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Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

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Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#11
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

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#12
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

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.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#13

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…

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.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#14

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.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#15

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

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.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#16
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.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#17
post #14

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

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#18
post #12
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

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?

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#19

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 i…

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.

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