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Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

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Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#51

Post by reddalo »

KomoD wrote: post #6
bglazer wrote: 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.

I've checked the Italian version of the article and I've noticed two interesting things:

- the page was originally published in 2017 by user Swmmng without any content, just a random photo of blue sapphire [1];

- the second revision of the article [2], published one minute after the first one, actually has content, but it's clearly machine translated.

So yes, it's a "clever" form of spam.

[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Woodard&old...

[2] https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Woodard&old...

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#52

Post by wongarsu »

umeshunni wrote: post #45
Flimm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. Most Wikipedia articles in different languages on the same topic are not translations of each other, in my experience. It is better to think of them as independent of each other.

I've often wondered if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It feels like reading through Wikipedia, I'm missing some specifics, details or even points of view on a particular (international) topics when I'm reading it in English. I was reading about a town in Estonia recently while trying to track down some ancestry and while the English page had limited information, when I switched to Estonian and used google transl…

If you speak multiple languages (or are willing to read machine translation) you can often get a much richer understanding of a topic by reading wikipedia in multiple languages. Wikipedia strives to be unbiased, but obviously that's a goal, not a reality. But different languages are biased in different directions. Even on articles of comparable length the articles often emphasize very different parts, and deem different facts relevant.

And sometimes there are facts that are just less relevant in certain languages. The English article on the model railway scale HO spends the majority of its introduction on a lengthy explanation that HO stands for "Half O", and the O scale is actually part of the set of 0, 1, 2 and 3 scale, but English speakers still use the letter O. Which is important to note in an English article, but completely irrelevant in the majority of languages that don't share this very British quirk and call it H0 instead.

Cultural diversity is a big strength of wikipedia. Turning everything into one smooshed together thing would be a travesty. Making the various different versions more accessible to readers would be helpful, but it would also dilute the diversity as it would certainly bring more editors of one language into other language versions of the same article, leading to more homogenized viewpoints and a view that's even more dominated by the most active wikipedians (presumably Americans and Germans)

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#54

Post by zozbot234 »

umeshunni wrote: post #45
Flimm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. Most Wikipedia articles in different languages on the same topic are not translations of each other, in my experience. It is better to think of them as independent of each other.

I've often wondered if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It feels like reading through Wikipedia, I'm missing some specifics, details or even points of view on a particular (international) topics when I'm reading it in English. I was reading about a town in Estonia recently while trying to track down some ancestry and while the English page had limited information, when I switched to Estonian and used google transl…

> Would some sort of auto-translation and content augmentation (with editorial support) be useful here.

The Wikipedia folks are working on this, but planning on auto-generating natural language text from some sort of language-independent semantic representation. This avoids the unreliability of typical machine translation and makes it comparatively easier to have meaningful support for severely under-resourced languages, where providing good encyclopedic text is arguably most important. Details are very much TBD but see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia for a broader description. If you prefer listening to a podcast episode, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a57QK4rARpw

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#55

Post by 63 »

tombert wrote: post #49
madcaptenor wrote: post #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…

The Corbin Bleu thing has been a fascination for awhile, I think. I seem to remember a thread on SomethingAwful or 4chan or something years ago. I am pretty convinced it was just an in-joke in some online community or even just a group of friends to make this perfectly-fine-but-completely-unremarkable actor on of the most famous people on Wikipedia. Like, some completely mundane actor immortal by making him one of th…

It's almost certainly all one individual in Saudi Arabia, though their motivation is unknown as is why they try so hard to obscure their identity. The full story is pretty fascinating and I highly recommend this video on it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ_pEP3fRvM

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#56

Post by thrance »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #28
madcaptenor wrote: post #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…

There seems to be a recency bias, as the odds of our present day politicians all being as historically important as the rest of the list is unlikely. Makes sense that things of recent media attention are higher priority for translation, irrespective of how "important" they are in the grand scheme of history.

And an American bias, with American editors still being a relative majority of Wikipedia editors. And a Western bias too, etc.

I don't think we could ever come up with an objective list of "who are the best people ever". Though it could be a fun project to define some criterions and search for who maxes them in history.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#58

Post by dav_Oz »

madcaptenor wrote: post #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…

Regarding Corbin Bleu the english wikipedia article itself mentions this oddity [0] apparently some great fan from Saudi Arabia [1](the article in Arabic itself is also unusually verbose [2]) put in the effort. The number (212) essentially didn't move since 2019 (then #5).

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Bleu

>In 2013, an MIT study discovered that Bleu was the third most-common biography article subject among all the different language versions of Wikipedia; pages on him were available in 194 languages, placing below only Jesus (214) and Barack Obama (200), and above Confucius (192) and Isaac Newton (191). The contradiction between Bleu's high notability on Wikipedia and low real-life notability comparative to the aforementioned historical figures made the creation of these pages unusual.[171][172] Years later, a Reddit user found that these translations were likely done by a single user whose IP addresses on Wikipedia locate to Saudi Arabia. By 2019, Bleu had dropped to #5 on the list of biographies, but increased in Wikipedia notability, by then being available in 213 languages.[173]

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/aetmh9...

[2]https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%83%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%...

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#59

Post by marc_abonce »

crazygringo wrote: post #36
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #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 i…

> It saddens me that we will probably see the end of wikipedia soon... I expect the slow ramp of anti wikipedia rhetoric... Now that college students are using completely unsourced... Where is this doom and gloom coming from? Wikipedia isn't ending. Legal challenges can be dealt with as they always have, and in the worst-case scenario the org can move countries if necessary. I can't even imagine why you "expect the s…

Unlike the parent post, I don't think that Wikipedia will end soon. However, Wikipedia has definitely handicapped itself for the sake of submitting to the the law in the last couple of years.

Specifically, this has been the case with the formerly fair use illustrations which are now shrunk to a tiny size. This makes Wikipedia a far less useful encyclopaedia for topics like the history of art. Not only did they edit out the images, but they also made the previous versions unreachable in the edit history, which contrasts with the transparency that used to distinguish the project before.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I understand the legal need for this change and I still love and support Wikipedia, but it would be naïve to take its current status for granted and assume that the foundation can just move to another country (where?) or that cloning would be easy when the edit history can be retroactively erased.

Re: Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

#60

Post by MichaelZuo »

reddalo wrote: post #51
KomoD wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, some account "Swmmng" has created a lot of these pages. Interestingly this is also the name of some kind of music/artist agency.

I've checked the Italian version of the article and I've noticed two interesting things: - the page was originally published in 2017 by user Swmmng without any content, just a random photo of blue sapphire [1]; - the second revision of the article [2], published one minute after the first one, actually has content, but it's clearly machine translated. So yes, it's a "clever" form of spam. [1] https://it.wikipedia.org…

That is strange… Why would wikipedia mods and admin let such obvious spam stay up?
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