[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Projects Growth Animated

[Brian]

>
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 2:46 PM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> Now, should we buy one? Foundation hasn't been into scientific
> computing & number crunching so far, so that would mean entering
> slightly other domain.
>
> --
> Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]
>

The answer to that question is..YES! :) Being more open and inviting to all
researchers is well within the Foundation's mission and will directly
benefit the projects. As an example, I recently read an NLP paper where the
researchers were able to automatically fill in missing information in
infoboxes based on article content. It's probably not a good idea to do this
fully automatically, but projects have had scripts for some time now that
detected spelling errors and the like and guided editors through the process
of updating them if it's actually appropriate. The Foundation really ought
to have some sort of outreach position that *proactively* sought these
researchers out, let them know that if they could package up their compute
job and provide an api/interface that there was a place it could be run and
(potentially) directly benefit Wikipedia. After all, they already did the
hard part of conducting state of the art research and implementing it! The
Toolserver can act in this function in a limited fashion, but it's really
not suited for folks who think in terms of the entire dataset.

Here's that particular paper. I found it on the DBPedia list.

Fei Wu, Daniel S. Weld, 2008.  Automatically Refining the
> Wikipedia Infobox Ontology, in the 17th International World Wide
> Web Conference, (WWW-08), Beijing, China, April, 2008.
> See http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/wufei/papers/www08.pdf
>

And keep in mind that it is just one of many.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_academic_studies

There is much for growth here, as in all areas.