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AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
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Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#32I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... > an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively fa…
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Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#33I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... > an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively fa…
The Cebuano wiki is a similar case, not spoken often, but it was a personal project of an editor that was mad at political articles and started making animal articles in the Cebuano wiki. The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs, such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not only are sources the input and page content is j…
Many sources for Wikipedia articles refer to Wikipedia without citing it. Many journalists will work from Wikipedia, and most of Wikipedia's sources are journalistic articles. It happens to be that often this isn't noticed because the information obtained this way is true and uncontroversial. Citogenesis only documents examples where, by bad luck, the result is untrue information.
Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant it as an example of--road to hell paved with good intentions and "and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing". But you do you.
That's extremely tangential. Bringing hot-button political topics into unrelated threads flattens everything into political arguments and starves all other topics of oxygen.
More specifically, it gets important HN discussions quickly flagged and dropped.
Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#35> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with trans…
> they don't deserve to have one
By what unholy pact have you been beknighted as the bestower of wikis, my friend?
Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#36> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with trans…
> they don't deserve to have one By what unholy pact have you been beknighted as the bestower of wikis, my friend?
Not the commenter but in this instance it seems like if you want something you need to either be able make/maintain it or fund someone who will, no?
Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#37If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as its own evolved language that forks from the original. > potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them. OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them…
I see that this comment get downvoted but I think we can agree on the facts that languages, just like species, die while other flourish. And that's fine. Survival of the fittest, right ? Not enough people speaking Greenlandic, too complicated even for it's own population who would rather speak danish ? The very reason I'm speaking English is because it was forced military during the 19th century by the UK and since t…
We already see the 'best' LLMs switch between different languages while they are 'thinking'. It seems to me that the more languages it can 'think' in, the better off it will be. Different human languages have different concepts of time, numbers, nature, place, intention, relationships, and so forth and so on.
Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#38> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with trans…
> they don't deserve to have one By what unholy pact have you been beknighted as the bestower of wikis, my friend?
If the original authors stop maintaining an OSS project, and you are one of only a very few users, you have two options: do the work yourself, or watch it die. If you are unwilling to do the work yourself, then that's a signal it isn't important enough for anyone else to do the work either.
Why should a wiki be any different?
Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#39I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... > an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively fa…
The Cebuano wiki is a similar case, not spoken often, but it was a personal project of an editor that was mad at political articles and started making animal articles in the Cebuano wiki. The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs, such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not only are sources the input and page content is j…
> It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur
I've seen a college professor cite wikipedia in support of a false claim. On investigation, the text in wikipedia was cited to an earlier blog post by that same professor.
I wasn't convinced.
Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages
#40It's ironic that the "solution" to the problem is being driven by yet another person that isn't native to Greenland. While they may be a Greenlandic teacher, it's almost assured that they are teaching western Greenlandic, which is similar to Canadian Inuktitut. People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate…
> People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate language and not a dialect. If this is true, then the easy solution would be to just have two separate wikipedia editions (assuming there is interest). After all if we have en, sco, jam and ang, surely there is room for two greenlandics. The limitting factor…
> the easy solution would be to just have two separate wikipedia editions (assuming there is interest)
That's... a reach.
An easier, and much more realistic, solution would be to just have one edition in Danish, which was already noted as the language Greenlanders have in common.