[HN Gopher] AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations ...
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AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable
languages
Author : kawera
Score : 34 points
Date : 2025-10-25 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| foxglacier wrote:
| If 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 and we don't need to
| maintain them forever.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| 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 the 20th by Hollywood.
|
| Just like a virus, if a language doesn't spread, it die.
| ratg13 wrote:
| It'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 language and not a dialect.
|
| When people from East and West Greenland come together, they
| typically speak Danish because they can't understand each other
| in their own native language.
|
| So we're talking about a country that has 55k people and a
| portion of them don't even speak the official language.. This guy
| would have no way of knowing whether something was written poorly
| by a computer or a poorly educated greenlandic native that maybe
| isn't so good with the official language.
|
| Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use the
| internet at all, it is not even clear what his solution is other
| than just deciding to be some sort of magic arbiter .. which is
| not realistic or sustainable.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| > Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use
| the internet at all
|
| On what do you base this assertion? I was not able to find up-
| to-date statistics, but 72% of participants in this survey from
| 2013 had internet access at home, either via PC or via mobile
| devices, and another 11% had internet access elsewhere:
|
| https://digitalimik.gl/-/media/datagl/old_filer/strategi_201...
| Uehreka wrote:
| I wish people on HN would stop acting like "magic arbiter"
| solutions are "not realistic", when in reality it's the only
| way things have every worked. Are federal judges "magic
| arbiters"? Yes. Do judges make bad calls? Yes. Do we not like
| when large numbers of judges who are unfriendly to our side get
| life appointments? Yes. Has anyone proposed an actual better
| way of solving these kinds of problems? No.
|
| So to get back to the point: Yes the solution is to appoint
| someone a magic arbiter, and hope they don't screw up. The fact
| that it's a deeply imperfect way of solving problems doesn't
| mean it's not workable. It just means it will backfire at some
| point, and someone else will get appointed instead.
| simonw wrote:
| I'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 failed to recognise the damage they
| were doing.
| fooker wrote:
| Great, now apply this idea to political ideology.
|
| Papers and books will be written about naive heavy handed
| online censorship creating echo chambers and driving the US
| into fascism.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Yes, half of my entire political ideology is based on posts
| written by 12 year olds on the Internet. The other half is
| based on posts written by dogs[1].
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_know
| s_...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Jfc, not everything is about that.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > 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
| translated articles that contains error isn't much. They should
| instead close that version of Wikipedia until there are enough
| volunteers.
| consp wrote:
| That last part creates a chicken and egg problem. You can argue
| about it but I will bet it will never get traction if there is
| no basis to start from.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The end of the article says they have closed it.
| johnea wrote:
| Unlike what the title of the post implies, I would say Wikipedia
| bears 0% of the blame for this issue.
|
| I would put 50% of the blame on goggle, for offering up
| translations that are wholly or partially in error, without any
| indication such as a warning message to that effect.
|
| Then I would assign 40% of the blame on LLM text generation based
| on models where the model creators performed no review of their
| training data.
|
| The final 10% of blame goes to anyone who would post rubbish
| without first hand knowledge that at least the translation was
| correct.
|
| Except for that final 10%, all of the blame goes to the profit
| motive. Foisting shit on the world for the sole purpose of
| profit.
|
| And lets face it, this isn't exactly the first time marginalized
| people, or their languages, have suffered because of western
| capitalism...
|
| p.s. fan-bois kool-aid drinkers, feel free to start your down-
| voting now...
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(page generated 2025-10-25 23:00 UTC)