First, let me demonstrate a case for the liveliness of Chinese Internet users on knowledge sharing. It is the "Songshu Hui"( the Squirrel-Organization http://songshuhui.net/ ), an new branding for scientific knowledge sharing in Mainland China right now. So far about one hundred of scientific-writers are working for this organization, and most of them own a master or doctor degree. The gathering of strength of these writers are powerful, even the top-ten official newspapers in China had reported them.
By contrast, personally I think Chinese Wikipedia is weaker in popularity in China right now, but I never deny the usefulness of Wikipedia in all.
Since "Songhu Hui" use Wordpress, so I just propose a technical idea to improve the cooperation between Wikimedia and "Songhu Hui". How about a keyword-link-generator to Wikipedia for Wordpress? This new Wordpress plugin will query Wikipedia to get a keyword list, and then make links in article in Wordpress automatically. But some technical problems still be there, for example, the Chinese word segmentation.
If this idea will be technically available, this kind of tool will spread and improve Chinese Wikipedia greatlly.
2009/2/20 Mingli Yuan mingli.yuan@gmail.com:
Since "Songhu Hui" use Wordpress, so I just propose a technical idea to improve the cooperation between Wikimedia and "Songhu Hui". How about a keyword-link-generator to Wikipedia for Wordpress? This new Wordpress plugin will query Wikipedia to get a keyword list, and then make links in article in Wordpress automatically. But some technical problems still be there, for example, the Chinese word segmentation.
I can certainly see the benefit of this, but automatic linking is full of problems. I don't know Chinese, so I'll have to give examples in English, hopefully the concepts still apply: Should words like "the" be linked? Probably not, but that means we need a list of words to exclude, that list may not really be the same for all articles (an advanced article might not link words that a more basic article would, for example). Should "blue whale" be "[[blue]] [[whale]]" or "[[blue whale]]"? This is almost impossible to deal with in English, I expect it is different in Chinese, but I don't know if it would be easier or harder.
Link suggestion is much easier - perhaps we could write a plugin that suggests possible words to link to Wikipedia and the author can choose which ones are appropriate.
2009/2/20 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
re/ the earlier comments, remember that we don't have to invent keyword identification from scratch. There's quite a bit of stuff out there already - I've seen a tool for writing blog posts, for example, which automatically adds in "contextual" Wikipedia links to the end of the text - which reduces the amount of work needed on the obvious problems of linking irrelevant words etc.
Link suggestion is much easier - perhaps we could write a plugin that suggests possible words to link to Wikipedia and the author can choose which ones are appropriate.
Or, even simpler (for the user), a plugin where the author selects a word or phrase and the system generates a Wikipedia link for it. Should be relatively effective for nouns and names, at least...
2009/2/20 Mingli Yuan mingli.yuan@gmail.com:
Since "Songhu Hui" use Wordpress, so I just propose a technical idea to improve the cooperation between Wikimedia and "Songhu Hui". How about a keyword-link-generator to Wikipedia for Wordpress? This new Wordpress plugin will query Wikipedia to get a keyword list, and then make links in article in Wordpress automatically. But some technical problems still be there, for example, the Chinese word segmentation.
Some googling throws up this existing tool:
http://www.dijksterhuis.org/wordpress-plugins/keyword-link-plugin/
which isn't *quite* what you want, but you can see the potential.
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