magnusmanske.de
The Issue Whisperer
There is a clear _no_ to LLM-generated content on Wikimedia projects, which is a good thing IMO. On the other hand, I found that LLM-assisted coding helps me significantly in Getting Things Done as a volunteer, that would otherwise turn tools into bitrot graveyards over time. Given that LLMs can be useful for some tasks, I thought about an application for Wikimedia projects outside content writing and coding.
Many people write Wikipedia articles, but most do so in one or two languages.And, unless yours is a smaller language Wikipedia, one might not often read other language editions while writing. Wikipedia language editions are independent, so besides core information, they tend to focus on slightly different aspects of a subject. But what if they disagree on information? One of them might be outdated, or factually wrong. Even if both are correct, in their own way, seeing a conflict might lead to better writing, on both sides. And it would be essential to discover deliberately false information, on a Wikipedia taken over by compromised admins, as it has happened. It would also be beneficial to consider aspects and approaches on one Wikipedia edition in another; it might lead to a better article. That is not to say that all editions must say the same, but _how do others do this_ is a classic source of learning, understanding, and improving, both your work and yourself.
So I asked Claude Opus to compare the language editions of a Wikipedia article. I picked the English, German, and French editions of Kassel, a city in Germany, as an uncontested topic. I told Claude to look for contradictions and important information missing in some editions. I also told it to produce a JSON file, and a human-readable table (below).
I believe even this little comparison is informative, and helpful for editors. Using more languages, and taking Wikidata into account, would make this even better. Of course, scaling up is not (financially) feasible with the commercially available LLMs. An open, capable LLM (e.g. Qwen series), ideally hosted on Wikimedia servers, would allow such comparisons, and other wiki-related tasks, for various tools. I am not talking about hosting a publicly accessible LLM, I am thinking of a back-end service for Wikimedia services, Toolforge, etc. It could be limited to access only Wikimedia sites, to avoid adding scraper stress to other websites. Either way, I believe there is potential in using LLMs to assist Wikipedia editors, if not the editing.
## Claude comparison of Kassel, acrosss en, de, fr
| English | German | French
---|---|---|---
Title | Kassel | Kassel | Cassel (Hesse)
Depth | Medium | Very high (reference version) | Low–medium
Character | Strongest on dynastic history, WWII bombing, Anglosphere threads; stalest on present-day facts | Deepest on geography, administration, religion, economy, local culture | Declared partial translation of an old German revision — inherits German framing without German updates, but adds substantial French-perspective content
### Core facts side by side
Field | English | German | French | Verdict
---|---|---|---|---
Population | 201,048 (Dec 2020) in lead; 197,230 (2024) in table | 197,230 (31 Dec 2024, state statistics); city’s own figure 207,863 | 200,406 body / 204,687 infobox | Conflict
Area | 107 km² | 106.798 km² | 106.78 km² | Agree
Elevation | 167 m (single value) | 132.9 m lowest to 614.8 m at Hohes Gras | 132.9 m to 614.8 m | Complementary
Cassel → Kassel | 1926 | 1926 in lead, “seit 1927” in history | 1926 | Conflict (internal to DE)
Etymology | Several unproven assumptions | Recent onomastics favours Germanic kas- + -sella | Asserts Castellum Cattorum as fact | Conflict
City rights | 1189 deed certifies them; grant date unknown | Before 1189; renewed 1239 by Hermann II | Before 1189, renewed 1239 | Complementary
Westphalia capital | 1807 | Occupied 1806, capital to 1813 | Capital from 1806 | Conflict
Worst air raid | 90% of downtown, ~10,000 dead, 150,000 homeless; no date in body | 22 Oct 1943, over 10,000 dead, 80% of housing | Over 10,000 dead, over 80% of houses | Conflict (scope)
documenta | Every five years since 1955; latest 2022 | Irregular at first, five-year cycle since 1972; text still ends at documenta 14 (2017) | Five-yearly, 100 days, city-wide; 15th in 2022 | Conflict
University | 25,000 (2018) in lead; ~21,000 (2026) in body | 23,699 (WS 2021/22); earlier university 1633–1653 | ~25,000 (2018) | Conflict
Fridericianum | “Europe’s first public museum” | First public museum building on the European continent | “One of the oldest public museums in Europe” | Conflict (claim strength)
Ice hockey | Huskies dissolved 2010, successor in 5th tier | Restarted, promoted to DEL2 in 2014 | — | Conflict (EN stale)
İzmit twinning | not captured | 2000 | 1999 | Conflict
### Sharpest contradictions
# | Issue | Assessment
---|---|---
C1 | Population spread of ~10,600 across editions | Not a factual dispute but an undeclared definitional one: census-adjusted state statistics vs. the municipal residents register. Only German tells the reader both exist.
