The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly by one bot
vice.com
vice.com
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.
Having some basic information already present means that potential editors won't have to start from an empty page, making it easier to see where content can be added.
Of course if what you're interested in is actually how much humans contribute to Wikipedia in a given language, you'll need to ignore bot activity, but that doesn't make it useless.
I'm curious about the actual quality of these articles. The OP says "the majority [of a random 1000] were surprisingly well constructed", but it's not clear what that even means. Does the author of the article know Cebuano (or Swedish or Waray-Waray, which are other languages this bot writes in) well enough to judge? Or does it just mean the articles looked like regular articles (ie they have all the infoboxes and other trappings of human-editor-driven articles)?
Can't speak to tech / science / art in the Visayan space.
> Basic articles (called “stubs”) were systematically created based on content extracted from structured databases. These stubs are then edited by the broader Wikipedia community, while “bots” keep the structured content in sync with the source databases.
(The "structured content" mentioned is the info box on the right-hand side of a gene article. Nowadays I believe this is populated directly from Wikidata[2].)
Note: I am a member of the lab that runs Gene Wiki, but my work is unrelated.
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Likely, but not always. I've encountered areas, for example Bohol, in that region where only the local language was well-understood.
And "Taglish" is about as understandable as Japlish - lots of similarities to English, but what does it mean?
Same in Indonesia. Outside of the main cities on Sumatra, especially with older people, only the local language is used daily.
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.
It is possible to link images and other things via Wikimedia, and my understanding is that Wikipedia does push for people to do this.
EDIT: Or do you mean contain the same information between different languages of a specific article?
There is no way to reconcile those histories.
I do think this is an interesting point: the current Wikipedia policy of allowing each language's Wikipedia to evolve independently risks missing an opportunity to free certain non-English speakers from some of the unfairness that results from happening to have not been born an English speaker.
(With no disrespect to the Wikipedias of other major languages, I'm sure they have many extremely high quality articles. But I assume that in, say Math, Physics, Computer Science, the English Wikipedia is the highest quality.)
Why would you think that English content in mathematics is the highest quality in comparison to other languages? Your thinking is flawed.
In my experience, non-English Wikipedia articles are great for "insider knowledge" about topics and/or local figures who are deemed not relevant enough to the English Wikipedia editors. But outside these niches, their texts tend to be both shorter and less polished.
Source?
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.
In turn, you'll get "every other language becomes practically required for people to be able to communicate about computers"
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
Off the top of my head, I believe we factor in 15% more text space for Spanish. German is something like 60% more.
(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.)
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.
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 à l'école 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 "à" and "école" 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 :)
Regarding "aujourd'hui", this monstrosity litterally means : "to the day of today"..
Our dear language needs a reform, lest it will survive only as a roman dialect.
오늘 학교에 가기 싫다 (I don’t want to go to school today)
Hangeul is a syllabary so anyone can read it, just like Latin. It was specifically designed in response to peasants not being able to read Chinese hanzi.
Things like the subject and topic can be and is omitted when it’s superfluous. (The above sentence omits the subject and subject particle. There is no topic here). English almost always needs to specify the subject, asides from very casual speech/slang. Korean, like english, doesn’t need to specify gender of nouns, and it also doesn’t need “a” or “the” markers. The location particle above could be dropped too.
However Korean does have complex honorifics and formality conjugations, which typically get longer the more formal/polite it is. Above we have the plain or dictionary form, which is usually the shortest form as well.
"I don’t want to go" and "I would like not to go" express different things.
One is expressing opposition right now, the other one is expressing desire or even a request, potentially while the action is already engaged. The first one is definitive, the second one is wishful thinking or negotiation.
I don’t think there’s a 1:1 translation of “would like not to”. I’d probably say something like “it’d be good if I did / didn’t do X”. Which is less direct than the equivalent “I do / don’t want to do X”.
English isn't inherently better as a world's language than anything else, it's just there, so it benefits from the network effect (it's more beneficial to learn language that has the most users, so it gets even more users).
That's your opinion or do you have supporting research to link to?
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!)
In an age where languages are dying with their last speakers, Visayan has done much to preserve their diversity -- although not a written/codified language, volunteers give radio broadcasts in the language, books are published in it (here the lack of codification shows by variance in spelling, verb conjugation, and sentence structure), and similar. Thank you to this wikipedian for doing something to preserve a wonderful language (I mention in another comment I am fluent and miss the regular speaking of it).
https://ceb.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klakkabekken_(su...
it describes where the place is and gives the citation as "found in the Geonames.org database".
BTW, do you have a link for their terms on "relevance"?
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.
I too agree that we don't need articles on someone's cat, but I've had articles deleted as not notable on indie web comics and indie role-playing games with hundreds or thousands of readers or copies sold.
I thought that the fact that the RPG was published and publicly available, and was being discussed in RPG forums would make it notable enough, especially when it was mentioned as an inspiration for rules in more traditional RPGs. But since they hadn't been mentioned in any published articles they were deleted and there was no real way for me to fight it. I had added stuff like the list of contributors, publishing year, and overview of the rules and setting, with no personal discussion of the game.
The result was that I stopped trying to improve Wikipedia, because I don't have the time or interest to fight people with an infinite amount of time that deletes my additions. My main contribution to Wikipedia wouldn't have been on the articles on Barack Obama or World War II anyway, as they already have people who are experts that add information. I could have brought information on my specialized topics of interest, but realized that they would all seem non-notable to someone who's not interested in the same thing and would be deleted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...
The German ones? You can find them here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Relevanzkriterien
Some might make sense, some are rather arbitrary and depend on the person that is going to delete your post.
I tried getting into Wikipedia and supporting the work, but the atmosphere in Germany is rather toxic. Let it die and look at the English version.
But you are absolutely right, it's just better to stick with the English version.