[Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Reasonator use in Wikipedias

Wed Jan 22 08:35:54 UTC 2014

Hoi,

The mail I send is meant to be a warning in advance. If you are interested
in the "Reasonator", it is in continuous development and information is
provided on an almost daily basis. When you have read it, you may
understand the potential it has. It will help you understand why it can
have a place as a stand in for an article in a Wikipedia and also why it
can beat the quality of information of most stubs.

There are many ways to skin a cat. The most obvious one is to add a
{{Reasonator}} template as a place holder in a Wikipedia. Another is to
capture a not found or a red link and insert Reasonator info. What I am
trying to do is to give a sense of direction. I am not indicating how it
will be done for sure.

When the English Wikipedia community makes a decision, it is what the
English Wikipedia community thinks best for itself. No problem in that. It
would only become a problem when it is inferred to be a decision for every
Wikipedia community.

The he Media Viewer is very similar to the situation at hand with Wikidata
and Reasonator. Wikidata data can be used on every Wikipedia and to some
extend this is done on many if not most Wikipedias (including en.wp). Like
with Media, it can be confusing that the information is actually not on
that local project. It is also not that obvious that Wikidata is not
necessarily interested in the policies that are dreamt up locally. The
alternative is NOT having central storage of images or NOT having central
data storage. Both are not really an option.

I like the fact that you come up with some suggestions however, your
proposal does not consider disambiguation. At this stage we are improving
the information that is provided by Reasonator; the latest iteration has
de-cluttered complicated pages like the one for Shakespeare a lot while
adding to the information that is made available.

Quality information is provided by the Reasonator, the biggest problem I
see is that we do not have info-boxes of high quality available when an
article is being written.
Thanks,
       GerardM

On 21 January 2014 20:07, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Can you explain how such a {{Reasonator}} template would actually work. You
> say that it would be a stand-in until the article was actually written, but
> how would it know when the article is actually written? Is there a way to
> access the target article's state via Lua?
>
> From a community perspective, linking to external sites from body content
> is normally frowned upon (on en.wiki at least), even if the link is to a
> sister project. There are two main reasons for this:
> 1. It discourages the creation of new articles via redlinks
> 2. It can be confusing for readers to be sent to other sites while surfing
> Wikipedia content. (This is one of reasons why the WMF Multimedia team has
> been developing the Media Viewer.)
>
> My suggestion would be to leave the redlinks intact, but to provide a
> pop-up when hovering over the redlinks (similar to Navigation pop-ups (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups)). This
> pop-up could provide a small set of core data (via an ajax request) and
> also a link to the full Reasonator page. I would probably implement this as
> a gadget first and do a few design iterations based on user-feedback before
> proposing it as something for readers.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Magnus Manske <
> magnusmanske at googlemail.com
> > wrote:
>
> > On a technical note, Reasonator is pure JavaScript, so should be easily
> > portable, even to a Wikipedia:Reasonator.js page (or several pages, with
> > support JS).
> >
> > git here:
> > https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/reasonator
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 5:13 PM, Ryan Lane <rlane32 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 7:17 AM, Gerard Meijssen
> > > <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hoi,
> > > >
> > > > At this moment Wikipedia "red links" provide no information
> whatsoever.
> > > > This is not cool.
> > > >
> > > > In Wikidata we often have labels for the missing (=red link)
> articles.
> > We
> > > > can and do provide information from Wikidata in a reasonable way that
> > is
> > > > informative in the "Reasonator". We also provide additional search
> > > > information on many Wikipedias.
> > > >
> > > > In the Reasonator we have now implemented "red lines" [1]. They
> > indicate
> > > > when a label does not exist in the primary language that is in use.
> > > >
> > > > What we are considering is creating a template {{Reasonator}} that
> will
> > > > present information based on what is available in Wikidata. Such a
> > > template
> > > > would be a stand in until an article is actually written. What we
> would
> > > > provide is information that is presented in the same way as we
> provide
> > it
> > > > as this moment in time [2]
> > > >
> > > > This may open up a box of worms; Reasonator is NOT using any caching.
> > > There
> > > > may be lots of other reasons why you might think this proposal is
> evil.
> > > All
> > > > the evil that is technical has some merit but, you have to consider
> > that
> > > > the other side of the equation is that we are not "sharing in the sum
> > of
> > > > all knowledge" even when we have much of the missing requested
> > > information
> > > > available to us.
> > > >
> > > > One saving (technical) grace, Reasonator loads round about as quickly
> > as
> > > > WIkidata does.
> > > >
> > > > As this is advance warning, I hope that you can help with the issues
> > that
> > > > will come about. I hope that you will consider the impact this will
> > have
> > > on
> > > > our traffic and measure to what extend it grows our data.
> > > >
> > > > The Reasonator pages will not show up prettily on mobile phones .. so
> > > does
> > > > Wikidata by the way. It does not consider Wikipedia zero. There may
> be
> > > more
> > > > issues that may require attention. But again, it beats not serving
> the
> > > > information that we have to those that are requesting it.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I have a strong feeling you're going to bring labs to its knees.
> > >
> > > Sending editors to labs is one thing, but you're proposing sending
> > readers
> > > to labs, to a service that isn't cached.
> > >
> > > If reasonator is something we want to support for something like this,
> > > maybe we should consider turning it into a production service?
> > >
> > > - Ryan
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> >
> >
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