I remember hearing a couple of times that CorenSearchBot was down, but just
assumed that something so important was being rescued, though I did wonder
slightly about the recent net increase in articles on EN wiki. 3,738,826
articles today means we've way overshot the 3 million projection, the 3.5
million prediction is looking distinctly cautious and and even the 4 million
by late 2012
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwikipediapercgrowth.PNG looks
somewhat unceiling like.
Could we get Google and Bing to make an exception for CorenSearchbot? If not
then I'd agree that a spider would make sense, though I've no idea what that
would cost. Having our own spider could be useful for other things though,
including:
# bot adding of {{deadlink}} templates.
# creating our own wayback machine showing webpages as they were when they
were cited by our articles
# a "may have moved here" table so we could add possibly moved here and
wayback options to {{deadlink}}.
# A bot to update links as sites reorganise and organisations rebrand,
without it we could be mostly deadlinked as early as mid-century.
#A bot that listed probable deaths based on obituaries in reliable sources
and even updates to subjects' own websites would also be useful.
# Possible breaches of our copyright would be another potential use, but
maybe we just need to rename "what links here" as "what links here
(internal)" and add "what links here (external)".
WSC
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:09:44 +0200
> From: Kim Bruning <kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio
> detection bot half a project was lost
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <20110914170944.C22787(a)bruning.lan>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:49:06AM -0500, Aaron Adrignola wrote:
> > CorenSearchBot has not been operational for several months since Yahoo
> > stopped allowing automated queries. Bing's terms of use don't permit
> > this either and apparently the same is true for Google.
>
> It might be useful to have a community operated spider, then? In that way,
> we could also optimize
> our database for the kinds of queries we need.
>
> sincerely,
> Kim Bruning
>
>
>
>
>
FYI: the minutes from the August 3rd, 2011 Board meeting in Haifa (the
Wikimania meeting) are now posted:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2011-08-03
Regards,
Phoebe Ayers
p.s. Digression on minutes:
Since I recently had to learn the process by which board minutes are
written and approved, I thought I would share it with you all --
possibly of interest to long-time foundation watchers :)
1. both the executive assistant to the board & the board secretary
take notes during the meeting; the executive assistant makes sure that
no important items are lost and their presence as recorder allows the
board secretary to fully participate in the meeting. [in this case
additionally since it was a transition meeting both SJ and I took
notes and shared with each other].
2. notes are typed up in minute form by the the executive assistant,
who then gives the document to the board secretary, who then reviews
and edits, and then shares the minutes with the board. This process
may take some time (e.g. after Wikimania when everyone is traveling or
participating in the conference afterwards).
3. the minutes are voted on as a regular resolution; this means a week
for the full board to discuss/edit onwiki if there are any typos or if
the minutes don't reflect the meeting accurately. After finalization
there is then a two-week period to vote to approve (in practice the
voting period for minutes is generally shortened to a week);
occasionally minutes may get approved by a vote at the next meeting.
4. after approval, the board secretary posts the minutes to the
foundation wiki, as the copy of record for the
community/board/auditors etc.
On Wed Sep 14 07:40:20, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the responses are a credit to Wikinews. This one
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002035.html
> in particular. It seems that they need something like CorenSearchBot to
> trackdown copyvio and plagiarism.
Here's another interesting post regarding copyrights, Wikinews, and the fork.
I disagree with the conclusion the author draws, but it's good to have both
sides of the argument.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002040.html
The problem is that, on larger projects, it's impossible to check every word in
the project against every possible website in a timely manner. Imagine: en.wp installs FlaggedRevs
for every article. All edits and new pages, before going "live", have to undergo thorough checks for
factuality against the sources and detailed copyright checks, down to the last word.
Think of what would happen. There backlog would soar, as there are not enough reviewers
to check every edit as it is made in such detail, even with the assistance of bots.
