Talk:Community Wishlist/W19

Thank you

Hey @Escargot bleu - thank you for this wish. I see Generative AI as a potential solution to many problems, but want to better understand what initially inspired this as a solution.

Is your issue that content translation tools often use the improper verb tense? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 16:03, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Hello @JWheeler-WMF

Tense is an issue among others, this was just an example. There are regular complaints about translations on French Wikipedia village pump, a recent one being fr:Wikipédia:Le Bistro/21 juin 2024#Outil de traduction à la masse.

And concerning generative AI as a solution, in my attemps to use it ChatGPT gave better results than tools like Deepl as it was able to correctly use template. It was not perfect though, sometimes it invented templates and I needed several interactions to get what I wanted. Escargot bleu (talk) 16:19, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the elaboration. I'm wondering if the wish should instead be re-worded as an opportunity to improve how content translation handles verb tense, grammar, etc? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 16:40, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

ChatGPT can't be used because of all the inaccuracies, hallucinations, errors, etc that it would introduce. I've added some info to the code issue linked at the bottom of the wish. It's nice that you tried and mentioned DeepL, I think for a start it would be very useful if one could select DeepL as the translator tool. Then as a second step one could add further things to the translation system. However, I think there is a better but possibly complementary machine translation solution than manual translation and adjustments using these tools since for example the target article is not getting updated and is hard to update once the source article gets changed. I noticed this when I wrote the German article for the article I started en:Pandemic prevention which is outdated and of lower quality than the ENWP one because of the trouble with syncing the changes. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:25, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Opposing this wish

This feels like a really really bad idea especially considering that we already have widespread issues with normal machine translation. Subtly introducing hallucinations and errors is not a feature I would like to have for a task that is as delicate as translating from different languages. Sohom (talk) 16:07, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Agree with above. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:29, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Note that I don't think machine translation is of bad quality at least when English or Spanish is the source text. I just don't think generative AI should be used since it's designed in a way that will make the result less accurate. Google Translate is pretty good but the translation need human proofreading and fixing usually minor issues here and there. Instead of adding support for generative AI in translation I'd support adding support for DeepL, a Google Translate alternative and sometimes or often but not always better than Google Translate. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:19, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Agree with above. Hakimi97 (talk) 00:24, 3 August 2024 (UTC)