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Comment by sings | Hacker News Reader

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.

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But then you'd lose all the interesting cultural insights you can infer from comparing the way different language versions describe the same topic. The texts are supposed to be neutral, but even neutral can mean quite different things. And when you have a topic that is prone to be suffering from edit wars in one language (e.g. a company you suspect of paying someone to "clean their wiki"), escaping to a different version can often be worthwhile if you have the language skills.

Indeed. Plus there’d be tugs of war, for example, the Sino-Japanese war, or the Russo-Japanese war, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There is no way to reconcile those histories.

What? Why not? An objective and comprehensive recollection of facts, mutually identified responses, and associated outcomes can't be hashed out?

Often people don't agree even on the most basic facts. For example, in the case of the Polish-Soviet war (1919-1920), "who attacked who?" is still a controversial topic.

Valid point. But why delineate differences of opinion across language lines when there are all sorts of reasons to disagree. Whether the disagreement is political, philosophical, regional, cultural, seems like using language as the key differentiator is a fuzzy proxy. You need to find a way to resolve these differences if the content is going to be trustworthy.

Exactly.

What you describe is indeed the downside. The upside is that if we automatically translated English content for (say mathematics) into other languages then non-English speakers would have access to the highest quality Wikipedia content.

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.)

> translated English content for (say mathematics) into other languages then non-English speakers would have access to the highest quality Wikipedia content.

Why would you think that English content in mathematics is the highest quality in comparison to other languages? Your thinking is flawed.

Because English Wikipedia is by far the version with the most readers, and therefore the one where most time has been invested in making an article good.

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.

I don't know about Maths and other STEM pages, but modern history and politics (last 100-150 years) pages in many non-English languages are highly questionable or even downright lying.

Because academics around the world who are native speakers of non-English languages do much of their professional work in English, read English language journals, and, if they contribute to Wikipedia, they are at least as likely to do so in English than their native language. As a result, English Wikipedia (for, say, mathematics) has vastly more attention and contributions, and is more comprehensive, than other languages.

> Because academics around the world who are native speakers of non-English languages do much of their professional work in English

Source?

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?

Yeah they meant why does the Barack Obama article in English differ in content than the Swedish one

I think they mean 2 articles in 2 languages with the same content, or as close as a translator can get. Very difficult to keep updated without automation but that seems like something they want to steer away from until no longer reliant on machine translations.

Why should something be deleted? If I was Greek studying the American Revolution it would be relevant. If there were French Wikipedia articles about cooking topics translated to English I’d be interested.

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.

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?

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.

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.

All of those languages and more are linked in the sidebar, what would you prefer to see?

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.

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.

The problem is that humans are very fond of doublespeak, rewriting history and just plain lying. That is why certain countries endeavor in government sponsored rewriting of local language Wikis. I say we just write off all non-English Wikis as lost cause and strife to maintain at least one Wiki as objective as rationally possible. (PS: my native language is not English, so I'm not a just defending the "easiest for me" solution)

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