This potential situation is somewhat similar to Wikinews', but WN's problems are compounded
by the fact that they *must* be always up-to-date or they are not useful at all. I happen to think
this approach is somewhat un-wiki-like, especially when there are very few reviewers. I
note that most WMF projects don't follow this model, instead removing copyright violations
and inaccurate statements as they find them. In theory, this means that the articles will not be
of any quality, but didn't someone once say, "Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory?"
CorenSearchBot would be quite useful for both Wikinews and OpenGlobe;
in general, I think wiki projects should take advantage of copyright searches
more often. If anyone can install the bot on OpenGlobe, please post at our Village
Pump.
Regards,
-Tempodivalse
> From: Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss(a)verizon.net>
> To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:30:44 -0500 (CDT)
> Subject: [Foundation-l] The WikiNews fork - for lack of a copyvio detection bot half a project was lost
> CorenSearchBot would be quite useful for both Wikinews and OpenGlobe;
> in general, I think wiki projects should take advantage of copyright searches
> more often. If anyone can install the bot on OpenGlobe, please post at our Village
> Pump.
>
> Regards,
>
> -Tempodivalse
CorenSearchBot has not been operational for several months since Yahoo
stopped allowing automated queries. Bing's terms of use don't permit
this either and apparently the same is true for Google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CorenSearchBot
I do like the idea of a place to request bots for projects other than
en.wiki (not *global* bots, but bots running locally by request).
Things like the unsigned bot.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Desired_bots
I think the responses are a credit to Wikinews. This one
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002035.html
in particular. It seems that they need something like CorenSearchBot to
trackdown copyvio and plagiarism.
I appreciate that lack of coding resource isn't the only problem in smaller
projects, but it may be one of the easier ones to make a difference on. I've
had a couple of people do some coding for me just by making requests at the
EN wiki bot requests page, now I realise if we were designing the project
from scratch we'd have the spam filter and the bot requests page on Meta not
EN wiki. But some problems are easier to work around than to fix. What I'm
not sure about is, is this a communication issue, with people not knowing
who to ask or asking the Foundation instead of asking for volunteer support;
Or is this a shortage of volunteers willing to write code? If its the former
then maybe it would help for each project to have a page explaining how you
request Bot support with a link to the EN wiki Bot requests page. If its the
latter then maybe we can help via hacking days such as the one the UK is
planning for later this year, or even by going outside the movement and
asking for volunteers willing to cut code.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
------------------------------
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:51:11 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss(a)verizon.net>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
> To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID:
> <504508872.5953792.1315929071322.JavaMail.root@vznit170070>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 12 September 2011 21:02, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Any comment from the Wikinews contributors who just posted to
> > foundation-l saying everything was fine and people saying it wasn't
> > were clueless?
>
> Several Wikinews regulars have made comments about the fork on wikinews-l,
> if
> anyone wants to see another viewpoint on OpenGlobe and the future of
> Wikinews:
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002034.html(…
> several posts following)
>
> Regards.
>
> -Tempodivalse
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
>
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 22:43, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
> On 08/15/11 12:25 PM, Gustavo Carrancio wrote:
>> Fred: easy to fork vs hard to understand other cultures. Think a minute.
>> ¿Are we making an Encyclopedia? Must we struggle to split or to get
>> togeather?
>
> At some point we need to ask ourselves: Is our mission to make the sum
> of all human knowledge freely available, or is it to create a monopoly
> on knowledge.
While I agree with necessity of being able to make a fork easily,
there is important message which Gustavo wanted to say, but didn't
express well.
Under the present circumstance, any attempt to create English
Wikipedia fork could be successful just if WMF makes
very-ultra-serious shit and it is not likely that it would happen.
We also know how the case Encyclopedia Libre vs. Spanish Wikipedia
finished. That's, again, thanks to the fact that Spanish is
multinational language and if someone wants to get significant
official support, it would require significant time.
