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)?
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).
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)?
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).