AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
> an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia
It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing.
The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs, such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not only are sources the input and page content is just an output, but page content is a tertiary source, and sources by policy should be secondary (and sometimes primary) sources, so the system is even protected against cross tertiary source pollution (say an encyclopedia feeding off wikipedia and viceversa).
It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur, see [[citogenesis]]
I've seen a college professor cite wikipedia in support of a false claim. On investigation, the text in wikipedia was cited to an earlier blog post by that same professor.
I wasn't convinced.
1- citing wikipedia (or any tertiary source) is valid, the problem is just when the source is not cited. And also it's against wikipedia policy, but you are free to cite it elsewhere.
2- citing the tertiary source and citing the secondary source are distinct and valid. There is no "rule", in wikipedia or otherwise, that says you need to cite the underlying source. In fact citation chains can become quite deep, it would be very impractical. An example would be, you could cite the gospels when jesus talks with the devil. If we had it your way then you wouldn't be able to cite an apostle, you would have to attribute the quote to jesus, and furthermore if jesus quoted the old testament you would have to cite that? If you think the bible is an exception, consider case law, if you were to cite an attorney's defense and the attorney cited some cases, would you have to cite the original cases? If so, then which? There might be multiple, it's not just a citation chain but a graph.
In this specific example your professor was not just quoting himself, but his work is now part of wikipedia and importantly was not contested or was not successfully contested. Similarly to how a trademark works, you claim you own the trademark, and if a year or so no one contends it, you have a stronger case that it's yours.
The people who want it to be considered as a language for political reasons cannot be bothered to translate Wikipedia themselves. They read and edit English Wikipedia and understand it perfectly.
Geordie English is closer to Edinburgh 'Scots' than to RP English or US English or Indian English. Is it a dialect of Scots?
The Glaswegian taxi driver may not consider themself to be speaking a different language but, if speaking to another local and leaving aside pronunciation, they’d use words, phrases and even grammar that’s incomprehensible to someone with no experience with Scots.
I’m a “posh Scot”, raised middle class in Edinburgh so my accent is minimal and thickens up or softens depending on who I’m speaking to. Even for me, there’s a lot of words, phrases and ways of speaking I’ve had to adjust to be consistently understood by American coworkers when over the last 10+ years.
Sort of like extreme cockney rhyming slang or for a more modern example thick BME* full of slang.
* = British Multicultural English, think fam n blud, lots of Jamaican english influence plus south east asian influence.
This is supremely ignorant. Scots is its own language. It's a 'brother' or 'sister' of English, with both English and Scots being descendants of West Germanic languages.
The fact that many (all?) Scots speakers also speak English doesn't mean Scots not a language on its own.
You could make your exact same arguments that Irish isn't a language because you could ask a Cork taxi driver whether he knows any English.
Scots = a language with some of the same ancestors as English.
Scottish English = a dialect (and accent) of English
Scots Gaelic = another language, with the same ancestors as Irish and Manx.
James Joyce wrote in English, no Irish person pretends that he wrote in a third language distinct from English and Irish. The fact that they do not do so does not compromise the political basis for independence, republicanism or reunification.
If a Cork taxi driver, addressed you in Irish (very unlikely), and you asked him to speak English, the request would be both coherent and reasonable. The point you missed is that the Glasgow taxi driver would look at you with consternation and say "But, I am speaking English! What's wrong with my English?' (insert dialect spelling if you like)
Rabbie Burns wrote in the same language as his compatriots Louis Stevenson and Scott.
It would be ignorant if I did not know about the meretricious claim of a minority of Scottish people to have their own language, but it is not ignorant to reject that claim. I am Scottish fwiw.
There exists dialects that are less mutually intelligible than apparently distinct languages, and the designation of each as "dialect" or "language" is political. Language is often a proxy for culture, and political actors may wish to suppress or boost the legitimacy of such cultural expression depending on their aims.
That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages.
The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with translated articles that contains error isn't much. They should instead close that version of Wikipedia until there are enough volunteers.
