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Did you know that Wikipedia's second-largest edition is Cebuano?

By Cara Emmeline Garcia
Published March 4, 2020 10:38 AM PHT

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According to a report by Vice.com, Cebuano Wikipedia is the second-largest edition and it's written by a bot.

We've all done it. We've all used Wikipedia at some point but little do we know about the world's largest and free encyclopedia.

In fact did you know that the second largest edition in Wikipedia is Cebuano? This was reported by Vice.com as written by Kyle Wilson.

According to Kyle, while the English edition has more than 6 million articles, the Cebuano Wikipedia lags behind by only 630 thousand articles. In total, that's more or less 5.3 million pages behind. The edition even beat the Swedish and German editions by over 1.64 and 2.98 million, respectively.

This fact is surprising because according to his research there are only about 16.5 million Cebuano speakers out of the 109 million Filipinos. That makes only 15% of the population in the country. It even surpassed the Tagalog Wikipedia edition.

So, the question is, how did this happen? The answer is fairly simple -- bots.

According to the report, an administrator named Guilherme Morandini found that over 99% of articles in the Cebuano Wikipedia were created by a bot named “Lsjbot.”

“Lsjbot” was created by Swedish physicist and programmer Sverker Johansson in July 2014 and was designed to perform tasks on the Internet.

Isang post na ibinahagi ni Sverker Johansson (@encomium_to_sverker_johansson) noong

It says, “Lsjbot is responsible for the creation of articles about various species on the Cebuano, Swedish, and Waray-Waray Wikipedias.” However, it is no longer creating articles in the said languages because “opinions have shifted” within the Swedish Wikipedia community and the Waray-Waray editors are unable to form a consensus about the automatic creation of articles.

As to why you're wondering why Sverker opted to create a bot appearing in Cebuano language? It's because Sverker's wife Smiley is from Cebu.

Many of the articles on Wikipedia are disproportionately written based on language and interests. The vast majority of writers on Wikipedia are young, affluent white men whose interests do not reflect that of the majority of people. Additionally, there is a severe language barrier for many people around the world. While Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers in the world, only 2.1% of articles are written in the language. For reference, English is 11.7% and has the largest number of articles. On a more personal note, Lsjbot has written roughly 50% of the articles in Swedish Wikipedia, and over 80% of the articles in the Waray and Cebuano languages, the native languages of Johansson's wife Smiley. #equality #language

Isang post na ibinahagi ni Sverker Johansson (@encomium_to_sverker_johansson) noong

In the press, the bot Lsjbot has generated some criticism from those who suggest that the articles produced lacked meaningful content and human touch.

In fact, The Sydney Morning Herald compared Lsjbot to Phil Parker who is allegedly the most published author in human history with over 85,000 books. According to the Australian newspaper, each book takes less than an hour for Phil to write.

While some criticisms arose, there are a few others who commended Sverker's invention as a thing of the future.

This was attested to by a global administrator named Vermont who views the Wikipedia edition as a “pilot wiki” of sorts for the “idea of an article-creating bot.”

For the foreseeable future, Vermont says humans are a necessity to control article content and quality but at some point, bots “could do everything that a human can.”