Show HN: Which of these two wiki pages exist in the most languages? (wikilingua.charlespierre.fr)

6 points by cpa 2y ago ↗ HN

A very simple game where you're presented two wiki (en) pages and have to guess which one exists in the most languages. It's not that easy and stringing the code together wasn't either (wikidata's sparql is a — powerful — nightmare).

repo: https://github.com/cpa/wikiguess/

4 comments

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gus_massa 2y ago ↗

How do you select the pages? Did you filter some of them or it's a random sample? I guess it would be nice to filter only "important" pages with many translations.

Also, I got a draw. Does it count like a win or a loose?

cpa 2y ago ↗

I wanted to only draw from the "good articles" category, but it's not easy to get from the API, unfortunately, so I kept a random draw from all articles.

As there are no scores, feel free to choose how to count draws as you wish ;)

gus_massa 2y ago ↗

Is it possible to get 10 random articles and show the "best" 2? It would be difficult to define best, perhaps:

* length > something

* editions > something

* number of translations > something

I don't expect the long articles to be better, but I expect short articles to be about uninteresting topics. Also, old articles would get a lot of silly editions, so perhaps the criteria should include age.

rvrs 2y ago ↗

I'm always surprised by what gets widely translated on Wikipedia.

For example, the Wikipedia page for the Disney Channel star Corbin Bleu is one of the most translated Wikipedia pages[1].

Also, I used to have my Google results set to Russian, and Google's info-box preview would best-effort display the Russian translation of a given article or attempt to run a translator on it with a disclaimer. I was constantly shocked by what sorts of obscure things had Russian translations, like this tiny island in Montana[2]. It reminds me that the world is smaller and more interconnected than I really think.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Bleu

[2]: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB%D0%B4...