[HN Gopher] Wikipedia Has a Language Problem. Here's How to Fix It
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Wikipedia Has a Language Problem. Here's How to Fix It
Author : _Microft
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-08-12 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (undark.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (undark.org)
| [deleted]
| kensai wrote:
| The beauty of Wikipedia is exactly in its plurality. It's perfect
| in its (contributors') imperfection. As long as the standards of
| quoting and referencing are kept high, let these minor
| interpretation differences spark attention so we can promote
| discussion and interaction.
|
| One Wikipedia to rule them all will only promote the Anglo-
| narrative (or whichever lingua franca rules at a certain point).
| Be very careful what you are wishing for, it might very well be
| Chinese next.
| quanticle wrote:
| Exactly. I take issue with the article's implicit assertion
| that English Wikipedia is somehow less subject to manipulation
| than Wikipedias in other languages. As Ryan Holliday pointed
| out all the way back in 2012, in his book _Trust Me I 'm
| Lying_, the PR and reputation management industries _love_
| Wikipedia. They know that reporters are lazy, so in advance of
| an interview they 'll go to Wikipedia for the background
| information, and that information sets the framing that they
| use for their narrative.
|
| If Wikipedia describes someone as a successful director,
| they'll get questions about movies they've directed, which
| actors they enjoyed working with most, etc. That same person
| described as a failed actor, will get questions about their
| acting career and why it never seemed to take off. Same person,
| same accomplishments, two completely different narratives,
| driven entirely by which facts are more prominent in the
| Wikipedia article.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Clearly they should be described as a "failed actor turned
| successful director" and anything else is leaving out
| information.
| eynsham wrote:
| I am not sure how this would be implemented except by machine
| translation (probably from English). There are all sorts of
| problems with this--and since machine translation is already
| possible, switching to an English and translated Wiki would only
| really be justifiable if the disadvantages were very few.
|
| 1. Machine translation is highly uneven. The official status of
| certain languages means we have a large corpus of material from
| international organisations and multilingual governments. But
| there are still lots of languages where the corpus is much
| smaller--even if there are lots of users who contribute (e.g.,
| Vietnamese.) The quality of these Wikipedias would decline
| substantially.
|
| 2. A few Wikipedia articles are a joy to read--they are
| idiomatic, easy to understand, and well-written. Machine
| translation simply cannot do this properly. This would be lost in
| every language but English.
|
| 3. What you want in an article probably differs by language.
| Frames of reference differ: one can probably expect e.g. certain
| pop culture analogies not to require explanation (or perhaps just
| a link) in some languages but to require fuller explanation in
| others.
|
| 4. The use of non-English sources would require much more work.
| At the moment, a French-language source may appear on French
| Wikipedia without any translation work. Now, it will only appear
| if a bilingual editor happens to find it and can be bothered to
| translate it. The pattern of course is general, and would be most
| undesirable.
|
| 5. There exist many perfectly good Wikipedia editors who do not
| know how to write in English, or would lack the confidence to do
| so. Are we to lose all their contributions? If not, we'd require
| legions of bilingual editors to verify machine translations from
| non-English languages. Experience suggests that there do not
| exist many such editors.
| sleavey wrote:
| This article talks about non-English Wikipedia sites, but it's
| worth noting that the co-founder of Wikipedia (the other one, not
| Jimmy Wales) no longer trusts the English site either.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0P4Cf0UCwU
| Peritract wrote:
| The article doesn't describe a _language_ problem, but an abuse
| one - Wikipedia does not have effective tools to deal with
| misinformation for topics /pages with a small readership/number
| of editors.
|
| Machine translation doesn't fix that; it changes the nature of
| the bias and which targets count as niche.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > But what if we could ensure that everyone across the globe saw
| the same page? What if we could create one universal Wikipedia --
| one shared, authoritative volume of pages that users from around
| the world could all read and edit in the language of their
| choice?
|
| > This would be a technological feat, but probably not an
| impossible one. Machine translation has been quickly improving in
| recent years and has become a part of everyday life in many non-
| English-speaking countries. Some Japanese users, rather than read
| the Japanese version of Wikipedia, choose to translate the
| English Wikipedia using Google Translate because they know the
| English version will be more comprehensive and less biased. As
| translation technology continues to improve, it's possible to
| imagine people from all over the world will want to do the same.
