Good Intentions, Bad Translations

Well-meaning translators run into a volunteer buzzsaw, the Wikimedia Foundation wants to keep up with its readers, and a Swedish pop singer takes up arms against Wikipedia.

🔔 Wiki Briefing

AI translations tanking nonprofit's Wikipedia efforts

No good deed goes unpunished. The Open Knowledge Association is a nonprofit founded in 2022 by Jonathan Zimmerman with the goal of improving content on Wikipedia. They do this by hiring freelance translators and workers from the Global South to convert high-quality articles from language editions representing the Global South to editions serving the Global North in service of knowledge equity and cross-edition parity.

But there's just one problem: the freelancers use LLMs, LLMs tend to hallucinate, and the translators aren't catching these errors. OKA has published more than 2,000 articles since it was created, many on English Wikipedia, and Wikipedia editors reviewing them have found fabricated sourcing and content, duplicate articles, broken formatting and templates, and other issues. 

Instructions for translators show a pretty extensive list of do's & don't's that should theoretically head off these problems, but the community still came down hard on OKA for its missteps. Many editors wanted to bar its activity outright, but ultimately the community settled on a (fairly generous!) four-strike policy, at least for now. It's another example of how even those with the best of intentions can easily run afoul of Wikipedia community standards. 

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📰 In the News

Zara Larsson's War

Swedish pop singer Zara Larsson did not care for the headshot on her Wikipedia article, and made sure to let plenty of people know it. Larsson took to TikTok to voice her displeasure with the photo to her 8.5 million followers, setting off a flurry of activity on the encyclopedia. Even with a legion at her command, making changes to how she appeared on Wikipedia turned out to be a little more complicated than she thought.

Editors new and old battled over which image to use. The article was eventually partially locked down due to the disruption. The community opened a discussion on the Talk page, which, as of this writing, had generated nearly 7,000 words of discussion across 112 comments. 

Left: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons // Right: Hellomoto100, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

No official determination has yet been made and it doesn't look like there will be a resolution anytime soon. Larsson vowed never to end her efforts to remove the "bad" photo of her. Some editors have said they would try to reach out to her team to get a third option. 

The images used on Wikipedia have rules for how they should look and what they should depict. For biographies, a well-lit, in-focus image of the subject alone that clearly shows their face, without excessive branding, will do the trick. The image also has to be licensed under an open license like Creative Commons 4.0 or be in the public domain. It can be a little tricky, but if you want to update an image, Beutler Ink is an email away.

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📚 Research Report

Reader retention top of mind at WMF

Keeping people engaged with Wikipedia is a top priority for the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and the organization has been rolling out many new experiments since news broke of its declining readership in October. 

Much of the WMF's work is focused on the experience for mobile users, who comprise the majority of viewers of Wikimedia projects. Users are prompted to try a trivia game when they open the Wikipedia app, which the WMF says is played by 8,000 people daily. Mobile users will soon see a sliding gallery of images used in the article at the top of the page that can whisk them to the relevant part of an article, a feature that has an 8.7% click-through rate.

Android users can get insights into how long they spend reading and editing under a new activity tab, and changes may be coming to how readers find new articles, as Wikipedia experiments with semantic search, allowing users to be more conversational with their queries. 

All of these efforts are in the name of preserving Wikipedia's audience, and the WMF says early returns are promising. The experiments are ongoing, but a new era for Wikipedia may be on the horizon.

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🧩 Wikipedia Facts

The ratio of editors to readers of articles about major corporations on Wikipedia is striking. The first infographic in Beutler Ink's new series What's The Diff? illustrates this gap. Follow William Beutler's LinkedIn profile for more facts about Wikipedia you didn't know you could know.

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💡 Tips & Tricks

Need a more educational game in your life? Wikigacha is a new browser game that combines the trading card and battling elements of Magic: The Gathering with Wikipedia articles.