See http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species Where's the problem with Wikispecies? Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't. So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't? Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
Nemo
Very good question. I'd say two major factors: 1. Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
2. They have way more photos because they accept non-commercial licenses. That alone garners way more possible submissions, since the vast majority of CC work on Flickr is doesn't allow commercial use. (At least that's the way it was the last time I looked at a breakdown.)
Steven Walling
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 8:11 PM, Nemo_bis nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species Where's the problem with Wikispecies? Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't. So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't? Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
Nemo
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I would really like WikiSpecies to improve their visibility in the community. Sadly enough, the interwiki-links from Wikispecies to other projects are already insufficient. Given that we have all those tax-box-templates I always think that it should be an easy task to write bots to make links between the projects. I would also like to see folks from WikiSpecies to present their projects on SignPost and Wikimania.
Ting
Steven Walling wrote:
Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
- Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
- They have way more photos because they accept non-commercial licenses.
That alone garners way more possible submissions, since the vast majority of CC work on Flickr is doesn't allow commercial use. (At least that's the way it was the last time I looked at a breakdown.)
Steven Walling
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 8:11 PM, Nemo_bis nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species Where's the problem with Wikispecies? Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't. So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't? Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
Nemo
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On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Wallingsteven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
- Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
Why cant we have this?
It would be nice to see board seats going to professional/academic leaders in the fields for each of our smaller projects. This would bring expertise, connections, focus, and funding.
-- John Vandenberg
John Vandenberg, 26/08/2009 12:07:
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Wallingsteven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
- Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
Why cant we have this?
I think that at this point we can't hope to do better than EOL, so «If you can't beat them join them»: we should evaluate if and how much Wikispecies (and Commons, which has great pictures of many species) can contribute to EOL content (the main problem here can be that they're mainly CC-BY while we are CC-BY-SA, but their licenses are very flexible – even too much, indeed). Wikispecies could benefit of a "jump on the bandwagon" effect.
Nemo
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Nemo_bisnemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
John Vandenberg, 26/08/2009 12:07:
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Wallingsteven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
- Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
Why cant we have this?
I think that at this point we can't hope to do better than EOL, so «If you can't beat them join them»: we should evaluate if and how much Wikispecies (and Commons, which has great pictures of many species) can contribute to EOL content (the main problem here can be that they're mainly CC-BY while we are CC-BY-SA, but their licenses are very flexible – even too much, indeed). Wikispecies could benefit of a "jump on the bandwagon" effect.
I agree; EOL has eclipsed WikiSpecies in many respects. They have nearly caught up on the number of taxonomic entries, but their experience is far better, primarily because they have links to pagescans on [[Biodiversity Heritage Library]].
However most of the information in EOL is just facts, and there in the public domain, and we should be able to syncronise the two sets of data. As a result, the "wiki" will gradually become as complete as the others, and time will tell whether a community will continue to find the wiki useful.
I doubt that there is much that WikiSpecies can "give" to EOL, but it would be good to hear from WikiSpecies people as there may be some parts of the project which are especially detailed. (I couldnt quickly find any "featured" content on WikiSpecies.) As you say, Commons can provide current images, and Wikisource can organise proofread transcriptions of the bibliographies.
-- John Vandenberg
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Nemo_bisnemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
John Vandenberg, 26/08/2009 12:07:
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Steven Wallingsteven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Very good question. I'd say two major factors:
- Support from scientists. Founded by one of the best-known scientists
alive, the EOL automatically gained support from the biological sciences in academia. Support from the scientific/academic community is the only reason their largely single-author system has flourished in my opinion.
Why cant we have this?
I think that at this point we can't hope to do better than EOL, so «If you can't beat them join them»: we should evaluate if and how much Wikispecies (and Commons, which has great pictures of many species) can contribute to EOL content (the main problem here can be that they're mainly CC-BY while we are CC-BY-SA, but their licenses are very flexible – even too much, indeed). Wikispecies could benefit of a "jump on the bandwagon" effect.
Wikispecies has recently built a partnership with the open access academic journal ZooKeys, which has a partnership with EOL and GBIF.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ZooKeys https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/species/wiki/Wikispecies:Collaboratio... http://pensoftonline.net/zookeys/index.php/journal/announcement/view/6 http://www.gbif.org/News/NEWS1243931673
The partnership with ZooKeys results in images of new discoveries being uploaded by the journal to Commons!
