The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, is celebrating the fact that its Content Translation tool, which was launched in 2014, has helped to create more than one million new articles on the internet encyclopedia. While most readers will be more familiar with the English-language Wikipedia, which is by far the biggest, other language versions of the site suffer from a smaller catalogue of articles which can hurt access to knowledge for non-English speakers.
To help bridge the knowledge gap, Wikimedia launched the Content Translation tool in 2014 with support for translating articles from Spanish to Catalan. Over the years, the tool has evolved to become available across 90 editions of Wikipedia as a stable release while it’s available as a beta product for Wikipedia’s other languages.
The tool is used today to create a new article every three minutes and although not all of the content it creates is perfect, fewer articles are deleted than are made. With the growing library of articles for other languages, the Wikipedia experience for non-English speakers is being greatly improved.
Making content available in the widest array of languages possible seems to be a very big objective of the Wikimedia project. Last year, Denny Vrandečić, the founder of Wikidata, published a 22-page paper about a project called Abstract Wikipedia that uses abstract notation to help translate content into other languages. According to Wikimedia, Abstract Wikipedia will be integrated with Wikipedia from 2023.