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Show HN: Which of these two wiki pages exist in the most languages?

by cpa on 9/11/23, 1:43 PM with 4 comments

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/

  • by rvrs on 9/11/23, 3:10 PM

    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...

  • by gus_massa on 9/11/23, 1:58 PM

    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?