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_ZooKeys
This is _very_cool_.
Sadly there are no reliable sources picking up this story, and I can't see any blogging about it either.
-- John Vandenberg
Nemo_bis <nemowiki@...> writes:
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species Where's the problem with Wikispecies? Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't. So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that allows you to query and extract the relational data.
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergőgtisza@gmail.com wrote:
Nemo_bis <nemowiki@...> writes:
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species Where's the problem with Wikispecies? Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't. So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't?
EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that allows you to query and extract the relational data.
While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex tools on our toolserver. Here is a small sample of the projects which run on the toolserver.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects
If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.
-- John Vandenberg
2009/8/26 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com:
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergőgtisza@gmail.com wrote:
EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that allows you to query and extract the relational data.
While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex tools on our toolserver. Here is a small sample of the projects which run on the toolserver.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects
If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.
I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it. Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.
J.
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forresterjames@jdforrester.org wrote:
2009/8/26 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com:
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Tisza Gergőgtisza@gmail.com wrote:
EOL is an encyclopedia, Wikispecies is just a raw taxonomy, which is totally useless to the average reader. It is also useless to most readers interested in taxonomies, because it lacks the software features to extract that. It is in a similar position to Wiktionary: a project about relations between things that totally lacks the concept of relations on the software level. That is like publishing text in the form of JPG files. If you are one of the few people specifically interested in taxonomies, you will probably use something that allows you to query and extract the relational data.
While the wiki software layer is very basic, we have many complex tools on our toolserver. Here is a small sample of the projects which run on the toolserver.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects
If you can specify what queries you are most interested in, the technical group may be able to write a tool to do this.
I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it. Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.
Wikis are not unstructured. The structure is not defined, but it is added as needed. Here is a tool that relies on the added structure of the Wikisource bibles.
http://toolserver.org/~Magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Genesis&booknumber=1...
And here is the code for that tool:
https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/Magnus/biblebay.php?r=1
The more structure provided by the wiki, the better the tools can query it.
-- John Vandenberg
2009/8/26 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com:
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forresterjames@jdforrester.org wrote:
I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it. Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.
Wikis are not unstructured.
Wikis aren't in general; MediaWiki is. Writing into an unstructured wiki in a structured, regulated way is a lot of work, and punishes the humans for our failure to provide the right tools.
The structure is not defined, but it is added as needed. Here is a tool that relies on the added structure of the Wikisource bibles.
http://toolserver.org/~Magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Genesis&booknumber=1...
And here is the code for that tool:
https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/Magnus/biblebay.php?r=1
The more structure provided by the wiki, the better the tools can query it.
Asking users to expend a huge level of effort to make their changes "proper" when a proper system would do it for them is not respectful and (as shown) not effective. It's impressive that people can edit in such a well-regulated way that we can programmatically extract semantic information, but it's not a stable, easy-to-use way of doing it. It's also fundamentally "anti-wiki", as new users will often make mistakes that make things worse, not better; biting the newbies built into the very code.
J.
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 1:01 AM, James Forresterjames@jdforrester.org wrote:
2009/8/26 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com:
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:41 AM, James Forresterjames@jdforrester.org wrote:
I think the point is that the fundamental design of MediaWiki - around a single block of unstructured information - is not useful for a semantic project like WSp; there are much better ways of doing it. Toolserver projects cannot add functionality to the core in a proper way. Extensions like Semantic MediaWiki try, but in the end we are trying to 'fix' it, I'm afraid.
Wikis are not unstructured.
Wikis aren't in general; MediaWiki is. Writing into an unstructured wiki in a structured, regulated way is a lot of work, and punishes the humans for our failure to provide the right tools.
And yet ... this is what every successful wiki does. Wikipedia is extremely structured. The writers are not always expected to know the structure; gnomes do the tidying up.
I would love to see the mediawiki software improved, especially merging in semantic functionality, but the ability to add semantics is available.
The structure is not defined, but it is added as needed. Here is a tool that relies on the added structure of the Wikisource bibles.
http://toolserver.org/~Magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Genesis&booknumber=1...
And here is the code for that tool:
https://fisheye.toolserver.org/browse/Magnus/biblebay.php?r=1
The more structure provided by the wiki, the better the tools can query it.
