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A comment on The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly by one bot. Parent comment

Re:The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly... by rcthompson on Monday February 24, 2020 @11:20PM (#22410889)
The counterpoint is that automatically-created stub articles serve to encourage community editing. It's much easier to edit an existing article than create a new one from scratch. This is one of the key principles behind the Gene Wiki project[1], which creates stub articles for human genes for this reason:

> Basic articles (called “stubs”) were systematically created based on content extracted from structured databases. These stubs are then edited by the broader Wikipedia community, while “bots” keep the structured content in sync with the source databases.

(The "structured content" mentioned is the info box on the right-hand side of a gene article. Nowadays I believe this is populated directly from Wikidata[2].)

Note: I am a member of the lab that runs Gene Wiki, but my work is unrelated.

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[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5944608/

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26989148

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly... by _-___________-_ on Monday February 24, 2020 @11:46PM (#22410974)
This seems fine as long as the articles are clearly marked as machine-generated. Machine translation regularly garbles the meaning of text, while producing readable text that has correct sentence structure etc. This is a major problem in an encyclopedia.
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Re:The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly... by yorwba on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @03:11AM (#22411610)
The subtitle of the article makes it sound like the text in question is machine-translated, but it is created by filling a template with structured data. So long as the template is correct and the data source is accurate, the meaning won't be garbled.
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Re:The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly... by _-___________-_ on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @03:29AM (#22411666)
I can't really see how the number of translated articles could be as huge as it is using only that approach.
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Re:The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly... by yorwba on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @07:57AM (#22412778)
Why not? I tried a random article and got one about a park: https://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atokad_Park Note that there's no English article about that park that could have served as the source for a machine translation. The article mostly lists a bunch of facts about the location that are easily available in public databases. I don't know how many entries GeoNames.org has, but this park has the number 5063315, so there should be material for quite a lot of articles.
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Re:The second largest version of Wikipedia is written mostly... by rcthompson on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @07:49AM (#22412713)
I guess it depends on how much information is in Wikidata, assuming that's the data source.
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