Comment by Myrmornis
9 hours ago
For some subjects, it's appropriate to host multiple versions of articles written natively in different languages.
But for other subjects, for example science and mathematics, it does a huge disservice to non-English readers: it means that their Wikipedia is second-rate, or worse.
Wikipedia should, in science, mathematics, and other subjects that do not have cultural inflection, use machine translation so that all articles in all languages are translations of the same underlying semantic content.
It would still be written by humans. But ML / LLMs would be involved in the editing pipeline so that people lacking a common language can edit the same text.
This is the biggest mistake Wikipedia's made IMO: it privileges English readers since the English content is highest quality in most areas that are not culturally specific, and I do not think that it's an organization that wants to privilege English readers.
Users can already translate English Wikipedia articles to other languages on the fly with Chrome etc. However, the quality of the translation is just not up to scratch yet, particularly for languages that are radically different from English; just try reading some ML-translated Japanese or Chinese Wikipedia articles.
> it means that their Wikipedia is second-rate, or worse.
?
Science and Mathematics have no cultural inflection? Do you speak more than one language? Each language has its standard sentences structures when it comes to these disciplines, and auto translators are very much not up to the task.
I prefee my Wikipedia to remain 100% human generated quality information over garbage AI slop content, which is already abundant enough on the internet.