Asking users to expend a huge level of effort to make their changes "proper" when a proper system would do it for them is not respectful and (as shown) not effective. It's impressive that people can edit in such a well-regulated way that we can programmatically extract semantic information, but it's not a stable, easy-to-use way of doing it. It's also fundamentally "anti-wiki", as new users will often make mistakes that make things worse, not better; biting the newbies built into the very code.
The Wikisource Bible projects were structured this way by the users. Magnus surprised us by creating a tool which used the structure which we had already put in place.
Likewise the templates on Wikispecies are great time savers. The existing structure is quite good. They just need tools to mine it.
-- John Vandenberg
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:30 PM, John Vandenbergjayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
And yet ... this is what every successful wiki does. Wikipedia is extremely structured. The writers are not always expected to know the structure; gnomes do the tidying up.
You must have an enormously different idea of extremely structured than I do. I once created software to extract lat/long from Wikitext on enwp and gave up when I got to the 100th or so distinct template invocation which did almost but not quite exactly the same thing.
Go search the archives for some of my example bat-shit category linkage maps.
It's extremely structures compared to complete anarchy, or perhaps "extremely structured" compared to the human body. It's not structured compared to normal sources of data. Not at all.
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:30 PM, John Vandenbergjayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
And yet ... this is what every successful wiki does. Wikipedia is extremely structured. The writers are not always expected to know the structure; gnomes do the tidying up.
You must have an enormously different idea of extremely structured than I do. I once created software to extract lat/long from Wikitext on enwp and gave up when I got to the 100th or so distinct template invocation which did almost but not quite exactly the same thing.
Go search the archives for some of my example bat-shit category linkage maps.
It's extremely structures compared to complete anarchy, or perhaps "extremely structured" compared to the human body. It's not structured compared to normal sources of data. Not at all.
English Wikipedia is not "well" structured for many data mining tasks. The problem domain is much larger and the content more dynamic, but there are also too many cooks and partially implemented ideas, and not enough concern about consistency and re-use.
The Creator & Author namespace on Commons & Wikisource respectively are a better example of structured information that can be mined.
Wikispecies pages have a limited amount of information on them, and it is quite sensibly structured. And I'd bet that the Wikispecies community is also going to be more accommodating of any proposals to increase standardisation of the content in order to allow mining.
-- John Vandenberg
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Nemo_bis nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species Where's the problem with Wikispecies? Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't. So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't? Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
Nemo
Encyclopedia of life has a much larger vision that WikiSpecies. They envision a day when autonomous robots scour the earth, collecting and documenting specimens, including full genome scans, for all creatures that remain, uploading the data to the encyclopedia automatically. And they plan to be part of making that happen. Having such an inspiring vision guiding your project is essential for success over competing projects. Additionally, EOL has entered the public consciousness, its most recent jumpstart being a Ted wish. That wish means that some of the worlds leading thinkers are aware of EOL, and some of the worlds biggest funders as well.
I don't mind repeating again. EOL boasts to have large amount of images, but do you know that according to some of EOL's partner projects, EOL has not handled any data submitted by its partners for over a year ago? Yes, they do have lots and lots of images but many are simply sitting in a hard drive waiting for the page to be created so the images can be incorporated.
We're an active community, making progress and edging towards 200,000 articles very soon. What we need is not a proposal for deleting this project, but more publicity and contributors.
P.S. We're constantly looking for bot owners to retrieve data from various databases and create articles automatically (e.g. http://species.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&dir...)
Andrew
"Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up."
From: Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:48:45 -0600 To: nemowiki@gmail.com; foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Why can't we have $12.5 million for Wikispecies?
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Nemo_bis nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/aug/21/encyclopedia-life-species Where's the problem with Wikispecies? Moreover, EOL received 33.000 images from individual contributors (http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), Wikispecies didn't. So, why is EOL succeeding, and Wikispecies seemingly doesn't? Is it useful to have two overlapping projects like these?
Nemo
Encyclopedia of life has a much larger vision that WikiSpecies. They envision a day when autonomous robots scour the earth, collecting and documenting specimens, including full genome scans, for all creatures that remain, uploading the data to the encyclopedia automatically. And they plan to be part of making that happen. Having such an inspiring vision guiding your project is essential for success over competing projects. Additionally, EOL has entered the public consciousness, its most recent jumpstart being a Ted wish. That wish means that some of the worlds leading thinkers are aware of EOL, and some of the worlds biggest funders as well. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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