<
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikipedia-vulnerable-languages-doom-spiral/>
"When Kenneth Wehr started managing the Greenlandic-language version of
Wikipedia four years ago, his first act was to delete almost everything. It had
to go, he thought, if it had any chance of surviving.
Wehr, who’s 26, isn’t from Greenland—he grew up in Germany—but he had become
obsessed with the island, an autonomous Danish territory, after visiting as a
teenager. He’d spent years writing obscure Wikipedia articles in his native
tongue on virtually everything to do with it. He even ended up moving to
Copenhagen to study Greenlandic, a language spoken by some 57,000 mostly
Indigenous Inuit people scattered across dozens of far-flung Arctic villages.
The Greenlandic-language edition was added to Wikipedia around 2003, just a few
years after the site launched in English. By the time Wehr took its helm nearly
20 years later, hundreds of Wikipedians had contributed to it and had
collectively written some 1,500 articles totaling over tens of thousands of
words. It seemed to be an impressive vindication of the crowdsourcing approach
that has made Wikipedia the go-to source for information online, demonstrating
that it could work even in the unlikeliest places.
There was only one problem: The Greenlandic Wikipedia was a mirage."
Via
The RISKS Digest Volume 34 Issue 78:
https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks/34/78#subj15
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