However, the opposite example is Hudong encyclopedia. It is obviously
that Hudong is much more relevant to Chinese people just because of
the fact that we still have more Taiwanese Wikipedians than Mainland
China ones.
A couple of months ago three admins of Aceh Wikipedia decided that it
is not acceptable that they participate in the project which holds
Muhammad depictions. By the project, they mean Wikimedia in general,
including Wikimedia Commons. It was just a matter of time when they
would create their own wiki. And they created that moth or two after
leaving Wikimedia. And what do you think which project has more
chances for success: the one without editors or the other with three
editors? So, while the reason for leaving couldn't be counted among
reasonable ones, the product is the same as if they had a valid
reason. And there are plenty of valid reasons, among them almost
universal problem of highly bureaucratic structures on Wikimedia
projects.
I can imagine even very successful fork of Wikipedia in any Balkan
language. We are also more or less on the edge of successful fork of
any language whose community has any kind of problem with the rest of
the movement. And at some point we could have serious problem.
Projects could even start without license compatibility with Wikimedia
content. Yes, as I don't think that anyone would bother -- which would
be the right decision because of a number of reasons -- with GFDL and
CC-BY-SA violations of the encyclopedia in a language with not so much
speakers.
That leads us to the serious dead end: We want forkability because of
our principles. We could potentially lose parts of our movement.
According to our principles, the only way to protect the movement is
to be attractive to editors more than potential forks could be. And
that's our structural problem: we are losing that battle since ~2007
and changes which we are making are too slow and too small.
And that opens the space for even worse scenario. The last hope for
societies in such decline is to impose martial law and try to fix
things by not so pleasant methods. The only problem is that we are not
society. Nobody would be killed because of Wikimedia fall and no
economy would be destructed. More importantly, when people see harsh
methods imposed (and one of them would be forbidding [easy]
forkability), they would start to leave the project, which would just
catalyze the fall.
Fortunate moment is that we are driving on organizational expansion
and that we bought some time. There are a couple of other methods for
buying time. But, if we don't use that time to fix things, at some
point we would deplete available options. We would eventually have the
same problems in India which we have in US; we would have the same
problems on a project which would be opened in 2012 as we have today
with many other projects.
Note that Wikipedia wasn't a hype because it is free and open online
encyclopedia. It was a hype because such thing didn't exist before. It
exists now all over the Internet. And without qualitative
breakthroughs, we have to do things regularly. And models exist: IBM
lives, Microsoft lives, Apple lives; Sinclair is dead, SGI is dead,
Sun is dead; Netscape lives as Mozilla, Amsword lives as Libre Office,
Ingres lives as PostgreSQL. Hi-tech organizations -- and we are
hi-tech organization -- which survived were able to catch the
technological development of their competitors. And our competitors
are not millions of MediaWiki installations; our competitor is Hudong
(note the features [1]), but also Google and Facebook. I am not saying
that they are against us, but that we have to catch their
technological development if we want to survive.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong#Features
On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote:
> On 07/09/2011 11:17 AM, Bod Notbod wrote:
>> [...] but I'm even less keen on parents telling their
>> children they can't use Wikipedia [...]
>>
>
> It's not the first time I see this meme expressed.
>
> Is there a reliable source somewhere that shows that (a) this represents
> a significant number of parents over several cultural groups, and that
> (b) there is serious indication that if (a) is true those same parents
> are going to change their stance given the proposed implementation of
> the image filter?
>
> Because, unless we got some serious statistical backing for those
> assertions, they are just smoke blowing our of asses to the sound of
> "but think of the children!"
Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as PG?
--
John Vandenberg
On 12 September 2011 21:02, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Any comment from the Wikinews contributors who just posted to
> foundation-l saying everything was fine and people saying it wasn't
> were clueless?
Several Wikinews regulars have made comments about the fork on wikinews-l, if
anyone wants to see another viewpoint on OpenGlobe and the future of Wikinews:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2011-September/002034.html (and
several posts following)
Regards.
-Tempodivalse