|
| IIRC, Wikipedia _used_ to have a machine translation utility, but
| they canned it because the results were so bad, and actually had
| a project to clean up the mess.
|
| I think the issue is that machine translation is _usually_ pretty
| good, but also frequently introduces significant errors (e.g.
| missing or misapplying a negation, which totally inverts the
| meaning of a sentence).
| [deleted]
| aaron695 wrote:
| > English Wikipedia is considered by many researchers to be
| almost, but still not quite as accurate as traditional
| encyclopedias.
|
| This is garbage. No one's claimed this for years. The citations
| are all over 10 years old.
|
| What is fun and productive is reading Wikipedia in the language
| relevant to the article. So read about German beers on the German
| Wiki as well as English.
| h4wzdbf wrote:
| London Breed is a nazi.
|
| I hope she gets her ass fucked up on the street.
|
| Fucking cunt.
| Chico75 wrote:
| My impression was that wikidata was the main answer to this
| problem by centralizing all the facts in a central database to
| avoid each page having its own data and sources, but I can see
| how there is much more than the data at stake.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > My impression was that wikidata was the main answer to this
| problem by centralizing all the facts in a central database to
| avoid each page having its own data and sources, but I can see
| how there is much more than the data at stake.
|
| IIRC, Wikidata doesn't centralize "all the facts," it just
| centralizes the basic infobox data, which is only a small part
| of any article
| crazygringo wrote:
| I've often wondered if it would be not just possible, but user-
| friendly, to write in a way that guarantees machine translation
| is 100% accurate.
|
| Specifically, imagine you write a few sentences in English. Then
| when you hit "publish", it would look for the potentially
| amibiguous parts of your sentences, and then give you "nearby
| synonyms" for you to select which one you meant. It wouldn't
| change the text in your source language, but it would remove the
| ambiguity so all the output translations would be correct, no
| guessing.
|
| It would do things like ask which noun "it" referred to since
| some languages have male/female versions, ask for clarification
| of verb tenses as necessary, etc.
|
| After all, the hardest part of machine translation is inferring
| meaning. If that part could be guaranteed to work accurately, it
| seems like machine translation could become a ton more useful.
| yorwba wrote:
| Abstract Wikipedia is kind of trying to do this, but using
| structured data instead of English.
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia
| rootsudo wrote:
| Disagree entirely on Japanese translating the English wiki - that
| is too many steps and most people do not do that. Also within
| Japan, SEO and such always put Japanese content first (especially
| on google.) vs en.wikipedia.org.
|
| The article is touching heavy on Japanese and if you do not have
| a basic fluency of the langauge, it's easy to jump to
| conclusion...
|
| Alongside, same with the renaming of Nanjing - what if the
| government renames the incident and it becomes the status quo?
| What is the source of truth?
|
| Machine translating one "wikipedia" is also wrong, because
| context is removed, and having English be the language of truth
| and all other languages translate from it - you'll miss out on
| many things, especially words that do not have a specific English
| translation.
|
| The article is poorly written and documented.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Alongside, same with the renaming of Nanjing - what if the
| government renames the incident and it becomes the status quo?
| What is the source of truth?
|
| The "source of truth" should be scientific consensus, not
| government decrees and policies.
|
| The problem is obvious: it takes a _lot_ of resources to
| determine what the consensus is on hotly debated topics.
| philwelch wrote:
| "Scientific consensus" is easily gamed by any authority with
| enough power to influence the scientific community.
|
| In the crudest version of this, any scientists who publicly
| disagree with the "consensus" are thrown into gulag. In more
| refined versions, they are excluded or expelled from the
| field, sometimes by activist mobs. The problem with the more
| refined version is that it's intentionally difficult to
| distinguish honest and qualified dissidents from kooks unless
| you know enough about the actual science.
|
| Consensus is a social and political phenomenon, not a
| scientific one.
| quanticle wrote:
| What is the "scientific consensus" on the name of a city?
| When the government of India decides to rename Calcutta to
| Kolkata, then has the "scientific consensus" on the name of
| the city shifted?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's what the inhabitants calls it.
