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Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

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Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#3
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

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#5
post #2

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?

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#6
post #3

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.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#7
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

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#9
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.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#10
post #3

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

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