With less than three months to go until the fourth annual Wikimania
conference, registration has finally opened and will remain so until
the 15th of June. This year Wikimania starts with the a promise to
"Change the Shape of Wisdom" as it is hosted by Bibliotheca
Alexandrina, the reincarnation of the ancient Library of Alexandria,
one of pillars of this Earth when Philosophy and Wisdom are bought
into question. In Alexandria, from the 17th to the 19th of July, ideas
will be shared and discussed between people from all over the globe,
once again igniting the golden cosmopolitan age of the city.
As always, the conference will take place over 4 different tracks,
with a variety of speakers: Keynote, invited, and other. The
conference tracks this year are:
* Wikimedia Communities - Interesting projects and particularities
within the communities; policy creation within individual projects;
conflict resolution and community dynamics; reputation and identity;
multilingualism, languages and cultures; social studies.
* Free Knowledge - Open access to information; ways to gather and
distribute free knowledge, usage of the Wikimedia projects in
education, journalism, research; ways to improve content quality and
usability; copyright laws and other legal areas that interfere with
Wikimedia projects. Free Content in Middle-East/Africa countries.
* Technical infrastructure - Issues related to MediaWiki development
and extensions; Wikimedia hardware layout; new ideas for development
(including usable case studies from other wikis or similar projects).
* Scientific track - Papers submitted to the scientific track were
peer reviewed by scientific standards and accepted or rejected based
on these reviews. The papers will be published in proceedings
afterwards. Based on the number and the quality of the submission, a
journal special issue may be pursued
This year the conference is taking an interesting direction that hopes
to enlighten third world and Middle Eastern countries about the new
digital realm that is continuously expanding and evolving; as such,
along with many well reputed figures, an emphasis has been put on
bringing in Arab speakers. Speakers include Ahmed N. Tantawy, the
Technical Director of IBM in the Middle East; Eliane Metni, the
founding director of the International Education Association; Tim
Spalding, the founder and lead developer of LibraryThing; Eric M.
Johnson, the team leader for the Knowledge Management Action Team at
the U.S. Department of State; and Usama Fayyad, Yahoo!'s executive
vice president of Research & Strategic Data Solutions.
Take part on one of the most important IT events of the year. Check
the registration prices online.
<http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration>
While these prices do not include accommodation, the local team has
taken the effort to make all sorts of housing opportunities available,
starting from dorms up to luxury hotel rooms. Check these when your
registering. You will also be pleased to know that transportation is
available to and from Cairo International Airport in the 2 days before
and after the conference.
And what is a gathering without fun? Tours and parties are being
planned out for the participants of the event. After all Alexandria is
cultural city that brims with hospitality and the main idea of the
event is to provide a gathering place.
Hope to see you there!
The Wikimania Local Team
----
Please forward this message along to whomever you think will be
interested! (Sorry if you've already this e-mail more than once!)
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
---
Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
Hoi,
I think this is of interest to us all.
Thanks,
GerardM
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Torsten Zesch <zesch(a)tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>
Date: Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 4:31 PM
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] The use of Wiktionary in Natural Language
Processing
To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
In contrast to Wikipedia, Wiktionary has received little attention by
the NLP research community so far.
I know of its use for subjectivity and polarity classification (Chesley
et al., 2006), and for diachronic phonology (Bouchard et al., 2007).
Alexandre Bouchard, Percy Liang, Thomas Griffiths, and Dan Klein. 2007.
A probabilistic approach to diachronic phonology. In Proceedings of
the 2007. In Proceedings of EMNLP-CoNLL, pages 887–896.
Paula Chesley, Bruce Vincent, Li Xu, and Rohini Srihari. 2006.
Using verbs and adjectives to automatically classify blog sentiment.
In Proceedings of AAAI-CAAW-06, the Spring Symposia on Computational
Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs.
If anybody knows of other papers that describe work where Wiktionary has
been used in NLP, I would be happy to hear about it.
At UKP Lab, we have recently used Wiktionary as a lexical semantic resource
for
computing semantic relatedness.
Our main findings are:
* Wiktionary offers an astonishing amount of lexical semantic
information, but also poses new challenges due to its collaborative
construction approach and the resulting occasional instance
incompleteness and inconsistency.
* Wiktionary can be used as a substitute for traditional semantic networks
like Princeton WordNet for some tasks, for example computing semantic
relatedness. Somewhat surprisingly, it outperforms traditional wordnets
as well as Wikipedia on this task.
