Wikipedia is one of the pinnacles of human knowledge and achievement across all cultures and time and space, as much as people try to sue them and get content taken down the set of laws and protections it enjoys is a true moral and technological good.
It saddens me that we will probably see the end of wikipedia soon.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been fined multiple times by Russian courts for example, it's just not in Russia's jurisdiction.
I expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric, which will all be plausible to the credulous, until public sentiment is swayed enough to strip their protections.
Now that college students are using completely unsourced, uninspectable chatgpt to write papers even that cohort won't protest.
And then instead of having a messy but checkable and certainly criticizable open repository of all human knowledge we will have opaque bs producers that are impossible to criticize because it will show eqch person what they want to see with no room for open debate or discussion and humanity will lose any attempt at curating shared, open touchstones of truth and fact.
crazygringo · 1h ago
> It saddens me that we will probably see the end of wikipedia soon... I expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric... Now that college students are using completely unsourced...
Where is this doom and gloom coming from?
Wikipedia isn't ending. Legal challenges can be dealt with as they always have, and in the worst-case scenario the org can move countries if necessary. I can't even imagine why you "expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric". Where is this coming from? Even if something happened to the org, some other org can clone it -- content and infrastructure and all.
And college students still have to cite their sources, and I don't even know what that has to do with Wikipedia, which isn't something any college student should be citing directly anyways.
Your pessimism doesn't seem to be based on any kind of facts, unless I'm missing something here? Especially with the inaccuracies of LLM's, people continue to care about correct knowledge, and so people will continue to use and update Wikipedia. Heck, LLM's may even make Wikipedia more important than it's ever been before.
thanhhaimai · 1h ago
> Your pessimism doesn't seem to be based on any kind of facts, unless I'm missing something here
I don't see any evidence of that. It's just more legal attacks just like there have always been. Wikipedia has plenty of money to defend itself, and can always move resources between countries.
I don't see anything new going on. It may be new in the US, but it's also merely one government official who sent one letter, and any legal challenge there is incredibly unlikely to succeed in the courts.
ddq · 2h ago
Humanity clearly must not go down this path, yet it does nothing to alter its trajectory. Those who study history are doomed to watch it repeat. It's hard not to develop distain for the collective stupidity, but more enraging is the impotent passivity of the best and the brightest. We seem unable to imagine a reachable future that is worth imagining, the daunting scale of our global problems stupefying us.
I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do. So I'll leave it up to you.
HaZeust · 1h ago
Recently, I found myself in a sadness for the lack of changes I was capable of making to our life’s systemic dysfunctions - be it natural or artificial - and found my time was much better spent improving the lives around me directly, individually or in small groups.
I’ve long had the philosophy that the world has enough problems and that it’s not my place to add to them, but this philosophy also gave me a motivation to move mountains for solutions - and would be upset when I inevitably couldn’t. I think this perspective has been the best middle ground between what I’m capable of, and what I want to accomplish.
yorwba · 1h ago
The value of Wikipedia is provided mostly by its community of users, not any assets owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. All legal entities currently associated with Wikipedia could be completely seized and shut down; all it takes for it to be reborn is a critical mass of engaged users picking a new domain to rehost the content and telling everyone about it.
thrance · 1h ago
> Wokipedia has a possibly terminal case of the woke mind virus.
- Elon Musk
Fascists from all around the globe are waging a war on truth, and Wikipedia is a major hurdle to their plans they're having trouble dealing with. That anti-Wikipedia rhetoric is ramping up in countries that used to care about reality but recently succumbed to right-wing populism.
bglazer · 4h ago
Apparently, the article for David Woodard, an American composer and conductor has been translated into 333 languages, including Seediq, a language spoken in Northern Taiwan by about 20 thousand people.
I am absolutely baffled as to why this is the case. I have to imagine some kind of "astroturfed" effort by Woodard or a fan to spread his name?
The really amazing thing is that there are more articles about this guy than about Wikipedia. You'd think the first thing the editors of any Wikipedia would do is make an article about Wikipedia.
KomoD · 4h ago
Yeah, some account "Swmmng" has created a lot of these pages. Interestingly this is also the name of some kind of music/artist agency.
canistel · 2h ago
I checked the Malayalam page for David Woodard as I have native proficiency and also when it comes to translation to Malayalam, even the finer engines are patchy at best. Firstly, there is an alert at the top which says that the article seems to be translated automatically and needs improvement, and frankly, this is quite self evident too. Which makes me wonder, whether someone tried to script/automate the translation (of this article) to a large number of languages?
tecleandor · 17m ago
That's what it looks like. Same for Spanish, weird automatic translation.
I've also seen that they've uploaded "name pronunciations" to Wikimedia that are done via TTS engines that are not, precisely, last generation. [0] Looks like some sort of automation exercise. Edited in a bunch of languages, but mostly in English. [1]
A lot of them seem to be stubs with only one line of content. Not very hard to translate "David James Woodard (born April 6, 1964) is an American conductor and writer" passably into 300-some languages.
