This endeavor looks largely orthogonal to what the objectives of an online encyclopedia should be. Creating as many stub articles as possible and filling them with "formulaic, generic, and reusable templated sentences with spots for specific information" seems more like a recipe for an automated content farm than for "disseminating the sum of <i>human</i> knowledge."<p>It would be most interesting to know what the 148 active Cebuano Wikipedia users think of the 5,331,028 articles the bot created, ostensibly for them. Too bad nobody apparently cared to ask.<p>In particular, since Cebuano speakers are likely to be fluent in Tagalog and/or English as well, they can easily use one of the other Wikipedia editions too. Without the hyperactive bot, the much smaller Cebuano Wikipedia would arguably be more relevant, reflecting topics truly of interest to the community.<p>While the number of articles is a convenient way of comparing Wikipedia language editions, it only works as such to the extent that the articles are kept to a certain standard. It seems to me that what we are observing here is yet another example of the situation that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.
I always thought it was a bit bizarre that different language editions of Wikipedia contain different information. It seems the focus should be more on translation than content creation. Maybe that isn’t practical with the current structure, but surely the aim should be a definitive knowledge graph rather than a disparate and unevenly duplicated set of articles. Just my two cents – I am sure many have put a lot of thought into how to best tackle this.
I discovered this in 2018, when comparing lists of languages supported by different software and the number of speakers.<p><a href="https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/#wikipedia" rel="nofollow">https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/#wikipedia</a><p>Having machine-translated content is powerful for SEO, but I don't know how practical that is for Cebuano. It would be nice for English to no longer be practically required for people to become computer literate.
I like this because growth and progress of knowledge base, regardless of language or hosting platform, is incremental and cumulative. Wikipedia shows this effectively in the English channel because it happened so quickly. But even the legacy encyclopedias did this through centuries. Whether a bot lays the groundwork from other reference points or dedicated humans do it is sort of immaterial, I think, because the very long run this benefits the people who speak this language.<p>In an age where languages are dying with their last speakers, Visayan has done much to preserve their diversity -- although not a written/codified language, volunteers give radio broadcasts in the language, books are published in it (here the lack of codification shows by variance in spelling, verb conjugation, and sentence structure), and similar. Thank you to this wikipedian for doing something to preserve a wonderful language (I mention in another comment I am fluent and miss the regular speaking of it).
Clicking on random article on <a href="https://ceb.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:Random#/random" rel="nofollow">https://ceb.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:Random#/random</a> , looks like every article is that of either a tree, or an animal, or an insect, or a place...
Slightly pedantic but the largest "Wikipedia" (depending on how you define it) is <a href="http://wikidata.org/" rel="nofollow">http://wikidata.org/</a> and it's also primarily written by bots.