It would be fine as a translation option. For cases when the page is not found, or the local language is lacking so you want to translate from a different language.
It isn't a replacement for an expert writing the real page in the language though. But there are a lot of languages with very little content. German has less than half as many articles as English (Cebuano is number 2 by number of articles - but that seems fishy. German is number 3). At the bottom Cree has only 13 articles. There are also a small number of inactive wikipedias, some of which may want a translation option as better than nothing.
Agreed. The bullet point "Helping editors share local perspectives or context by automating the translation and adaptation of common topics" could be unfortunate if not carefully reviewed - and hopefully it will be.
Having recently spent some time doing translations with the current models, my experience is that their output quality can have a rather high variance. That, along with a tendency toward hallucination, often makes them a "fuzzy guess" at best. When I'm the user asking for that translation, I can factor that fuzziness into my understanding of the output. If its already translated for me, I'm depending on someone else to have done the work of making sure it is faithful to the original.
Not saying they should, but as a PSA, if you’re anglophone and looking something up about a place in the non-Anglo world, it’s always worth switching to that area’s language and auto-translating. Even the images won’t be shared. Structure might be all different. Perspective may not be the same.
I mean like using it for translating another existing article in another language sounds cool, but not that new articles in other languages are not getting written because it's easier to just translate the English version with AI. and what you said it's true, I think that Wikipedia should employ human translation as volunteers for those kind of articles
I actually like that some Wikipedia articles are smaller in my mother language than in English, it gets more straight to the point, so indeed replacing these with auto translations from English would be a loss