C3 | English geography section places Hesse in “the south-western part of Germany” | Flatly wrong, and contradicts English’s own lead (“central Germany”) and the German/French statement that Kassel is about 70 km north-west of Germany’s geographic centre.
C2 | Fama Fraternitatis: 1617 (EN) vs 1614 (FR) | 1614 is the standard dating of the first printing; English looks like an error.
C5 | Student numbers | Real enrolment decline reported at three vintages, plus an English lead never reconciled with its own body.
C13 | Scheidemann as mayor: “1920 bis 1925” in prose vs. 1919–1925 in the mayors list | Internal German inconsistency.
C15 | English still lists Bombardier as a local employer | Absorbed by Alstom in 2021; German notes Alstom on the site.
### Substantive content in one edition only
Topic | Only in | Why it matters
---|---|---
WWI POW camp at Niederzwehren: built for 20,000, extended to 30,000, and a 1915 typhus epidemic in which a French army doctor estimated roughly 12,000 of 19,000 prisoners infected and 2,300 dead by end of June — 1,600 French, 700 Russian; other sources say 3,000 | FR | The largest unique block anywhere. Absent from German entirely.
Hesse-Kassel selling Hessian soldiers to Britain to suppress the American Revolution, financing palaces and the landgrave’s lifestyle | EN | Central to 18th-century city finances; missing from German.
SA and SS in civilian clothes wrecking the synagogue on 7 November 1938 to fake spontaneous anger, two days before the national pogrom; 2,301 Jews in 1933, ~300 refounding the community, ~1,300 by 2006, new synagogue opened 28 May 2000 | DE | English says only that “in the late 1930s, Nazis destroyed the Kassel Synagogue” and nothing about afterwards.
GDP of €9.914bn (2016), €49,937 per capita against €43,496 for Hesse; unemployment 10.2% (2011) → 6.7% (Dec 2018); city entered Hesse’s municipal rescue scheme in 2012 and left in 2016 | DE | English offers one unsourced sentence about halved unemployment.
Treppenstraße (1953) as West Germany’s first pedestrian street; first German city to introduce the parking disc (1961); reconstruction following plans drawn up under the Nazi regime | DE | The reconstruction-plan provenance is a real historical point, not trivia.
First German observatory (1558); documenta 6 making Kassel the first city lit by laser at night (1977) | EN | —
Napoleon III imprisoned at Wilhelmshöhe after Sedan; Hindenburg and Ludendorff preparing the capitulation there in 1918; Brandt–Stoph inter-German talks in 1970 | EN | French omits the imprisonment of a French emperor while detailing French POWs.
Kasselänerisch dialect; the Kasseler / Kasselaner / Kasseläner distinction; and that the cured pork called Kasseler is not from Kassel but named after a Berlin butcher named Cassel | DE | Exactly what a non-German reader would want and won’t find in English.
Kassel’s boundaries unchanged since 1936, because the 1970s Hessian reform brought no incorporations | DE | Makes the population series directly comparable over time, unlike most German cities.
German Rugby Federation founded in Kassel in 1900; first German water-ski club 1949 and federation 1958; MT Melsungen playing Bundesliga handball in the Rothenbach-Halle | DE | English covers only football and ice hockey.
Brothers Grimm resident 1805–1830 as court librarians; Druselturm dated to 1415; 1923 Esperanto congress under Einstein’s honorary presidency | FR | The Einstein item is unsourced in French.
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