I go to the
| entry for Carnival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival),
| why doesn't it link me to the Brazilian
| (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval), Spanish
| (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval) or Italian
| (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnevale) entries for which I
| might learn more, using auto-translate?
| carlinmack wrote:
| All of those languages and more are linked in the sidebar,
| what would you prefer to see?
| telesilla wrote:
| You know, I never knew that that sidebar was a link to the
| same entry in different languages - thanks! Still, it makes
| me wonder if there is still a way to open up more content
| in other languages, so that those who contribute more in-
| depth can somehow have that content be shared on other
| language pages more transparently. But, I never studied
| library science and I'm sure finer minds than mine have
| considered this problem.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The tricky thing is that any text content has to have
| translation. You might be able to get away with not
| translating maps, since place names tend to be more
| stable (or at least generally pretty easy to work out)
| across different languages. For example, "Pologne-
| Lituanie" is going to be within the capability of most
| English speakers to work out, even if they've never heard
| of "Poland-Lithuania".
|
| It is possible to link images and other things via
| Wikimedia, and my understanding is that Wikipedia does
| push for people to do this.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It links to articles in over 80 languages. So on one hand it
| does a really good job at cross linking. On the other hand,
| missing out on linking to the languages you mention seems
| like a huge error.
| samatman wrote:
| It does link to all those languages. I think what the
| grandparent was referring to is that there's no way to
| indicate that an article in another language might be
| interesting in some way.
|
| Such as, for Carnival, being written in a language spoken
| by a people who celebrate it, or for Alexander the Great,
| highlighting the languages spoken in territories he
| conquered.
|
| It's an interesting proposal, but I get a headache just
| thinking about the politics of implementing it.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| I'm guessing the task is just too hard so this is the next best
| option. For all of the versions to contain the same content you
| would have to have every edit made to at least the English
| version and optionally another version. What happens when
| someone who only knows a non English language wants to make an
| edit? Does the site ping a user who knows both languages to
| translate it? Its just easier to let the versions be split.
| StavrosK wrote:
| How do you mean? I'm fine with the fact that the Greek
| Wikipedia doesn't contain an article about the Boston Tea
| Party, but I like that it contains an article about the 1821
| rebellion. Requiring the information to be the same across
| languages would mean that either both should be translated, or,
| if no translator can be found, one should be deleted.
|
| EDIT: Or do you mean contain the same information between
| different languages of a specific article?
| 4cao wrote:
| This endeavor looks largely orthogonal to what the objectives of
| an online encyclopedia should be. Creating as many stub articles
| as possible and filling them with "formulaic, generic, and
| reusable templated sentences with spots for specific information"
| seems more like a recipe for an automated content farm than for
| "disseminating the sum of _human_ knowledge. "
|
| It would be most interesting to know what the 148 active Cebuano
| Wikipedia users think of the 5,331,028 articles the bot created,
| ostensibly for them. Too bad nobody apparently cared to ask.
|
| In particular, since Cebuano speakers are likely to be fluent in
| Tagalog and/or English as well, they can easily use one of the
| other Wikipedia editions too. Without the hyperactive bot, the
| much smaller Cebuano Wikipedia would arguably be more relevant,
| reflecting topics truly of interest to the community.
|
| While the number of articles is a convenient way of comparing
| Wikipedia language editions, it only works as such to the extent
| that the articles are kept to a certain standard. It seems to me
| that what we are observing here is yet another example of the
| situation that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a
| good measure.
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(page generated 2020-02-24 23:00 UTC)