It's the same. Google translate uses trained AI models.
By what unholy pact have you been beknighted as the bestower of wikis, my friend?
Why should a wiki be any different?
https://www.exclassics.com/espoke/espkpdf.pdf
Wikipedia is prominent. Wikipedia articles in a language without much representation become prime examples of that language to those who read them.
Wikipedia is built around the basic principle that if you just let everyone contribute, most contributions will be helpful and you can just revert the bad ones after the fact. This works for large communities that easily outnumber the global supply of fools, but below a certain size threshold, the sign flips and the average edit makes that version of Wikipedia worse rather than better.
So smaller communities probably need to flip the operating principle of Wikipedia on its head and limit new users to only creating drafts, on the assumption that most will be useless, and an admin can accept the good ones after the fact.
I'm not sure whether Wikipedia already has the software features necessary to operate it in such a closed-by-default manner.
For whom?
[0] Which paradoxically to a significant degree exist thanks to the unpaid work of volunteers in many of such communities.
While translation tools are a godsend for that, as well as life in general when dealing with a language I am not that good at, LLMs make me increasingly reluctant to do that much more because there is no way I could detect AI slop in a second language. For all I know I'd be translating junk into English and enabling translingual citogenesis.
Bad as the slopwave is for native speakers, it's absolutely brutal for non-native speakers when you can't pick up on the tells. Maybe the gap will narrow and narrow until the slop is stylistically imperceptible.
> potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them.
OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them and we don't need to maintain them forever.
Survival of the fittest, right ? Not enough people speaking Greenlandic, too complicated even for it's own population who would rather speak danish ? The very reason I'm speaking English is because it was forced military during the 19th century by the UK and since the 20th by Hollywood.
Just like a virus, if a language doesn't spread, it die.
When people have varying levels of capability with languages, they’ll switch to whatever is the lowest common denominator — the language that the group can best communicate in. This tended to be English, even amongst a bunch of native speakers of a common foreign language.
Moreover, this is context dependent: when talking about technical matters (especially computing), the Lingua Franca (pun intended) is English. You’ll hear “locals” switch to either mixed or pure English, even if they’re not great at it. Science, aviation, etc… is the same.
Before English it was French that had this role, and before then it was Latin and Greek.
The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere. International commerce becomes practical. Students can study overseas, spreading ideas further and wider. Books have a bigger market, attracting smarter and better authors. There’s a bigger pool of talented authors to begin with, some of which write educational textbooks of exceptional sparkling quality. These all compound to create a more educated, vibrant, and varied culture… because of, not despite the single language.
I find this cultural Darwinism argument incredibly ironic, given how vocal factions in 2 of largest (native) English-speaking countries have been whinging about "their culture" being sullied by immigrants.
You are correct, but I never claimed that as the source of irony. To set the stage, we have English-speaking nationalists (your term) who obliviously benefit from the rest of the world getting on board the English train at the detriment of their own languages[1] (never mind the circumstances). If we were to accept the language-Darwinism perspective at face value, watching the winning side being salty about (the effects of) winning is incredibly ironic to me.
> I doubt you have the same contempt for all people who want to maintain their own culture.
Merely observing an ironic situation doesn't mean I have contempt for any group of people. You feel very strongly about the subject and are reading into way more than what I actually wrote.
1. The French language board tries to fight a good fight against Angloisms, but it's a losing battle. Other languages have no structures holding them up, and lose dozens to hundred of words per year. English media is pervasive and incessant.
You mean the irony is people whose language became popular are salty about having immigrants corrupting their culture? That's a stretch of the word irony - it's like saying it's ironic that a successful athlete is unhappy about losing a competition because his previous success came about from other people losing. People who are competing do like to win and don't like to lose. That's completely normal non-ironic thinking.
> doesn't mean I have contempt for any group of people.
Describing their behavior as whinging and putting "their culture" in quotes shows contempt. I'll show you with the NZ Maori example. See if it looks contemptuous:
I find it ironic that vocal factions of the New Zealand Maori population are whinging about "their culture" being sullied by immigrants.