Some recent publications devoted to this issue are:
Zesch, T.; Mueller, C. & Gurevych, I.
Extracting Lexical Semantic Knowledge from Wikipedia and Wiktionary.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC), 2008
Abstract:
Recently, collaboratively constructed resources such as Wikipedia and
Wiktionary have been discovered as valuable lexical semantic knowledge
bases with a high potential in diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP)
tasks. Collaborative knowledge bases however significantly differ from
traditional linguistic knowledge bases in various respects, and this
constitutes both an asset and an impediment for research in NLP. This paper
addresses one such major impediment, namely the lack of suitable
programmatic access mechanisms to the knowledge stored in these large
semantic knowledge bases. We present two application programming interfaces
for Wikipedia and Wiktionary which are especially designed for mining the
rich lexical semantic information dispersed in the knowledge bases, and
provide efficient and structured access to the available knowledge. As we
believe them to be of general interest to the NLP community, we have made
them freely available for research purposes.
and
Zesch, T.; Mueller, C. & Gurevych, I.
Using Wiktionary for Computing Semantic Relatedness.
In Proceedings of AAAI, 2008
Abstract:
We introduce Wiktionary as an emerging lexical semantic resource that can be
used as a substitute for expert-made resources in AI applications. We
evaluate
Wiktionary on the pervasive task of computing semantic relatedness for
English
and German by means of correlation with human rankings and solving word
choice
problems. For the first time, we apply a concept vector based measure to a
set
of different concept representations like Wiktionary pseudo glosses, the
first
paragraph of Wikipedia articles, English WordNet glosses, and GermaNet
pseudo
glosses. We show that: (i) Wiktionary is the best lexical semantic resource
in
the ranking task and performs comparably to other resources in the word
choice
task, and (ii) the concept vector based approach yields the best results on
all
datasets in both evaluations.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UKP Lab is working on the release of a freely available Java-based API to
access the lexical semantic information contained in Wiktionary.
The release is scheduled for June 2008 at
http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/.
There is also a new release of the Java-based API for Wikipedia.
It is much faster now and contains a Mediawiki markup parser that
can be used to analyze the contents of a Wikipedia page. The parser
can also be used stand-alone to analyze further web pages using
MediaWiki markup.
-Torsten
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jay Walsh <jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:56 PM
Subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Blog is live
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
We are pleased to notify you that today we flipped the switch on the Wikimedia
Foundation's official blog! Wikimedia Blog can be found at
http://blog.wikimedia.org
Some background info: this will be a space for WMF staff to post news and
information about the work we're engaged in. We'll also bring in guest
contributors, board members etc to post. Comments are pre-moderated
for the time
being, and we're hoping for lots of civility. Comments will be moderated by
several volunteer moderators and staff as necessary.
We have some basic posting guidelines (generally short, fairly simple english,
conversational etc) so we can keep it reader friendly and useful. We expect a
wide audience - media, public, users, you name it! And we'll work
hard to keep it
interesting - and regular (hopefully posts every other business day).
Always welcome your views, and your understanding about our work-in-progress :)
Hope you enjoy! Looking forward to hearing your views.
Thanks,
--
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
---
Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
Hi,
Lately, I have started wondering why we don't
have a set of multilingual discussion pages - one
to deal with English, say, which could be used
for people interested in working on English words
in any wiktionary. Another for Swedish, and so
on... Then we could, I believe, reduce the amount
of *repeatedly* produced "hot air".... ;)
I mean, I see right now a discussion concerning
Romance languages' participles underway in
en:wikt. I see no reason, however, why a such
discussion won't arise again, in the Greek, or
the Polish, or even the Italian wiktionary.
I see the same discussions concerning various
details on certain Swedish words being held on
both sv: and en: - and in how many more places
are these words discussed without me noticing
because I'm not active in those wiktionaries, and
perhaps unable to understand the language in
which it is held? Perhaps I (or someone else)
familiar with other wiktionaries could point out
how the same problem may have been solved already
in this second wiktionary, would I only know
about the discussion...
Someone found out a while ago that several
wiktionaries had made mistakes in their treatment
of Irish nation names - and had to rise the same
issue over and over and over again, once in each
wiktionary where this user found this particular
error.
Though I know meta - in theory at least - has
been multilingual for quite some time, I'm not
very active there and hence don't really know
about how successful (or not) their attempts to
deal with large numbers of extensive multilingual
discussions have been. (Perhaps someone could
enlighten me?)
