Comment on How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days agoWikipedia (from my understanding) was built off similar doctrine as Linus’ law for iterative improvement where the dedicated and the many culled the misinformation and the outdated.
I wonder what would be a viable alternative for delicate situations like these where “hugs of death” (too many eager users who don’t understand the damage they’re causing) are occurring due to the current model for niche cultural systems like these. Maybe a council established group of authors and editors based on their background and qualifications?
squaresinger@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That’s kinda what Wikipedia does. They have a quite elaborate review process before stuff goes live: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reviewing
In the English Wikipedia, that process is working quite well. But in e.g. the Welsh Wikipedia or other tiny languages, they might only have a handful of reviewers in total. There’s no way that such a small group of people could be knowledgeable in all subjects.
Welsh Wikipedia, for example, has less than 200 total active users, and there are dozens of small language or dialect Wikipedias that have <30 active users.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
I don’t think there’s an actual solution for this issue until AI translations become so good that there’s no need for language-specific content any more. If that ever happens.
Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Even then the information on a topic can be very different depending on the language. As an example, the history of Canada is very different depending on whether or not you went to a francophone school.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s not really language dependant but region/culture dependant.
Nigeria and UK both have English as their official language, still their viewpoint on history is quite different too.
A good Wikipedia article would include all relevant viewpoints that are based in reality, and probably even some that are not, though with a disclaimer.