Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 04/08/11 3:09 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote: We will still have a niche in languages they aren't interested in, and among people who care about copyright. But my suspicion is that we are unusual, and that most potential editors are more annoyed by having their contributions rejected by deletionists than by something in the small print that says their words now belong to the website they've written them on. ... Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. I'd like to see a Wikisource type project that accepts orphan works (subject to definition) that are supposedly still protected. They could easily be taken down if a legitimate owner materializes, but otherwise could accelerate the freeing of these works. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: I'd like to see a Wikisource type project that accepts orphan works (subject to definition) that are supposedly still protected. They could easily be taken down if a legitimate owner materializes, but otherwise could accelerate the freeing of these works. I think some already exist. Mention of Canada and orphan works rings a bell, but I can't remember the name of the organisation. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 10/04/2011 20:44, geni wrote: Thing is their business model appears to be to start with $50 million of funding and proceed to hire whoever you need to write your encyclopedia. And there is no particular reason why paid staff couldn't be a viable route to a competitor. But that sounds like the annual budget. And I suppose the assumption is that doing content in English is enough. You'd have to sell a lot of advertising and/or subscriptions. There probably is a niche, at least, for a general encyclopedia that libraries would willingly pay for, written professionally. Would that worry us? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 11 April 2011 10:49, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: And there is no particular reason why paid staff couldn't be a viable route to a competitor. But that sounds like the annual budget. And I suppose the assumption is that doing content in English is enough. You'd have to sell a lot of advertising and/or subscriptions. There probably is a niche, at least, for a general encyclopedia that libraries would willingly pay for, written professionally. Would that worry us? You assume libraries have any money whatsoever. I have anecdotal comments by someone from 2005 on http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/277688.html - Libraries are glorified combination of internet cafes, OAP reading rooms, care-in-the-community day centres and a half-way-house between Blockbuster and CashConverter in terms of CD and DVD rental. In 10 years they'll look like Starbucks (probably due to being owned by them), or be shut - the lot of them. My basis for this opinion - my mother is Reference Librarian for Lancashire (and has been for about 10 years now), and if she had the funding for a Britannica in every branch she'd spend the money on replacing several hundred other books per branch instead. That is, it would have to be quite a remarkable encyclopedia indeed to actually spend money on. I can't imagine library funding has actually gotten better since 2005 - there's Vodafone's tax break to pay for, after all. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 8:26 PM, David Goodman dgge...@gmail.com wrote: I've also suggested this, calling it '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in. It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists will have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists will have it not rejected. But it would be interesting to see a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable(W)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? While I agree with the general idea (I would love for example an [[Obscure:]] namespace) we need to make sure that WP:V, and especially WP:Synth is guarded vehemently. We need to keep thinking about what Wikipedia is, and it is WP:NOT, and keep actively thinking about if that is still what we want it to be, and act upon it. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 8 April 2011 23:07, Bob the Wikipedian bobthewikiped...@gmail.com wrote: A relatively successful wiki competitor is the Encyclopedia of Life. Here's how that site works: *Experts write articles (similar to the original Nupedia, only they dint' give up after nine articles) *Articles that are lacking are temporarily imported from Wikipedia *Wikipedia articles which are reviewed and approved by experts become permanent content *Taxonomic data is imported from various databases, including WORMS, ITIS, and various other trusted names. *The public (supposedly) may contribute information (though I've not figured out how yet) *The public may contribute tagged freely licensed photos to the wiki by uploading them to the EOL's Flickr photostream where a bot adds them regularly. On the surface, EOL looks like it's doing quite well and has a lot of useful information and photos, and I even use it sometimes for research when Wikipedia doesn't satisfy my hunger :-[ . But if you ask me, they've made it too difficult to learn to contribute, barring out potential editors like myself. God bless, Bob Thing is their business model appears to be to start with $50 million of funding and proceed to hire whoever you need to write your encyclopedia. Admittedly given the foundation's spending plans of late it appears the WMF is interested the same model. -- geni ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