Of course I understand that there are some
serious complications with any attempt of a
"multilingual discussion" - maybe most
importantly the continuous need to translate
things, but I guess there also will be issues
with various wiktionaries wanting to arrange
things in very different manners.
Now the question is: would anyone be interested
in trying to follow a multilingual discussion of
their favourite language if it took place in meta
or on another site than they ordinarily work on?
Or would such an attempt be considered as an
attempt of *someone* (=outsiders) to decide how
"my" wiktonary is run?
Comments?
Regards,
\Mike
(p.s. This actually makes me regret that we
basically decided to split the wiktionaries
according to the user interface language and not
according to "content language", way back in
2003/2004 or whenever the first two non-English
wiktionaries were created.... :/ Well, no point
crying over spilled milk.)
I'm \Mike.
You'll find me at [[wikt:sv:Användare:Mike]], [[wikt:en:User:Mike]] and elsewhere.
__________________________________________________________
Sent from Yahoo! Mail.
A Smarter Inbox. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
Dear All,
This is a note to inform you that there is a vote on en.wiktionary to
reinstate the CheckUser privileges of User:TheDaveRoss after his
absense. Your input would be much appreciated at
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Votes/cu-2008-02/User:TheDaveRoss
Yours
Conrad
[[en:wikt:User:Conrad.Irwin]]
Please spread the word to all those who are interested and on to your
local Village pumps. :-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml(a)gmail.com>
Date: Feb 2, 2008 9:15 AM
Subject: Wikimania 2008: Call for Participation
To: "Wikimania general list (open subscription)"
<wikimania-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, English Wikipedia
<wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, English Wikipedia
<wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Program committee list
<wikimania-program(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Please circulate this call among Wikimedia communities, researchers
and other people that may be interested! This call is also online at
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Participation
== Wikimania 2008: Call for Participation ==
[[w:Wikimania|Wikimania]] is an annual global event devoted to
[[foundation:Main Page|Wikimedia]] projects around the globe
(including [[w:Main page|Wikipedia]], [[:w:b:en:Main page|Wikibooks]],
[[:w:s:en:Main page|Wikisource]], [[:en:n:Main page|Wikinews]],
[[:w:wikt:en:Main page|Wiktionary]], [[:w:v:en:Main
page|Wikiversity]], [[:m:q:en:Main page|Wikiquote]], [[:species:Main
page|Wikispecies]], and [[:commons:Main page|Wikimedia Commons]]) and
for its editors and users to gather, meet each other, exchange ideas,
and report on research and projects. It is a community event, which
is also open to the public and to researchers. This year's conference
will be held from '''July 17-19, 2008''' in
[[w:Alexandria|Alexandria]], [[w:Egypt|Egypt]] at the new Library of
Alexandria ([[w:Bibliotheca Alexandrina|Bibliotheca Alexandrina]]).
For more information, please visit the Wikimania 2008 Home page at
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org
We are accepting submissions for presentations, workshops, panels,
posters, open spaces, and artistic artifacts. Please carefully follow
the submission guidelines below. Submissions can be sent via the
following link:
:https://wikimedia.pentabarf.org/submission/wikimania2008
=== Important dates ===
* 1 February – 16 March : Submission
* 17 March – 30 April : Review, feedback and notification of acceptance
* 17 – 19 July 2007 : '''Wikimania'''
=== Conference Tracks ===
Submissions should address one or more of the following themes:
; Wikimedia Communities : Interesting projects and particularities
within the communities; policy creation within individual projects;
conflict resolution and community dynamics; reputation and identity;
multi-lingualism, languages and cultures; social studies. We
explicitly invite you to discuss your local Wikimedia project's
community.
; Free Knowledge : Open access to information; ways to gather and
distribute free knowledge, usage of the Wikimedia projects in
education, journalism, research; ways to improve content quality and
usability; copyright laws and other legal areas that interfere with
Wikimedia projects. Free Content in the Middle-East/Africa.
; Technical infrastructure : Issues related to MediaWiki development
and extensions; Wikimedia's technical infrastructure; new ideas for
development (including case studies from other wikis or similar
projects).
; Scientific track : Papers about massively collaborative work, open
and free content creation, community dynamics, the social or economic
aspects of the Wikimedia projects, and other topics related to
Wikimedia projects. Papers submitted to the scientific track will be
peer reviewed by a reviewing committee regarding their novelty,
rigour, and estimated impact, and accepted or rejected based on these
reviews. The papers will be published in proceedings afterwards, and
depending on the number and the quality of the submissions, a journal
special issue may be pursued. Scientific track papers must be in
English, and must not exceed 7,500 words (or 15 pages LNCS).
