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Fandom's AI-Translating Wikis

Agnaa

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A little over a week ago Fandom announced their intent to start doing this, and a little under a week ago posted this update. Main points:
  • They do this by feeding the page through an LLM.
  • They're starting with English > German.
  • They're starting on one wiki, the Shogun wiki. Their next phase will be rolling it out to a few more.
  • They plan to only do this to a few core pages.
  • They plan to do this process once, rather than updating it with every edit made to the English page.
  • Sounds like they're gonna keep doing this despite the backlash, and they're gonna write a bigger post defending it.
lmao

I hope we don't get our pages translated, presumably adding work and leaving them in an outdated state.
 
absolute-dogshit.png

Entirely expected course of events, honestly.
 
Kinda wanna see what a LLM would make out of a page on the wiki when translating it into German, though.
Thinking about how much jargon and special use fo terms we have and I expect it to end up hilariously broken.
 
If Fandom creates automatically translated and continuously updated versions of our wiki that cannot be manually edited, since they simply contain translated text from our own pages, that might not be so bad, but otherwise I think that we should strongly oppose this. 🙏
 
If Fandom creates automatically translated and continuously updated versions of our wiki that cannot be manually edited, since they simply contain translated text from our own pages, that might not be so bad, but otherwise I think that we should strongly oppose this. 🙏
Their idea is to bring editors in from other countries, so they won't continuously update them (and so, we'd need to continuously monitor their actions); if they only cared about readers, they'd integrate Google Translate or something similar.
 
Hmm. In that case I think that this is a horrible idea. If you write a draft for a letter text detailing our reasoning, I can send it to Kirkburn and continue to talk with him about the issue. 🙏
 
I could if you think it's important, but I don't think that would be necessary, unless they approach you (or another staff member) about implementing it on our wiki.
 
I think that we should take precautions, yes. They might not ask us before they implement it otherwise. 🙏
 
Then I'd start with something like:
Hey Kirkburn,

Our community's seen Fandom's posts about their translation pilot, and we're worried about this potentially being applied to our wiki.

It seems like a particularly bad fit for our wiki. Since we cover so many different series, lots of information gets outdated relatively quickly, so it would not be ideal to have many versions of pages "frozen in time" so to speak, with a far smaller base of editors attempting to keep tens of thousands of pages updated with new releases in media.

On top of that, the material we host is quite contested. Most other wikis are on topics that have far less debate, splintering this off will have those other-language versions with a smaller pool of voices to come to reasonable conclusions, and any choices they make will be inevitably tied to the English version, despite our userbase likely having little influence over the exact content of offshoots like that. Even if they don't make new bad choices, they could easily fail to be updated with the new choices we make on the main wiki, leaving them in a state we ultimately disagree with.

Finally, there's also the concern that such a derivative wiki seems prime for vandalism, we already have to deal with quite a bit of that, including by non-English speaking editors, on the main wiki. Having separate wikis our strained resources would also have to monitor seems unworkable.
I'm not sure how to finish it, but that's what I've got so far.
 
How about this?

"Hello. I hope that you are well. 🙏

Our community has seen Fandom's posts about creating automatically translated versions of different wikis, and we are worried about this potentially being applied to our own VS Battles Wiki.


It seems like a particularly bad fit for our wiki.

Given that we cover so many different series, lots of information gets outdated relatively quickly, we continuously perform a massive amount of quality-improving revisions, and our edit-patrollers have over a thousand edits to keep track of the reliability for almost every day.

Basically, the material we host is extremely contested. Most other wikis handle topics that are far more self-evident, and require far less debates.

As such, if you only intend to auto-translate the information from our wiki once, rather than continuously, the translated wikis would quickly turn extremely outdated and unreliable due to old versions of pages being "frozen in time", or continuously easily vandalised and distorted through constant edit-wars, since our staff members are strained very thin already in terms of available workforce, and cannot handle even more work than we already do, and if unverified staff members take over the evaluation, editing, and edit-patrolling duties in the offshoot wikis, they would most likely just apply whatever statistics and powers that they feel like, as is the usual praxis for our less reliable copycat wikis, so our userbase will likely have little influence over the exact content of the offshoots.

And even if they don't make new bad choices, they could easily fail to be updated with the new revisions we make in our main wiki, leaving them in a state we extremely strongly disagree with, and yet they would use our reputation and wiki title for public recognition.

In addition, there is a very large risk that many knowledgeable non-native English speakers in our community would splinter off into offshoot wikis in many different languages, which would lose us valuable help and ultimately turn away our wiki from being a collaborative international project where we constantly strive for quality improvements by pooling our resources, into a fragmented, unreliable, self-contradicting, national tribalist mess, with each part having limited resources and also greatly dividing our visitor base.

This problem may also apply to Fandom as a whole. Do you want to bring people together from all over the world to learn to get along as fellow humans in international communities, or even more tribalist ultranationalist nonsense?

Integrating some kind of automatic Google Translate page-translating function for visitors of our and other main wikis seems like a considerably more realistic idea."

Suggested wording structure improvements are appreciated. 🙏
 
Last edited:
I disagree with the last two points presented, but other than that it seems fine.
 
Please elaborate. 🙏
 
I don't view this sort of thing as tribalist, many people simply don't know English, this brings them into the fold.

It seems likely to improve their viewer statistics, surely there are at least some users who would like a wiki, but don't use it since it's in the wrong language. And if it ends up not improving this, they'll notice in the pilot they're starting now, and obviously not bring it to other places. They are ultimately a company interested in making money, and they won't waste time and energy doing this if it ends up getting them no visitors.

A Google Translate sort of function would be rather fine, I'd want it to be toggleable but it is on most websites with that. I think I missed that and was referring to tribalism/viewers by "last two".
 
Well, I removed the mention of visitor statistics, but I think that different nations fragmenting humanity by sticking to themselves only is a valid point, and that international communities help to counteract that.

Should I send the letter now? 🙏
 
Eh, I don't have anything more to add.
 
Okay. I will send it then. Thank you for helping out. 🙏❤️
 
I have sent the letter now. 🙏
 
I received a reply. 🙏

"Hi there!

I have sent your feedback over to the Community staff members overseeing the project. They wanted to emphasize, though, that the experiment will be opt-in only, so if someone reaches out to VS Battles about it, please feel free to say no. 🙂️"
 
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