RE: theopenglobe.org fork.
On Tue, 2011-09-13 at 09:56 -0400, pi zero wrote:
Most of the enforced standards on en.wn --- for purposes of review time, which *is* the primary limiting factor in our output --- are about not plagiarizing, and about being accurate. (It's striking how many people, even college students, have no clue how to use a source without plagiarizing from it.) *Obviously* we want to find ways to leverage reviewers' time better so as to improve our efficiency at such things (I'd like to think it's obvious, anyway; focusing on stuff like that would be productive), but whatever it takes to enforce those things is part of being a news site. There are other really important things that make contributing a challenge, but they aren't dominant in limiting our output and are also part of being news site or of being a quality news site (and they too are valuable skills for authors to acquire) --- focusing on a news event (which makes us hard news and is closely related to npov), inverted pyramid style, writing clearly and for an international audience.
We've often talked about partially automating plagiarism checking, but never actually implemented such.
To me, it seems like an interesting CompSci challenge. I believe there are a number of tools used in education to deal with part of the problem. However, our requirements are a little different from checking for "student ripped off final year paper from graduate at college X written three years ago".
I've a hunch that some interest, and a slightly clearer definition of requirements, would make it an interesting Google Summer of Code challenge/project.
In any case, give TheOpenGlobe a few months and see if they fare any better in a GoogleFight[1]. ;-)
[1] http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=theopenglobe&w...
Brian McNeil.