Haha, yes. And we certainly seem to be cutting out those who don't wish to identify. God bless, Bob On 4/10/2011 2:44 PM, geni wrote: On 8 April 2011 23:07, Bob the Wikipedianbobthewikiped...@gmail.com wrote: A relatively successful wiki competitor is the Encyclopedia of Life. Here's how that site works: *Experts write articles (similar to the original Nupedia, only they dint' give up after nine articles) *Articles that are lacking are temporarily imported from Wikipedia *Wikipedia articles which are reviewed and approved by experts become permanent content *Taxonomic data is imported from various databases, including WORMS, ITIS, and various other trusted names. *The public (supposedly) may contribute information (though I've not figured out how yet) *The public may contribute tagged freely licensed photos to the wiki by uploading them to the EOL's Flickr photostream where a bot adds them regularly. On the surface, EOL looks like it's doing quite well and has a lot of useful information and photos, and I even use it sometimes for research when Wikipedia doesn't satisfy my hunger :-[ . But if you ask me, they've made it too difficult to learn to contribute, barring out potential editors like myself. God bless, Bob Thing is their business model appears to be to start with $50 million of funding and proceed to hire whoever you need to write your encyclopedia. Admittedly given the foundation's spending plans of late it appears the WMF is interested the same model. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
We already have several rivals, including the Chinese, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike and the largest online encyclopaedia Hudong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong At some point in the near future translation software will improve to the point that they can compete against us in languages other than Chinese. Also I suspect we are already losing ground to more inclusionist projects such as IMDB. We will still have a niche in languages they aren't interested in, and among people who care about copyright. But my suspicion is that we are unusual, and that most potential editors are more annoyed by having their contributions rejected by deletionists than by something in the small print that says their words now belong to the website they've written them on. Willingness to adapt to the desires of National Governments and even cultural prejudices also creates niches in much if not most of the world. I've no idea how good Chinese to Arabic translation software is, but the combination of an adequate translation and a filter agreed with relevant governments or religions would probably beat us in the Arab world. I don't like the idea of political censorship, but I do like the idea of enabling people to make their own choices as to what they see. If our user preferences included two stick figures and a sliding bar that enabled every option from burka to thongless then my personal choice need not concern others any more than theirs mattered to me. Other interesting niches would be for a child safe, unscientific or mono-dialect encyclopaedias. I'm not convinced that the young earth creationists with their American English at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia or the Australian English equivalent at http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are sufficiently mainstream to do this, let alone the absolutist flat earthers at http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page But I suspect that a mainstream trusted brand could find a niche here, perhaps even with a bowdlerised mirror of Wikipedia. I've seen many newbies get an early warning by starting their wiki career correcting articles to the version of English that they are comfortable with, and I'd like to see us resolve this by making display dialect a user preference http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:More_multi_dialect_wikis I think this would have a secondary benefit that identifying and appropriately marking ambiguous words such as bonnet, hood and fender would make it easier to translate those articles into other languages. Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. WereSpielChequers ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism, propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current community of editors. It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability policy gets you. The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to be too drastic. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 08/04/2011 11:09, WereSpielChequers wrote: snip Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. Hmmm yes. It is interesting to me that Google Knol is nowhere on your list of viable competitors (you did make some good points in favour of those you mentioned). Notability has always been a broken and widely-misunderstood aspect of enWP. My impression is that deWP, for example, sets the bar higher, and has fewer problems: in a word, deletionism can work well enough. Comprehensiveness is of course about total content, while notability is about topics you recognise. Salience is the neglected concept, which is relative to topic. To get back to knols: this sort of factual blogging isn't really likely to produce much interesting content, absent incentives. And no serious publishing process is likely to produce anything that is way better, unless it is quite complicated. I feel that's the correct conclusion from (en)WP. There may be an improved model, but please don't tell me that a few tweaks will eliminate the complexities entirely. There are choices that can be made about where to place the tricky parts. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 8 April 2011 15:17, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Notability has always been a broken and widely-misunderstood aspect of enWP. My impression is that deWP, for example, sets the bar higher, and has fewer problems: in a word, deletionism can work well enough. Comprehensiveness is of course about total content, while notability is about topics you recognise. Salience is the neglected concept, which is relative to topic. I am told anecdotally that many native speakers of German who also speak good English prefer en:wp for its comprehensiveness. This may be an example of what we think we should be about conflicting with what readers actually want and expect. