Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

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101 pointssohom_datta67 comments

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.

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.

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.

apocolyptic poetry doom has been tried.. maybe something else

If you dont like the news, go out and make some of your own

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.

> 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.

> Your pessimism doesn't seem to be based on any kind of facts, unless I'm missing something here

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...

You're calling it a "slow ramp (up)".

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.

Unlike the parent post, I don't think that Wikipedia will end soon. However, Wikipedia has definitely handicapped itself for the sake of submitting to the the law in the last couple of years.

Specifically, this has been the case with the formerly fair use illustrations which are now shrunk to a tiny size. This makes Wikipedia a far less useful encyclopaedia for topics like the history of art. Not only did they edit out the images, but they also made the previous versions unreachable in the edit history, which contrasts with the transparency that used to distinguish the project before.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I understand the legal need for this change and I still love and support Wikipedia, but it would be naïve to take its current status for granted and assume that the foundation can just move to another country (where?) or that cloning would be easy when the edit history can be retroactively erased.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%20Woodard

Yeah, some account "Swmmng" has created a lot of these pages. Interestingly this is also the name of some kind of music/artist agency.

I've checked the Italian version of the article and I've noticed two interesting things:

- the page was originally published in 2017 by user Swmmng without any content, just a random photo of blue sapphire [1];

- the second revision of the article [2], published one minute after the first one, actually has content, but it's clearly machine translated.

So yes, it's a "clever" form of spam.

[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Woodard&old...

[2] https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Woodard&old...

That is strange… Why would wikipedia mods and admin let such obvious spam stay up?

I don't know what "mods" are but perhaps you mean "modifiers" as in "editors".

One main aspect in play here is that we're dealing with over 300 sets of Wikipedia editors in different projects. Each Wikipedia language-based project is siloed, with its own complement of editors, admins, policies and guidelines. Sure, you can edit more than one Wikipedia from a single account, but there is typically a true community that coalesces in each one, and they set the culture and the rules of behavior.

I have found that many are less deletionist and less vigilant and more welcoming of new content in general. The majority of these articles may be under the radar for them. They may not detect anything wrong with the articles. They may not care. They may have too few editors patrolling in general, to clean up minor issues like this.

Another thing about the small communities that have formed, they often understandably do not always enjoy when an editor comes cross-wiki to combat some perceived abuse or vandalism. It is not what some user did on another wiki that matters to them, if a local user is not being disruptive, per se, then they should not be subject to any disciplinary action.

So if anyone were to pursue this seemingly minor issue of single-article spam, they'd need to pursue it more than 300 times in 300 different ways, subject to 300 separate policies and guidelines interpreted by that many communities of editors and admins. That's sort of a radioactive task for anyone there.

> I don't know what "mods" are but perhaps you mean "modifiers" as in "editors".

Moderators

Wikipedia doesn't have anyone called "moderators", at least not in English nor in any sense of userrights. "Mods and admins" is usually something an ignorant non-community-member resorts to appealing when something is wrong there.

The truth is that Wikipedia content is not governed by a hierarchical administration, and all ordinary editors collaborate there to achieve consensus.

Administrators on Wikipedia have the responsibility for administrative tasks, privileged things, and disciplinary actions. Not content, not choosing what sort of articles to delete, not cleaning up articles.

See, I tried to give benefit of the doubt and a favorable interpretation, and someone who isn't the GP chimes in to perpetuate the myth. I'm curious about the myth: where does it come from and how do so many people sincerely just believe this is how Wikipedia works? Is "mods and admins" the default "go-to group" that cleans up other websites? Is it a specific meme from Reddit or some other forum type place? "Moderators" are usually the ones who execute discipline on forum discussions and users. That's not even a relevant role in terms of Wikipedia. But even within the noticeboards and talk pages, newbies come in all the time to appeal to "mods and admins", please address our problem. It's interesting how uniform the myth becomes!

It has been known to happen https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/aetmh9...

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.

But the point still stands: if it's so straightforward, why give this person this treatment, instead of millions of other people?

For the sake of null hypothesis, how far and wide has the second most translated article reached? Is it also an (apparently) random stub?

That's what the OP link is about. Woodard is #2, below Turkey and above Japan.

It would be interesting to see which the most translations that qualify as a Good Article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_article_criteri...

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.

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.

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?

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]

  0: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pronunciation_of_the_English_surname_Woodard.ogg
  1: https://xtools.wmcloud.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/Swmmng

The word "translated" isn't correct here, as the articles may not be translations of other articles.

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.

In my experience, "simple translations" are even explicitly discouraged in at least some language versions of Wikipedia.

