Dear Nikhil (& et all),
Request to NOT take it personally. Whatever you are
doing is a great initiative and really appreciable. But these comments are
not to undermine your efforts.
Srikanth's reply should completely explain why Shiju
was trying to make a point and IMHO, they are valid ones. These best
practices are based on previous experiences and not any knee jerk comments (
Sorry, No pun intended).
Please note that even this is the practice for
project for English wiki , supplied to schools
of "more liberalized" countries.
The question is neither about the format of this
information provided nor about the number of articles. 500 ? 2500? 25000?
Ship it on a CD, thumb drive, DVD or even Blueray discs or any other medium
..Any number of articles is accepted, provided we are able to provide them
quality content. I can personally vouch that more than half the content on
our Wikipedia is crap. Yes I mean it. And but the reason we are all here is
to convert them this crap to more useful stuff.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 7:18 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 00:50, Nikhil Sheth <nikhil.js(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi All,
I had a great time reading the blogpost. Very amusing. But had to clarify
some things before we all pick up our pitch-forks and torches, so..
http://nikhilsheth.blogspot.com/2011/03/clarification-about-wfsoe-and-engli…
I think you took it a bit personal. Shiju's blogpost IMHO is a good guide
especially for Indian languages CD creation project. Giving ZIM format dumps
has some adverse effects which was what Shiju tried to share as a best
practice. I think they are valid concerns. Let me explain.
I think he clearly mentioned about the
http://schools-wikipedia.org/ project
for English wiki and there is no problem in such approaches. I think the
blog post was mainly addressing the impact of giving whole dumps of Indian
language wikipedia's, all [except English(Yes, English is also an Indian
langugage)] of which are in their early stages.
Sometime back i proposed a similar CD creation project on tamil wikipedia
and thought given that Santhosh's software is available, we could get a CD
in couple of month's time. My timeline was rightfully mocked at by the
community, with valid concerns on quality and we have just started
collecting articles, which will then be peer reviewed, copy edited etc
before we could use the software and create a CD. Along with Shiju's points,
I am sharing some important viewpoints(which i learnt from tamil community),
why i think the whole exercise of fact checking and releasing is very
important instead of just dumping them in the case of Indian language
wikipedia's.
** Who had checked the validity of the content provided in the CD? Once the
CD is created, the content is frozen for ever. We never know in what ways
the content in CD is going to get duplicated.
>This is very important. Imagine students using
it to write answers for
exams using this and if there is a factual error and
teacher fails to give
marks, the students will never ever turn back to Wikipedia again.We are
loosing young buds here. While you might say Wikipedia is not reliable for
information source, but you can use it, for a school kid, its always
binary.Indian language wikipedia's are bound to have more spelling
mistakes(since most of us use a non native keyboard / translation and we are
human), the error rate will be even higher. Its not just about schools,
anyone who is find such errors in a published form(CD is a published form
you cant change) will find it annoying and may arrive at a prejudice which
we wouldnt want.
**How we are going to handle the copyright violation of text and images
included in the CD? Can we always point our fingers to WMF?
> This is very serious issue, its a different
thing that we as individuals
might not respect copyright because of the climate in
India, but as a
project Wikipedia holds copyright as one of the 5 pillars(Do I need to tell
this list about this, sorry *runs away* :D).
**Who will answer the queries related to the explicit images contained in
many articles. The inclusion of explicit images, controversial articles, and
factual errors in the CD supplied to the school children are not small
issues.
> Not many know, Shiju may be sharing this
because malayalam community
actually burnt their fingers here. There was a
(politically motivated?)
article in leading malayalam daily/magazine criticizing the effort
regarding inclusion criteria / some factual erroneous information.This may
not have been shared widely to avoid multiplication of negative publicity.
While at personal level it hurts the people who worked hard for this after
spending weeks for the project, at project level it creates a negative
publicity / impact for language wikipedia which none of us would want.
> On the content side as well, Indian
wikipedia's arent that great(barring
few). The Stub ratio may be high which
will give a wrong impression of
language wikipedia's to people using the offline ZIM dumps that language
wikipedia's will only have templated content stubs. While its good to have
stubs online, since they help in improvement of articles, i dont fancy stubs
on an offline wikipedia.
> While giving ZIM format dumps might be useful
for people without
connectivity, IMHO its definitely not suitable for mass
consumption without
a bunch of disclaimers (which might not even be understood by well educated)
> While the intentions may be good, that
shouldnt cause a negative impact
to the language wikipedia is the bottom line.I
hope you understand.(This was
probably missing in Shiju's blog post which made you think it was a pointing
fingers, but I am sure Shiju's intention was to share his "bottom line")
Regards
Srikanth.L
http://srik.me
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