Upfront: Here’s the Administrators’ Noticeboard discussion.

Okay, this one apparently slipped under my radar, albeit it seems like they’re pretty small and only started in 2022. Here’s their 2025 report.

It seems like their limited focus is on using LLMs for interwiki translation; to what extent its paid editors are capable of that, I have no idea. We maintain a list of paid editing companies here (usually undisclosed against policy).

OKA asserts:

For example, articles in topics such as Science, technology, engineering, and Finance are lacking compared to topics such as History, Geography, and Humanities.

I have no idea how they reached this conclusion or how they think they’re qualified to translate anything given the random “totally not a Central European language” capitalization of words like that.

Per 404:

A job posting for a “Wikipedia Translator” from OKA offers $397 a month for working up to 40 hours per week. The job listing says translators are expected to publish “5-20 articles per week (depending on size).”

20 for any reasonable-size article could not adequately be vetted by one person in an 84-hour work week, for context, and that’s $9.90/hour at 40 hours. (edit: wait, sorry, I read that as $397 per week; $397 per month would be < $2.50/hour. What the fuck.)

Overall, before reading the discussion, the people at OKA seem like disruptive morons.

Edit: Into the discussion we go:

Cmon man, the training guide instructs translators to create multiple email accounts to get around LLM usage caps… — ExtantRotations

…yes, and? — 7804j [OKA founder]

Jesus christ. 🤦

Edit 2: 7804j just cannot stop themself from transparently using an LLM to participate in the discussion.

Edit 3: “we ensure they are above the minimum wage in the countries where the editors reside” oh my fucking god

The killer almost had me, but I learned in self-defense class that “poisonous [organism]” only inherently means ingested in colloquial usage and that venoms are more properly a subset of toxins (naturally-occurring poisons) which are a subset of poisons. Consequently, it’s like the killer showed me a square and called it a quadrilateral: I’m too pedantic to be affected.

Danke. This should easily be fine for anyone who’s slightly-to-moderately interested; some of the nitty-gritty details like hyperlinks to the edit diffs are excluded from this copy–paste for those who really know their stuff and want to learn more.

Oh, fuck, this is going to be interesting to read about. Just to clarify: it seems like this wasn’t just Wikipedia but Wikimedia generally. So that’s also e.g. Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, etc.

Edit: Decided to check Reddit, and someone posted an ostensibly good summary on /r/wikipedia.

This is largely true. English takes ‘-ard’ from Old French. MW defines it as:

one that is characterized by performing some action, possessing some quality, or being associated with some thing especially conspicuously or excessively

The main point is that it’s generally just a pejorative suffix.

Citing the Trésor de la langue française informatisé, however, Wiktionary puts forward a surprisingly cogent counterargument and alternative etymology to the “packsaddle” one for “bastard”.

You’ve got it reversed. Switching to Teams greatly hastened development, as the team’s newfound vitriol and frustration could be channeled toward the end user in a neverending feedback loop.

“It’s funny how people will believe in Newton’s laws of motion but still think the Force from Star Wars is mythical nonsense.”

I think you’re in the same boat I am where I fucking haaaaaaate the culture on link aggregators (and probably other social media) where people will bitch and moan to no end that their preferred format (publicly reacting to disconnected headlines whose articles they haven’t read) isn’t giving them literally all the information they need to form a cogent opinion.

• “I had time to write a 300-word short essay about this headline, but I’m going to whine if I get called for something in the first paragraph that invalides everything I said.”
• “I can’t believe this headline mentioned a pretty common thing I’m not personally familiar with but the publication’s target audience obviously is.”
• "Headline didn’t answer every single question I could possibly wonder? Uh, clickbait much?
• “The headline writer didn’t account for this batshit non sequitur I drew from it, so they’re basically lying.”

They genuinely think that the article body should be effectively superfluous to the headline – not just to have a basic gist of but to discuss and debate current events, which is insane. It reminds me of people who think they can learn math and physics by passively watching somebody else do it – which is true only to an utterly incosequential extent.

Speaking as someone who’s read thousands of articles for research, I feel confident saying that reading the article is an insane force multiplier to understanding. Any time you spent reacting to the headline would’ve been 3x as effective put into reading even just part of an article. This doesn’t just apply to current events, and even I haven’t thoroughly learned this lesson; so many times I’ve been editing Wikipedia and arrived at a point where reading one goddamn article for three minutes would’ve saved me half an hour of fucking around (“two hours of debugging can save you five minutes of reading the documentation”).

This is my way of pleading with you (you, the non-CombatWombat reader): it’s enriching once you can steel yourself and work through the initial dopamine drought, and it quickly becomes enjoyable. It’s not your fault it’s so hard psychologically; this was done to you by formats that value engagement with the platform over engagement with the material.

But if you don’t, please at least accept that headlines cannot always contain everything you want.

Yeah, there’s no fucking way “Well Grok told me these are the prompts they used” would be admissible as evidence of any kind.

Given a translator, can you even imagine Leonardo da Vinci and Hideo Kojima in a room together?

I will inform you that this excerpt is correct English. There needn’t be an article like “a” or “the” before “possibility”. It reads awkwardly in everyday language, but that really is just innocent “legalese” phrasing.

No, beyond the legalese. For example, the comma placement in:

which, unknown to them threatens,

The comma should go after “them”, because “unknown to them” constitutes the entire aside.

If you delete the aside in this, it reads “which national security”, whereas it should read “which threatens national security”.

This is just the first one I found; I didn’t go hunting for them. It’s one of those grammatical mistakes that actively ruins the cadence of the sentence as you read it in your head.

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Is the issue that there are people paying for YouTube Premium?

Every article I read about Intel makes me more thankful that I got a Ryzen 1700 in 2017 and never looked back.

I don’t want to distract from the article itself, but on a generic level, The Signpost is worth reading for anyone interested in the “behind-the-scenes” of the project. They published another article about this a couple weeks ago.

We do also maintain docs. I put a lot of effort into the Setup ones but got burnt-out before really getting into the other ones (which need a lot of work). And for actual bugs, we use GitHub.

Discord’s search functionality is reasonably robust, and as long as you’re already there, you can usually find old conversations about the problem you’re having. The biggest problem is that it’s gated off from the wider Internet, which is shitty.

I think what we all like about it over forums for providing support is that it’s closer to real-time communication, it’s more flexible (conversations can flow in and out of each other instead of being permanently stuck in one subject-specific thread), and it’s more casual.

I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn’t. We’ve discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn’t stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.

I’d be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that’s a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I’m still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.

I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.

“Imagine calling yourselves the ‘master race’ but forgetting to secure your own website — maybe try mastering to host WordPress before world domination,” Root wrote.

Fucking gold.