Though, I'm not sure if the Good Article assessment is used in many languages. Maybe someone could slap some LLM on it to do a quick assessment of which are likely to be GA.
morley · 2h ago
But the point still stands: if it's so straightforward, why give this person this treatment, instead of millions of other people?
IIAOPSW · 2h ago
For the sake of null hypothesis, how far and wide has the second most translated article reached? Is it also an (apparently) random stub?
rafram · 2h ago
That's what the OP link is about. Woodard is #2, below Turkey and above Japan.
The word "translated" isn't correct here, as the articles may not be translations of other articles.
Flimm · 1h ago
I concur. Most Wikipedia articles in different languages on the same topic are not translations of each other, in my experience. It is better to think of them as independent of each other.
lxgr · 1h ago
In my experience, "simple translations" are even explicitly discouraged in at least some language versions of Wikipedia.
numpad0 · 37m ago
Yeah, this needs determinations as to which are translations of each others, and which are independent articles on same topics.
I found this very interesting and tried to find the most surprising entries on the list. One of them is Šiprage, a settlement in Bosnia and Herzegovina with a population of 992. It has wikipedia pages in 225 languages, more than "Internet" (224). I wonder why.
A very active member of their community armed with a translator, very probably.
ivanjermakov · 3h ago
With 225 translators haha
mdp2021 · 50m ago
? A single multilingual electronic translator...
AStonesThrow · 3h ago
There is a lot of low-hanging fruit for low-effort, semi-automated article creators.
One of the favorite areas is CDPs and really small towns. You can pick up gazettes and databases full of places that have, like, one post office or a singular train station. They may be ghost towns or mining towns or something. Then you just vomit them all into individual articles.
There is some debate about the notability, accuracy, and utility of such articles. Many are forever doomed to be stubs, just from a lack of real documentation about them. Often people will find that the place never really existed per se despite its very real entry in the database.
angry_moose · 4h ago
Definitely working off an incomplete data set from wikidata.
According to the wikidata, there are no articles for the United States in whatever languages VEP, GUR, and UR are, but:
Ended up being fairly easy to look for - I compared the David Woodard list to the United States list and found instances where it claimed there was an article for the former but not the latter. Most David Woodard articles have a link to where he was born (United States), so an easy crosscheck.
UR is Urdu, GUR is Gurene (a language spoken in parts of Ghana and Burkina Faso), and VEP is the Veps language, spoken by the Veps people in Karelia. VE is Venda, spoken in parts of Zimbabwe and South Africa.
iLoveOncall · 2h ago
The article on pagination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagination has only been translated 11 times unfortunately. If it had been higher on the list it might have given the creator of the website some good ideas.
nritchie · 2h ago
This begs the question: How many languages can be accessed via AI translators?
Ylpertnodi · 2h ago
I had Cgpt translate into a very local actual dialect (as opposed to the official language of the country I'm in). According to the locals, they couldn't believe how accurate it is.
madcaptenor · 3h ago
Here is an interesting list of the most famous humans, where fame is measured by how many languages they have a Wikipedia article in.
333: David Woodard
275: Michael Jackson
274: Jesus
252: Donald Trump, who is very happy he's ahead of...
251: Barack Obama
250: Ronald Reagan
242: Adolf Hitler
239: Leonardo da Vinci
234: Isaac Newton
233: Confucius
230: William Shakespeare
229: Albert Einstein, Vladimir Putin, Nelson Mandela
225: Joe Biden
224: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
223: Muhammad
222: Aristotle, Basshunter (Swedish musician)
218: Johann Sebastian Bach
217: Plato
215: Julius Caesar
213: Napoleon
212: The Beatles (not bigger than Jesus), Corbin Bleu (American actor and singer), Alexander the Great
211: George W. Bush, Ludwig van Beethoven, Vincent Van
Gogh
210: Vladimir Lenin, Michelangelo
209: Christopher Columbus, Buddha
206: Augustus, Karl Marx
205: Charles Darwin, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Elizabeth II
204: Pablo Picasso
203: Abraham Lincoln, Galileo Galilei, Mahatma Gandhi
202: Joseph Stalin
201: Socrates
200: Salvador Dalí
I generated this list by hand, so it's possible I missed some, especially one-named people. Most of these seem legitimate, but I do wonder what David Woodard, Basshunter, and Corbin Bleu did.
IIAOPSW · 2h ago
There seems to be a recency bias, as the odds of our present day politicians all being as historically important as the rest of the list is unlikely. Makes sense that things of recent media attention are higher priority for translation, irrespective of how "important" they are in the grand scheme of history.
clircle · 2h ago
I was guessing that Donald Trump would be #1, but i was way off.
madcaptenor · 1h ago
He's #4 among humans, behind David Woodard, Michael Jackson, and Jesus.
It saddens me that we will probably see the end of wikipedia soon.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been fined multiple times by Russian courts for example, it's just not in Russia's jurisdiction.
I expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric, which will all be plausible to the credulous, until public sentiment is swayed enough to strip their protections.