This is just a misapplication of the analogy. For a language, "fitness" refers to similarity to whatever language is spoken by people relevant to you. Diversity is the worst quality a language can exhibit, and is the quality that causes dying languages to die.
There is no such concept as an external force coming in that certain languages handle better, allowing them to temporarily outcompete other languages. Existing pools of diversity are not protective against this, because it can't happen.
Also unlike genetic diversity, linguistic diversity does not need to be maintained as a legacy of the past. It is constantly being generated in much larger quantities than are desired. If you managed to perform the opposite of the Tower of Babel miracle and replaced every currently-spoken language everywhere in the world with a perfect monoculture, within 1-2 generations you'd be back to having mutually unintelligible varieties in different regions.
But the sentence `well-meaning Wikipedians who think that by creating articles in minority languages they are in some way “helping” those communities` clearly shows the author hasn't really considered the issue.
For instance, my mother tongue’s Wikipedia (Korean Wikipedia) suffers from serious governance issues. The community often rejects outside contributors, and many experienced editors have already moved to alternative platforms. As a result, I sometimes get mixed, low-quality responses in my native language when using LLMs.
Ultimately, we need high-quality open data. Yet most Korean-language content is locked behind walled gardens run by chaebols like Naver and Kakao — and now they’re lobbying the government to fund their own “sovereign AI” projects. It’s a lose-lose situation.
While they may be a Greenlandic teacher, it's almost assured that they are teaching western Greenlandic, which is similar to Canadian Inuktitut.
People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate language and not a dialect.
When people from East and West Greenland come together, they typically speak Danish because they can't understand each other in their own native language.
So we're talking about a country that has 55k people and a portion of them don't even speak the official language.. This guy would have no way of knowing whether something was written poorly by a computer or a poorly educated greenlandic native that maybe isn't so good with the official language.
Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use the internet at all, it is not even clear what his solution is other than just deciding to be some sort of magic arbiter .. which is not realistic or sustainable.
On what do you base this assertion? I was not able to find up-to-date statistics, but 72% of participants in this survey from 2013 had internet access at home, either via PC or via mobile devices, and another 11% had internet access elsewhere:
https://digitalimik.gl/-/media/datagl/old_filer/strategi_201...
So to get back to the point: Yes the solution is to appoint someone a magic arbiter, and hope they don’t screw up. The fact that it’s a deeply imperfect way of solving problems doesn’t mean it’s not workable. It just means it will backfire at some point, and someone else will get appointed instead.
This is the heart of the matter. Nothing is good or bad in a vacuum, but when two things (say, outcomes) can be compared, distintions can be drawn. Noticing flaws in the present can't be contrasted with simple models of "the better solution"; this is comparing apples to oranges. Address both the good and the bad of the present, including the days where nothing noteworthy happens and therefore below the awareness of most people, and the good and the bad of an elaborated counterpart.
The reason none of this makes sense to me is that it's intellectually crippling Internet users. Computers and the Internet are tools. If you want something machine translated to you, you can use a tool like Google translate to translate it for you. If the webmaster does this, it robs people from the opportunity to learn to use those tools and they become dependent on third parties to do this for them when they would have a lot more freedom if they just did it themselves (or if they learned English).
Teach a man to fish...
If this is true, then the easy solution would be to just have two separate wikipedia editions (assuming there is interest).
After all if we have en, sco, jam and ang, surely there is room for two greenlandics. The limitting factor is user interest.
That's... a reach.
An easier, and much more realistic, solution would be to just have one edition in Danish, which was already noted as the language Greenlanders have in common.
I live in Europe (famous place for becoming professional banner clicker) and I didn't get one single distraction.
There is Brave with its blocker, there is AdGuard, which blocks ads on websites and applications, regardless of the browser.
However, in the larger picture: languages evolve. New ones develop, old ones die. Do artificial attempts to "rescue" a language really make sense?