Your topic must be related either to the Wikimedia projects and their
communities, or to the creation of free content in general.
=== Types of Submissions ===
We are seeking submissions for
* presentations (10–30 minute talks with discussion afterwards)
* workshops (60–120 minute session with more involvement of the audience)
* panels (group of 2-5 speakers to discuss on a specific subject)
* posters (printed presentations or visual displays that can stand on their own)
* artistic artifacts (plays, competitions, comedy, visualizations, or
other representations of some aspect of the projects)
In addition there will the possibility to give [[lightning talks]] (5
minute short presentations). These will be organized on the Wikimania
2008 wiki without need to submit via the submission system.
=== Submission Guidelines ===
Wikimania is organized by volunteers, so please help us minimize
wasted effort by submitting via the [[submission]] system and
following these guidelines. All submissions MUST explicitly include
the following:
# an English "Event title"
# a short English "Abstract" of your event in 50 to 100 words. The
abstract will be used for the public schedule.
# the "Track" your submission fits in best (Wikimedia Communities,
Free Knowledge, Technical infrastructure, or Scientific)
# the "Event type" (presentation, workshop, panel, poster, artistic...)
# information about the speaker (full name, email, a short description
of at least 2 sentences...)
# for submissions to the scientific track: set "Submission of paper
for proceedings" to "yes" and upload a paper instead of the
"Description" below as "Attachment". Papers must be in English, and
must not exceed 7,500 words.
In addition you can add some more information like a a subtitle of the
event, an image (will be resized to 128x128px) and private "Submission
notes" for reviewers and conference organisation. In particular you
should give:
* a more detailed "Description" of your event in English or Arabic.
The description is essential for review: please give an overview of
the areas to be covered or taught. The better you describe your
submission, the more likely it will get accepted. State clearly the
relevance to the Wikimedia projects and whether submission concerns a
specific wiki project. You can also include links. The description
will later be used for the public schedule but you can edit it before.
* special requirements (such as equipment for a workshop or panel) if needed
* the language used for presentation
* whether you want to submit a paper for proceedings
* whether you want to submit presentation slides
* whether the presentation is intended to be a specific length
* the target audience you are going to reach and what previous
knowledge is needed
* images or sketches of the poster or artistic artifact if available
* for panel submissions a suggested moderator and short biographies of
each suggested panelist
In the "Submission notes" you should tell us whether you will attend
to Wikimania (a) surely, (b) probably, (c) only if your submission is
accepted, or (d) only if we provide travel and/or accommodation. You
can also add yourself to the public list of attendees at the Wikimania
2008 wiki: http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees
Please note that all submissions must be dual licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License version 1.2 or later ''and'' the Creative
Commons Attribution License! By submitting for Wikimania 2008 you
agree to this condition.
For more information see the submission guidelines at
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submission
===Submissions===
Once you are sure you have included all of the required information,
please send your submission before the respective deadline through our
'''submission system''':
:https://wikimedia.pentabarf.org/submission
== See also ==
* About the venue: http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Venue
* Brainstorming page for program ideas:
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Program_ideas
* Editable list of attendees: http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
---
Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
May be of interest.
cheers,
Brianna
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Kastner <paul(a)lingro.com>
Date: 1 Dec 2007 16:19
Subject: [Icommons] Launching open-dictionary language-learning
project (Lingro.com)
To: icommons(a)lists.ibiblio.org
Hi all,
We're launching a project to build a compilation of all the available
open-content dictionaries (both same-language and translating /
multilingual dictionaries) as well as develop tools for
language-learners. We're working on expanding the dictionaries through
user contributions (dual-licensed under Creative Commons Attribution
Share-Alike and GNU FDL) and will be submitting updates and
modifications back to the original sources (like Wiktionary). The
project also uses audio pronunciations from the Shtooka project, and
we'll be recording more pronunciations to contribute back to Shtooka.
We're developing innovative tools for people to use with the
dictionaries. The project (named Lingro - http://lingro.com) lets
people read a web page in a foreign language and click on words they
don't know for a translation. Here's an example - it's
CreativeCommons.org for a Spanish speaker learning English. Users can
click on any word in the text for a translation into Spanish:
http://lingro.com/translate/english-spanish/creativecommons.org
There's also a quick search-as-you-type dictionary:
http://lingro.com/dictionary/english-spanish/
Lingro already has tools for people to add / modify single
translations and definitions, and we're working on an interface to
guide people in contributing multiple translations by prompting them
for frequently-occurring words in corpora which don't exist in the
dictionaries. We hope to expand existing open-content dictionaries for
major languages to be at least as good as the copyright-laden
competition and create dictionaries for less popular languages that
are better than anything else out there.