I've often wondered if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

It feels like reading through Wikipedia, I'm missing some specifics, details or even points of view on a particular (international) topics when I'm reading it in English. I was reading about a town in Estonia recently while trying to track down some ancestry and while the English page had limited information, when I switched to Estonian and used google translate, I was able to find a ton of detail. I see the same when reading about smaller towns in India or non-English literature.

Would some sort of auto-translation and content augmentation (with editorial support) be useful here.

If you speak multiple languages (or are willing to read machine translation) you can often get a much richer understanding of a topic by reading wikipedia in multiple languages. Wikipedia strives to be unbiased, but obviously that's a goal, not a reality. But different languages are biased in different directions. Even on articles of comparable length the articles often emphasize very different parts, and deem different facts relevant.

And sometimes there are facts that are just less relevant in certain languages. The English article on the model railway scale HO spends the majority of its introduction on a lengthy explanation that HO stands for "Half O", and the O scale is actually part of the set of 0, 1, 2 and 3 scale, but English speakers still use the letter O. Which is important to note in an English article, but completely irrelevant in the majority of languages that don't share this very British quirk and call it H0 instead.

Cultural diversity is a big strength of wikipedia. Turning everything into one smooshed together thing would be a travesty. Making the various different versions more accessible to readers would be helpful, but it would also dilute the diversity as it would certainly bring more editors of one language into other language versions of the same article, leading to more homogenized viewpoints and a view that's even more dominated by the most active wikipedians (presumably Americans and Germans)

> Would some sort of auto-translation and content augmentation (with editorial support) be useful here.

The Wikipedia folks are working on this, but planning on auto-generating natural language text from some sort of language-independent semantic representation. This avoids the unreliability of typical machine translation and makes it comparatively easier to have meaningful support for severely under-resourced languages, where providing good encyclopedic text is arguably most important. Details are very much TBD but see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia for a broader description. If you prefer listening to a podcast episode, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a57QK4rARpw

They are functionally completely independent. And it's true that translation is not necessarily the way foreign-language articles get written. But it's also true that editors can often lift whole sections out of one project to translate into another project, by way of augmenting the article content. What's terrible is when this is bad content, because errors can easily be propogated in very persistent ways!

I need to qualify that independence, though: all Wikipedia projects draw from at least two common sources: Commons and Wikidata. Now, Commons is media-oriented, so most of the images and audio provided may be language-independent. Wikidata is something that's not well incorporated in the English Wikipedia, but heavily used elsewhere. For basic facts and data points, Wikidata is a common database that levels the playing field for all projects and helping them expand equally without monumental individual efforts in each community. If you, as an editor, wish to truly make significant changes happen, you can do it from "behind the scenes" in one of these two projects.

It is very advantageous to read articles in different languages if you're interested in deep dives on the subject. For each topic, figure out its native tongue and go there to find good info. You can even just Google Translate it back to English. And sign in to your account: the Wikipedia preferences permit you to use an interface language that you can understand.

You'll find that English Wikipedia editors have an aversion to non-English sources and citations. They're not prohibited at all, but they are not popular, because other editors like to read and verify them. Unfortunately, English Wikipedia articles on foreign topics can often be built entirely on Anglophone sources, making a very impoverished, insensitive, inaccurate article! I've found foreign-langauge projects which provide foreign-language sources to be really useful in this regard.

Yeah, this needs determinations as to which are translations of each others, and which are independent articles on same topics.

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.

David Woodard's got some hardcore fans or what?

edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1ce1f74/why_does...

This guy does an excellent breakdown. But the TLDW: possibly a Saudi superfan,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ob0f1kCtOM

"Arthur Miller interview on "The Death of a Salesman" (1999)"

This what you meant to post?

perhaps they meant to post this video (which is excellent): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ_pEP3fRvM

My apologies. My copies got messed up. Thanks for the help.

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.

Fascinating post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0iprage

> I wonder why

A very active member of their community armed with a translator, very probably.

With 225 translators haha

? A single multilingual electronic translator...

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.

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:

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

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.

I mean, they also self report here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_articles_w...

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.

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.

I think the requirement for sources also makes it harder to have more information about people from earlier times in history. Present day politicians are all over the internet and mentioned in reputable newspapers, so easy to find sources for a lot of things, but less easy for people to find reputable (and easily accessible) sources for earlier people.

And an American bias, with American editors still being a relative majority of Wikipedia editors. And a Western bias too, etc.

I don't think we could ever come up with an objective list of "who are the best people ever". Though it could be a fun project to define some criterions and search for who maxes them in history.

