Tuesday, April 07, 2026

Chatting with Copilot about its dependence on Wikipedia

There's a huge pull-down world map in our multi-purpose room. While waiting for a class one day I asked (no one in particular) I wonder how many languages are spoken in Indonesia. One woman, born in India, guessed 4 or 5. I said, maybe a thousand or more. Here's the answer from Translatorswithoutborders  https://translatorswithoutborders.org/language-data-for-indonesia?   

"There are over 800 languages spoken in Indonesia according to the 2010 census. Other sources consider several of these to be dialects of the same language, and show the number of unique languages being closer to 700. By all estimates, Indonesia is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Indonesian (locally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia) is the primary lingua franca. Indonesian is spoken by over 94% of the population, but it is the primary language of only 20% of the population. Javanese (Jawa) is the most common primary language, spoken by over 30% of the population. The maps, documents, and datasets below provide information about languages spoken throughout the country."

I'll accept that, but I had a long chat with Copilot and I told it I was flunking it. I switched to another platform (?) because it kept taking the Wikipedia short cut.

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