We're set up as a business, but our plan is to make money by providing
the best tools for learning languages. The dictionaries themselves
will always be free and open. We're not even sure if that's the best
business decision. We hope it is. But either way, we're doing it this
way because we think the open content is hugely important. Especially
for content that's so basic to human life and necessary for
communication between different cultures.
Please feel free to let me know what you think of the site. I'd also
love to hear feedback on what we can be doing to help the open-content
community.
Cheers,
Paul
_______________________________________________
Icommons mailing list
Icommons(a)lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/icommons
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/
There's a list of Wiktionaries by raw size at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary#List_of_Wiktionaries
Do all Wiktionaries follow the same format, with one wiki article
per word, containing sections for language / part of speech /
aspects and then numbered lists for meanings? E.g.
[[Snow]]
==English==
===Noun===
# The frozen, crystalline state of water
# A shade of white
# Random electrical noise
====Derived terms====
====Translations====
===Verb===
# Weather when snow is falling
# Bluff draw in poker
====Derived terms====
====Translations====
Or is there any Wiktionary that breaks this pattern? Does this
pattern have a name? What do you call it when/if some Wiktionary
breaks this pattern?
How did we end up with disambiguation pages on Wikipedia, strictly
keeping one page per meaning of a word, but not on Wiktionary?
Is that because Wiktionary spun off before disambiguation pages
were invented on Wikipedia, and the news never spread to
Wiktionary? Or is it because the Oxford English Dictionary
differs from Encyclopaedia Britannica in this respect, and we want
to keep the best practice? Or why? One could say that all
meanings of "snow" are the same word (by etymology), and should
logically be in one page. But this is not true of "pen"
(etymology 1--4) and the keeping of foreign words of similar
spelling in the same page (Norwegian "pen" meaning "fine"). Has
there been a discussion about this, and where can that be found? I
found something from December 2002,
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary_talk:Entry_layout_explained/archiv…
But the voice of reason, Imran, left the project a year later.
Another discussion took place in December 2005,
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour_archive/October-Decem…
(It appears to be a December issue, so I apologize for bringing it
up a few weeks early this year.)
In the English Wiktionary, what percentage of words are in
English? And is the "long tail" of foreign languages similar over
all Wiktionaries? Is there any major Wiktionary that has a higher
concentration of words in the own language?
If the above pattern holds, a simple count of all level-2 headings
from the database dump could give the answer. For example, in the
dump of the Swedish Wiktionary, having 46500 articles and being
the 13th biggest, these level-2 headings appear most frequently:
2510 ==Svenska== Swedish
1847 ==Tvärspråkligt== Translingual
625 ==Engelska== English
343 ==Historik== Etymology
267 ==Tyska== German
245 ==Danska== Danish
230 ==Norska== Norwegian
217 ==Spanska== Spanish
217 ==Franska== French
192 ==Italienska== Italian
184 ==Nederländska== Dutch
169 ==Finska== Finnish
152 ==Polska== Polish
135 ==Serbiska== Serbian
122 ==Rumänska== Romanian
116 ==Interlingua== Interlingua
109 ==Ungerska== Hungarian
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
All -
we've set up a blog to accompany our annual fundraiser. The headlines
from the blog will be featured in the sitenotice:
http://whygive.wikimedia.org/
I'd like to invite you to submit posts to the blog. These posts can be
provocative, and should give compelling reasons to support the
Wikimedia Foundation. You can draft posts here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/Why_Give_blog
Posts will be selected by a number of people: Cary Bass (our Volunteer
Coordinator), Sandy Ordonez (our Communications Manager), Sue Gardner
(Special Advisor to the Board), and myself. We'll probably try to have
a new post every 2-3 days at least.
Once again, the point of these posts is first and foremost to invite
the general public to donate. :-) Please submit stories in this
general spirit.
If you are willing to act as a moderator for comments to vet out spam
& trolling, please contact Cary Bass at <cbass AT wikimedia DOT org>.
For now, this is an experiment and as such, only in English. We will
set up blogs in other languages if this one has a measurable impact on
our fundraising.
Thanks for any and all help!
Erik Möller
Member of the Board