An EPFL researcher has created a system that scans Wikipedia for important articles that are missing in other languages. This project could help expand the online encyclopedia's coverage in minority languages, such as Romansh. With 40 million articles in 293 languages, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia ever made. The 5.4 million pages in English are particularly varied, covering 60 times more topics than the Encyclopaedia Britannica . But not all languages enjoy such depth of coverage. 'Information that some language groups need has not been translated,' says Robert West, a researcher at EPFL's Data Science Lab. 'For example, global warming is a crucial issue in Madagascar, yet there are no articles on this topic in Malagasy.' Closer to home, only 3,400 articles are available in Romansh versus 1.8 million in French and over two million in German.
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