Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles

I don't know what "mods" are but perhaps you mean "modifiers" as in "editors".

One main aspect in play here is that we're dealing with over 300 sets of Wikipedia editors in different projects. Each Wikipedia language-based project is siloed, with its own complement of editors, admins, policies and guidelines. Sure, you can edit more than one Wikipedia from a single account, but there is typically a true community that coalesces in each one, and they set the culture and the rules of behavior.

I have found that many are less deletionist and less vigilant and more welcoming of new content in general. The majority of these articles may be under the radar for them. They may not detect anything wrong with the articles. They may not care. They may have too few editors patrolling in general, to clean up minor issues like this.

Another thing about the small communities that have formed, they often understandably do not always enjoy when an editor comes cross-wiki to combat some perceived abuse or vandalism. It is not what some user did on another wiki that matters to them, if a local user is not being disruptive, per se, then they should not be subject to any disciplinary action.

So if anyone were to pursue this seemingly minor issue of single-article spam, they'd need to pursue it more than 300 times in 300 different ways, subject to 300 separate policies and guidelines interpreted by that many communities of editors and admins. That's sort of a radioactive task for anyone there.

Wikipedia doesn't have anyone called "moderators", at least not in English nor in any sense of userrights. "Mods and admins" is usually something an ignorant non-community-member resorts to appealing when something is wrong there.

The truth is that Wikipedia content is not governed by a hierarchical administration, and all ordinary editors collaborate there to achieve consensus.

Administrators on Wikipedia have the responsibility for administrative tasks, privileged things, and disciplinary actions. Not content, not choosing what sort of articles to delete, not cleaning up articles.

See, I tried to give benefit of the doubt and a favorable interpretation, and someone who isn't the GP chimes in to perpetuate the myth. I'm curious about the myth: where does it come from and how do so many people sincerely just believe this is how Wikipedia works? Is "mods and admins" the default "go-to group" that cleans up other websites? Is it a specific meme from Reddit or some other forum type place? "Moderators" are usually the ones who execute discipline on forum discussions and users. That's not even a relevant role in terms of Wikipedia. But even within the noticeboards and talk pages, newbies come in all the time to appeal to "mods and admins", please address our problem. It's interesting how uniform the myth becomes!

They are functionally completely independent. And it's true that translation is not necessarily the way foreign-language articles get written. But it's also true that editors can often lift whole sections out of one project to translate into another project, by way of augmenting the article content. What's terrible is when this is bad content, because errors can easily be propogated in very persistent ways!

I need to qualify that independence, though: all Wikipedia projects draw from at least two common sources: Commons and Wikidata. Now, Commons is media-oriented, so most of the images and audio provided may be language-independent. Wikidata is something that's not well incorporated in the English Wikipedia, but heavily used elsewhere. For basic facts and data points, Wikidata is a common database that levels the playing field for all projects and helping them expand equally without monumental individual efforts in each community. If you, as an editor, wish to truly make significant changes happen, you can do it from "behind the scenes" in one of these two projects.

It is very advantageous to read articles in different languages if you're interested in deep dives on the subject. For each topic, figure out its native tongue and go there to find good info. You can even just Google Translate it back to English. And sign in to your account: the Wikipedia preferences permit you to use an interface language that you can understand.

You'll find that English Wikipedia editors have an aversion to non-English sources and citations. They're not prohibited at all, but they are not popular, because other editors like to read and verify them. Unfortunately, English Wikipedia articles on foreign topics can often be built entirely on Anglophone sources, making a very impoverished, insensitive, inaccurate article! I've found foreign-langauge projects which provide foreign-language sources to be really useful in this regard.

Now I wouldn't be so quick to say this, because after all, we are talking about far more than the English Wikipedia here.

The English Wikipedia is the original, the largest, and the most visible project, but it's completely independent from the other ones.

I would say that many of the other language projects have majority non-American editors, because fluent and native speakers are more likely to be able to contribute in a big way to them. Perhaps immigrants to America may hold down a large part as well, but if you peer under the hood of some of these projects, you'll find a lot of their controversies and biases result from nationalism and adherence to regional cultures and customs that differ with American ones.

Now it wouldn't be surprising that most/all projects exhibit an incipient Western bias, because the WMF is a Western organization and based in Western culture, so any editor drawn to that ethos may tend to be less in line with foreign biases. But we have seen, just from disputes that bubble over into enwiki, or Commons or Wikidata, that there is a true diversity to editors, and I think it's a disservice that anyone projects enwiki demographics onto the other projects.

> Wikipedia is more connected that you may think.

Actually I wrote this same idea 17 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44036737

So I don't know what you think I think, but I already said this is so. Nobody has said any different. The independent governance of the projects is nevertheless a fact, though; they all make independent decisions in terms of content retention as we are discussing in this thread. All the editors who "port" or translate bits of articles are operating independently, and there is actually no way to logically link the material using wikicode; if the text is edited in one place, then its content will diverge from every other place it appears. In other words, the projects are independent from one another, despite "cross-pollination", translation, or "porting" of text from one to another.