2 Comments

Question on AI, language, and Wikipedia since it sounds like you've been thinking about it!

I was trying to learn about a town in the middle of Spain the other day.

There's hardly any information about it on the english version of the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvillar/Bilar

Only a little more in the Spanish version: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvillar

And I had to click the basque language version to get a lengthy entry: https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvillar

I don't know how good AI translators have gotten, but I have to assume they're pretty good, which makes me wonder: when, if ever, should I expect wikipedia to automatically give me all the information siloed in the basque-language-wiki in english (or whatever my default language might be)?

Expand full comment
author
Oct 27·edited Oct 27Author

Great question! The Wikimedia Foundation seems pretty committed to local wikis with local knowledge in local languages--the point isn't just to have all knowledge written in English and auto-translated--but I think that a tool where it checks what entry has the most info (by length or some other metric) and offers a sidebar or something could be super useful, because translators are very good and only getting better (if you were using Chrome, Google probably offered to auto-translate it and probably did a pretty good job).

Expand full comment