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 08/04/2011 15:57, David Gerard wrote: On 8 April 2011 15:17, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Notability has always been a broken and widely-misunderstood aspect of enWP. My impression is that deWP, for example, sets the bar higher, and has fewer problems: in a word, deletionism can work well enough. Comprehensiveness is of course about total content, while notability is about topics you recognise. Salience is the neglected concept, which is relative to topic. I am told anecdotally that many native speakers of German who also speak good English prefer en:wp for its comprehensiveness. This may be an example of what we think we should be about conflicting with what readers actually want and expect. It's not actually terribly surprising, given that there are probably at least four times as many native speakers of English as of German. In the areas I work in I often come across cases where deWP has a better article on a topic than enWP. These are things you'd expect, anyway. The real point is that deWP's model seems clearly viable, if a bit different. We'll see, in the longer term. The gap between content and featured content (optimised) still seems huge (FAs cover half a week's additions at the current rate, by number of topics). We've got a long way with good enough content. Charles= ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
With regard to the Chinese examples specifically, they may have a lot of articles, but content-wise, they are a mess. And that isn't just me, the biased Wikipedia editor saying that. A lot of Chinese people I've talked to don't trust their content either, particularly Hudong, which is worse than Baidu Baike. In addition, their communities are weak in terms of project building, I think. Editors may create articles to gain in their point systems, but they have no buy-in in terms of making a good encyclopedia, because they don't make those decisions. Finally, I doubt that we will have to compete with them in any other languages, because Chinese websites just don't seem to be interested in that. There are enough mainland Chinese users for any website to live off of. The largest video portal site in China, Youku, doesn't even have a version in traditional Chinese characters, much less any foreign language. There are plenty of similar examples. All of this is just to say, I think there is still space for Wikipedia, even when other competitors exist. When Chinese people are exposed to Wikipedia, they seem to like it and find it reliable. The hard part is getting that exposure. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia. - maintanability of BLPs
Tom, The maintanabilty test strikes me as an interesting one, but I'm not sure it scales. On Citizendium you had essentially one language and a relatively small community, on Wikipedia you have: * * a much larger multilingual community so exponentially more difficult to know if someone is sufficiently interested to update it when the subject dies. * a large proportion of editors who edit as anonymous IPs, so you have no easy way to discover in advance whether an article would be updated if the subject died. * tools such as http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table so you don't need someone on the Lain Wikipedia to be keeping an eye on whether someone is alive, there could be someone on the French, Russian or Tamil wikipedias and it then gets circulated as a death anomaly. * the critical mass that means that when someone notable dies a bunch of newbie and IP editors often turn up at their Wikipedia article As for the obscure English grocer, at present he wouldn't have an article unless he was notable for something else - not every sportsperson stays in sport till their retirement. I think you could expand notability a long way without including every shopkeeper, but as I said I think this is easier for IMDB and similar specialist pedias than for us. One area where I do think we could make a difference is to change our policy to accept the concept of transient fame. For example anyone signed as a player of a major football club is of interest to a certain section of our readers, if they are dropped from the squad without ever playing then they cease to be of interest. Currently our policy requires them to have made a first team appearance, but currently in the squad or having in the past made a first team appearance would be more rational. WereSpielChequers On 8 April 2011 11:30, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism, propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current community of editors. It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability policy gets you. The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to be too drastic. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
I've also suggested this, calling it '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in. It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists will have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists will have it not rejected. But it would be interesting to see a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable(W)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
I've also suggested this, calling it '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in. It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists will have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists will have it not rejected. But it would be interesting to see a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable(W)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? -- David Goodman Yes, let's do that. Fred Bauder ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
That wouldn't solve anything, except further draw a hard line and create an even larger rift between editors. If we strive to be an open community where we bring people together, then we would collectively be making it more closed by doing this. -MuZemike On 4/8/2011 1:26 PM, David Goodman wrote: I've also suggested this, calling it '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in. It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists will have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists will have it not rejected. But it would be interesting to see a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable(W)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