Now that college students are using completely unsourced, uninspectable chatgpt to write papers even that cohort won't protest.
And then instead of having a messy but checkable and certainly criticizable open repository of all human knowledge we will have opaque bs producers that are impossible to criticize because it will show eqch person what they want to see with no room for open debate or discussion and humanity will lose any attempt at curating shared, open touchstones of truth and fact.
Where is this doom and gloom coming from?
Wikipedia isn't ending. Legal challenges can be dealt with as they always have, and in the worst-case scenario the org can move countries if necessary. I can't even imagine why you "expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric". Where is this coming from? Even if something happened to the org, some other org can clone it -- content and infrastructure and all.
And college students still have to cite their sources, and I don't even know what that has to do with Wikipedia, which isn't something any college student should be citing directly anyways.
Your pessimism doesn't seem to be based on any kind of facts, unless I'm missing something here? Especially with the inaccuracies of LLM's, people continue to care about correct knowledge, and so people will continue to use and update Wikipedia. Heck, LLM's may even make Wikipedia more important than it's ever been before.
Yes, the slow ramp of anti Wikipedia rhetoric is a documented fact, in both Russia and the USA: https://gizmodo.com/trump-doj-threatens-wikipedias-nonprofit...
I don't see any evidence of that. It's just more legal attacks just like there have always been. Wikipedia has plenty of money to defend itself, and can always move resources between countries.
I don't see anything new going on. It may be new in the US, but it's also merely one government official who sent one letter, and any legal challenge there is incredibly unlikely to succeed in the courts.
I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do. So I'll leave it up to you.
I’ve long had the philosophy that the world has enough problems and that it’s not my place to add to them, but this philosophy also gave me a motivation to move mountains for solutions - and would be upset when I inevitably couldn’t. I think this perspective has been the best middle ground between what I’m capable of, and what I want to accomplish.
- Elon Musk
Fascists from all around the globe are waging a war on truth, and Wikipedia is a major hurdle to their plans they're having trouble dealing with. That anti-Wikipedia rhetoric is ramping up in countries that used to care about reality but recently succumbed to right-wing populism.
I am absolutely baffled as to why this is the case. I have to imagine some kind of "astroturfed" effort by Woodard or a fan to spread his name?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%20Woodard
I've also seen that they've uploaded "name pronunciations" to Wikimedia that are done via TTS engines that are not, precisely, last generation. [0] Looks like some sort of automation exercise. Edited in a bunch of languages, but mostly in English. [1]
Though, I'm not sure if the Good Article assessment is used in many languages. Maybe someone could slap some LLM on it to do a quick assessment of which are likely to be GA.
edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1ce1f74/why_does...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ob0f1kCtOM
This what you meant to post?
Fascinating post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0iprage
A very active member of their community armed with a translator, very probably.
One of the favorite areas is CDPs and really small towns. You can pick up gazettes and databases full of places that have, like, one post office or a singular train station. They may be ghost towns or mining towns or something. Then you just vomit them all into individual articles.
There is some debate about the notability, accuracy, and utility of such articles. Many are forever doomed to be stubs, just from a lack of real documentation about them. Often people will find that the place never really existed per se despite its very real entry in the database.
According to the wikidata, there are no articles for the United States in whatever languages VEP, GUR, and UR are, but:
https://vep.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikan_%C3%9Chtenzoittud_Va...
https://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA...
https://gur.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_America
Ended up being fairly easy to look for - I compared the David Woodard list to the United States list and found instances where it claimed there was an article for the former but not the latter. Most David Woodard articles have a link to where he was born (United States), so an easy crosscheck.
Though VE seems to be an outlier where there is a Woodward but not United States article: https://ve.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Woodard
333: David Woodard
275: Michael Jackson
274: Jesus
252: Donald Trump, who is very happy he's ahead of...
251: Barack Obama
250: Ronald Reagan
242: Adolf Hitler
239: Leonardo da Vinci
234: Isaac Newton
233: Confucius
230: William Shakespeare
229: Albert Einstein, Vladimir Putin, Nelson Mandela
225: Joe Biden
224: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
223: Muhammad
222: Aristotle, Basshunter (Swedish musician)
218: Johann Sebastian Bach
217: Plato
215: Julius Caesar
213: Napoleon
212: The Beatles (not bigger than Jesus), Corbin Bleu (American actor and singer), Alexander the Great
211: George W. Bush, Ludwig van Beethoven, Vincent Van Gogh
210: Vladimir Lenin, Michelangelo
209: Christopher Columbus, Buddha
206: Augustus, Karl Marx
205: Charles Darwin, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Elizabeth II
204: Pablo Picasso
203: Abraham Lincoln, Galileo Galilei, Mahatma Gandhi
202: Joseph Stalin
201: Socrates
200: Salvador Dalí
I generated this list by hand, so it's possible I missed some, especially one-named people. Most of these seem legitimate, but I do wonder what David Woodard, Basshunter, and Corbin Bleu did.