Wikipedia consensus? - It is who you ask but what are the facts

An article in VICE starts as follows: 'Wikipedia consensus is that an unedited machine translation, left as a Wikipedia article, is worse than nothing'. This article is problematic in so many ways, it starts with this premise because the Cebuano Wikipedia does not contain machine translation. It contains machine generated text and, to add insult to injury this same article states: 'the majority (generated articles) are surprisingly well constructed'.

An article like this can be sanity checked. Principles come first;

• This is about a Wiki in contrast to the Nupedia approach. 
• Wikipedia’s founding goal is to make knowledge freely available online in as many languages as possible.
• There is a difference between opinions and facts

It is important how arguments are made. When "highly trusted users who specialize in combating vandalism" are introduced and comment that "many articles are created by bots", it does not follow that the quality is low nor that this is to be considered vandalism but the implication is made.

It is a fact that the Cebuano Wikipedia has 5,378,563 articles and also that there are some 16.5 million people who understand Cebuano. There is however no relation between these two facts. More relevant is that the wife of Sverker Johansson has Cebuano as her mother tongue and his two kids learn from their maternal cultural heritage also thanks to the work he does for the Cebuano Wikipedia. That is very much a classic Wiki approach.

In contrast the English Wikipedia has its bot policy preventing the use of bots for generating content. These notions should be local to the English Wikipedia and need not have relevance elsewhere. These highly trusted users can be expected to proselyte this point of view and thanks to this POV they take away a source of information without offering any credible alternative for the existing lack of information available to the rest of the world. At the same time the English Wikipedia is biased in the information it provides and does not provide the same quality of service for the domains selected for the Cebuano Wikipedia.

Sadly the Wikimedia Foundation itself makes no effective difference in support of the "other" languages it is said. An alternative to the LSJbot was introduced and it may be able to make a difference but as it does not provide a public facing service making it very much a paper tiger. Even worse are the Nupedia notions in the combination of two things: "Due to its heavy reliance on Wikidata entries, the quality of content produced is heavily influenced by the quality of the Wikidata available." and "It can discredit other Wikipedia entries related to automatic creation of content or even the Wikipedia quality.” These notions are problematic for several reasons.

• No information is preferred over little information when our service to an end user is considered
• Quality of information is framed in the light of existing Wikipedia entries. Whose Wikipedia entries are we considering? They are however irrelevant as our aim is to inform our end users; they do not cover the same subject.
• When the quality is considered of Wikidata .. Why, it is a wiki and its quality is improving particularly as so many eyes shine their light on it.
• We can inform, in any and all languages, and we do not even have to call it Wikipedia, we do not even have to save it in a Wikipedia when we only cache the results from the automated text generation.
• When we cache results of automated text generation, texts can be generated again when the data is expanded or changed.

So far the critique of the VICE article, but then again does English not have its own problems?

• Its 1,143 administrators and 137,368 active users are struggling to keep up, when you compare it with the 6 administrators and 14 active users for the Cebuano Wikipedia it is understandable that, as they grow, the English have to rely more and more on bots and artificial intelligence.
• Magnus has demonstrated that the maintenance of lists is better served not by editors but by using the data from Wikidata
• The Wikipedia technology has a problem with false friends. Arguably some 4% of list entries are wrong because the wrong article is linked to. When links are solidified by using Wikidata identifiers instead, this problem disappears in the same way as the problems with interwiki links disappeared.

The biggest problem "Wikipedia consensus" has is that it was formulated in the past by a tiny in-crowd making up the "accepted" big words for the rest of us and worse they can not be swayed from their POV by facts.

Thanks,

      GerardM