|
| Calcutta, Pondicherry and Pekin were "best attempts" by
| Europeans to transcribe the sounds from the locals that
| were relayed to them by illiterate sailors.
| lwouis wrote:
| See my sibling comment. You don't need a consensus. You can
| list multiple perspectives and have them coexist. That's how
| we have to do with religion for example. There can't be a
| consensus there clearly, so we share all perspectives. Facts
| of life such as what's on Wikipedia should be edited as well
| as narrated by a variety of sources so that it represents the
| diversity of humankind
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The question if something was a "massacre" or an "incident"
| or if a Nazi installation was a
| "concentration/extermination camp" or a "collection camp"
| is _not_ something that allows coexistence or diversity.
| pavon wrote:
| The article also assumes there is one audience which is also
| false. The English language page for a Japanese subject will
| inherently need to describe things differently for a western
| audience to understand than the Japanese language page would.
| Trying to merge these would make things worse for both
| audiences.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Do you know of any examples where the English version of a
| wikipedia article has a more "Western" explaination whereas
| the Japanese version has a more "Eastern" one?
| lwouis wrote:
| She seems to dream of this "one absolute source of truth".
| There is no universal truth. The best way to know something is
| to know as many perspectives on it as possible. In her example
| of "massacre" changing to "incident", both are descriptions
| that groups of people find appropriate.
|
| You open a left-wing journal and read about what people in that
| bubble think of the world. You open a right-wing journal and
| read a different perspective.
|
| Plurality of information and perspective gives you the richest
| knowledge. Not some Orwellian universal truth that some
| committee/government approved.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| There is universal truth (though there may be many
| perspectives - some biased purposefully, some merely
| imperfect), and that truth is rooted in the fact that the
| real world is an objective thing that exists. Claiming that
| "there is no universal truth" just feeds the recent concept
| of "alternative facts" and lends validity to absurd
| worldviews that don't take the objectivity of the physical
| world as foundational feature.
|
| I agree that it's good to try to see things from various
| angles, but "there is no such thing as universal truth" seems
| like a very damaging idea.
| philwelch wrote:
| But at the foundation, there _is_ a universal truth. Whether
| you describe something as a "massacre" or an "incident" is a
| moral judgment, but whether the event happened in the first
| place is a fact that continues to be true regardless of the
| strength of anyone's delusion to the contrary.
|
| Plurality of information and perspective gives you the
| richest knowledge because (a) the knowledge of which
| judgments different people apply to the same facts is a fact
| in itself and (b) all sides lie and omit information to
| further their own agenda, so you have to try your best to
| interpolate the universal truth from what everyone else is
| saying.
| Decabytes wrote:
| I know Esperanto isn't the greatest language in the world. It has
| its problems like other languages. But I feel like this is a good
| use case for it. I've heard of Esperanto being a good
| intermediate language to translate things into due to it being
| much more regular of a language. There have even been
| investigations in using it in Machine learning.
|
| It would be easier for someone to pick up, and translate to from
| their native language compared to other languages, even in cases
| where your native language had not cognates with Esperanto. Then
| since its grammar is regular it could be translated into another
| language with less effort. A benefit of using Esperanto as
| opposed to inventing a new language is that it does have some
| traction. There are websites and apps that teach it. It's on
| google translate, mozilla common voice etc. It is not completely
| unfamiliar, and it is not tied to any one nation. This
| simultaneously avoids the social issues that would inevitably
| arise if English were used, while also building off of an already
| established (and over 100 year old language). It also has support
| from countries who have had difficult relation ships with the
| U.S.A for example Radio China has a 1 hour broadcast in
| Esperanto, Cuba has a broadcast, and other countries as well!
|
| I've been learning Esperanto for a couple months and it has been
| fun. While the community is small it is definitely enthusiastic.
| It's #35 on wikipedia with over 300k articles, has both a normal,
| and meme(memeo) subreddit, and a large Telegram group (over 1k
| members).
|
| 1.
| https://www.proquest.com/openview/dfaf840b0267d1bb8a38d9d719...
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Language_Translati...
| 3. http://esperanto.cri.cn/2521/more/2622/more2622.htm 4.
| https://esperanto.net/en/esperanto-broadcasts/ 5.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias 6.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Esperanto/
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(page generated 2021-08-12 23:02 UTC)