Now I wouldn't be so quick to say this, because after all, we are talking about far more than the English Wikipedia here.

The English Wikipedia is the original, the largest, and the most visible project, but it's completely independent from the other ones.

I would say that many of the other language projects have majority non-American editors, because fluent and native speakers are more likely to be able to contribute in a big way to them. Perhaps immigrants to America may hold down a large part as well, but if you peer under the hood of some of these projects, you'll find a lot of their controversies and biases result from nationalism and adherence to regional cultures and customs that differ with American ones.

Now it wouldn't be surprising that most/all projects exhibit an incipient Western bias, because the WMF is a Western organization and based in Western culture, so any editor drawn to that ethos may tend to be less in line with foreign biases. But we have seen, just from disputes that bubble over into enwiki, or Commons or Wikidata, that there is a true diversity to editors, and I think it's a disservice that anyone projects enwiki demographics onto the other projects.

Hum, sure. I would add too that all Wikipedia projects are still related to each other, with the English one being at the center of the graph.

A lot of articles in the French Wikipedia use translated paragraphs from the English one, and I would think it is a similar story for the other Wikipedias, although I don't speak any other languages well enough to verify that.

Similarly, I would think English Wikipedia benefits from articles or bits of articles ported to it from other languages. All that to say, Wikipedia is more connected that you may think.

> Wikipedia is more connected that you may think.

Actually I wrote this same idea 17 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44036737

So I don't know what you think I think, but I already said this is so. Nobody has said any different. The independent governance of the projects is nevertheless a fact, though; they all make independent decisions in terms of content retention as we are discussing in this thread. All the editors who "port" or translate bits of articles are operating independently, and there is actually no way to logically link the material using wikicode; if the text is edited in one place, then its content will diverge from every other place it appears. In other words, the projects are independent from one another, despite "cross-pollination", translation, or "porting" of text from one to another.

> but I do wonder what David Woodard, Basshunter, and Corbin Bleu did

I don't know who the others are, but as someone who grew up 1990s/2000s in Sweden playing video games and being at LAN parties, Basshunter was wildly popular in Sweden at the time, and looking him up now, apparently around the world too. I'm guessing the combination of making songs about video games/internet culture (like "The bot Anna" and "We sit in Ventrilo and playing DOTA") as early as that, with songs translated into other languages had some impact on his popularity, and I feel like many people who'd enjoy Basshunter probably likes nerdy things like editing Wikipedia too.

The Corbin Bleu thing has been a fascination for awhile, I think. I seem to remember a thread on SomethingAwful or 4chan or something years ago.

I am pretty convinced it was just an in-joke in some online community or even just a group of friends to make this perfectly-fine-but-completely-unremarkable actor on of the most famous people on Wikipedia. Like, some completely mundane actor immortal by making him one of the most ubiquitous pages on Wikipedia is pretty funny.

I honestly could see myself doing that if I had more friends.

It's almost certainly all one individual in Saudi Arabia, though their motivation is unknown as is why they try so hard to obscure their identity. The full story is pretty fascinating and I highly recommend this video on it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ_pEP3fRvM

Yeah I actually saw that video.

The Saudi Arabia thing seems compelling, but I stand by that it’s likely just a joke among friends, probably a friend group within Saudi Arabia.

No one from sports, until 184 Lionel Messi

Regarding Corbin Bleu the english wikipedia article itself mentions this oddity [0] apparently some great fan from Saudi Arabia [1](the article in Arabic itself is also unusually verbose [2]) put in the effort. The number (212) essentially didn't move since 2019 (then #5).

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Bleu

>In 2013, an MIT study discovered that Bleu was the third most-common biography article subject among all the different language versions of Wikipedia; pages on him were available in 194 languages, placing below only Jesus (214) and Barack Obama (200), and above Confucius (192) and Isaac Newton (191). The contradiction between Bleu's high notability on Wikipedia and low real-life notability comparative to the aforementioned historical figures made the creation of these pages unusual.[171][172] Years later, a Reddit user found that these translations were likely done by a single user whose IP addresses on Wikipedia locate to Saudi Arabia. By 2019, Bleu had dropped to #5 on the list of biographies, but increased in Wikipedia notability, by then being available in 213 languages.[173]

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/aetmh9...

[2]https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%83%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%...

This begs the question: How many languages can be accessed via AI translators?

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.

Georgia(contry) is hilarious.

  Dog
  Cat
  Jesus

I was guessing that Donald Trump would be #1, but i was way off.

He's #4 among humans, behind David Woodard, Michael Jackson, and Jesus.

Is Jesus completely human?

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