How one man created 6 million Wikipedia articles, and why he stopped

Submitted ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Tea@programming.dev⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-04-15/wikipedia-cebuano-lsjbot-ai-article-generation-non-english/105123090

With nearly 7 million articles, the English-language edition of Wikipedia is by many measures the largest encyclopedia in the world.

The second-largest edition of Wikipedia boasts just over 6 million articles. It isn’t French, or Spanish, or Chinese Wikipedia.

It’s Cebuano: a language spoken mostly in the southern Philippines.

But Cebuano Wikipedia didn’t grow with the help of thousands of volunteer editors, as its English counterpart did. Most of the articles come from one person: Swedish linguist Sverker Johansson.

Dr Johansson designed a program, dubbed “lsjbot”, which generated millions of articles in several languages, but particularly Cebuano.

It also laid bare a debate which Wikipedia has been grappling with since its inception, and which artificial intelligence (AI) is making ever more pressing.

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Alternate headline: How one man spammed Wikipedia

source
Yoga@lemmy.ca ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This whole thing is just so incomprehensiblely stupid and real world usage numbers prove it:

According to Wikimedia Statistics, Cebuano Wikipedia currently reels in tens of thousands of page views from the Philippines each month.

English Wikipedia, meanwhile, gets more than 100 million Filipino viewers per month.

If people wanted AN AUTOMATED TRANSLATION they could just go to the English page and use one of the many free page translation tools that exist. Who even asked him to do this? Or is it just more white saviour complex?

source
- x00z@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It gives Philippine people the ability to edit the translation directly, eventually having their own version of it. As long as the information is correct and it’s only possible grammatical errors, this is quite a good thing to do.
  
  I have translations in the apps I write, and I just generate an automatic translation for languages I do not speak. If anything is wrong, people will correct it and I’ll end up with a fully correct translation.
  
  It is very common.
  
  source
- sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  They’re so busy asking if they could they didn’t ask if they should.
  
  Same with the guys who made the AR glasses that use face recognition to automatically dox people.
  
  source
thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The Scots wiki had the same problem. A teenage American who didn’t speak Scots edited and created 10s of thousands of entries

For those not aware Scots is a Germanic language that split from Old English back about 700-800 years ago - closely related to modern english like frisian is, but also retaining many words lost to english (some of which are retained in Swedish / Dutch etc). It is distinct from standard scottish english.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language

source
- Chronographs@lemmy.zip ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Little better because he was this guy is actually machine translating it and not just typing what a Scottish accent sounds like phonetically lol
  
  source
  - Yoga@lemmy.ca ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    He cited one “ridiculous” example where entries went wrong. In the submission for Telekinesis, the description was written in neither Scots nor English and read: “Telekinesis es a form of movnig ebjocts with yor maind.”
    
    I’m sorry but even for a 12 year old that’s comedically stupid.
    
    source
mediocreme_ow@lemm.ee ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
woah! i speak Cebuano, yet I didn’t know a Cebuano Wikipedia exists :0

source
- Gregorech@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Time to start editing…
  
  source
Amoxtli@thelemmy.club ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Better than nothing I guess.

source
- catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Unless it’s inaccurate, in which case it’s worse than nothing
  
  source