Dear Markus and Yury,
I think you make a very important point. Actually
STI International could provide
(modest) financial and personal support on
helping on the issue. If this is viewed
as a good proposal we could follow up on this.
Many greetings,
Dieter
At 06:43 PM 1/12/2012, Markus Krötzsch wrote:
Hi Yuri,
let us take this to one mailing list
[email protected], as this is the list that is
most involved (please drop the others when you reply).
As the technical maintainer of the site, I
largely agree with your assessment. In spite of
the very high visibility of the site (and
perceived authority), the active editing
community is not big. This is a problem
especially given the significant and continued
spam attacks that the site is under due to its
high visibility (I just recently changed the
captcha system and rolled back thousands of
edits, yet it seems they are already breaking
through again, though in smaller numbers).
I do not want to blame anybody for the state of
affairs: most of us do not have the time to
contribute significant content to such sites.
However, given the extraordinary visibility of
the site, we should all perceive this as a major
problem (to the extent that we attach our work
to the label "semantic web" in any way).
So what can be done?
(1) Freeze the wiki. A weaker version of this
is: allow users only to edit after they were
manually added to a group of trusted users (all
humans welcome). This would require somebody to
manage these permissions but would allow
existing projects/communities to continue to use the site.
(2) Re-enforce spam protection on the wiki.
Maybe this could be done, but the site is
targeted pretty heavily. Standard captchas like
ReCaptcha are thus getting broken (spammers do
have an effective infrastructure for this), but
maybe non-standard captchas could work better.
This is a task for the technical maintainers
(i.e., me and the folks at AIFB Karlsruhe where the site is hosted).
(3) Clean the wiki. Whether frozen or not, there
is a lot of spam already. Something needs to be
done to get rid of it. This requires (easy but
tedious) manual effort. Some stakeholders need
to be found to provide basic workforce (e.g., by
hiring a student to help with spam deletion).
(4) Restore the wiki. Update the main pages
(about technologies and active projects) to
reflect a current and/or timeless state that we
would like new readers to see. This again needs
somebody to push it, and for writing pages about
topics like SPARQL one would need some
expertise. This is a challenge for the community.
I am willing to invest /some/ time here to help
with the above, but (3) and (4) requires support
from more people. On the other hand, there are
probably hardly more than 20 or 30 *essential*
content pages that we are talking about here,
plus many pages about projects and people that
one should ask the stakeholders to review. So
one might be able to make this into a shining
entry point to the semantic web in a week of
work ... together with (1) and (2) above, the
invested work would remain valuable for a long time.
Cheers
Markus
On 12/01/12 10:43, Yury Katkov wrote:
Hi everyone!
What is the current status of the semanticweb.org
<http://semanticweb.org> website? It used to be the main wiki about the
semantic web, it has a lot of cool and useful information about
everything. But now it seems abandoned. I mean, there are about 30 real
writers who update the information about their projects an write
articles, but they do something like 30% of changes. The other 70% is spam!
Are there guys who support the website?
Who manages the community, are there any plans of creating projects and
articles about SW? Is there community at all?
In my opinion if this great website suppose to be alive the first goal
is to find volunteers who'll help administrator to combat spam (with
bots, extensions and editing policies) and support the new activities
and projets on the wiki. (I'm ready to be one of them).
If this wiki lived only in the past when it was a big hype around
Semantic Web topics and now without a big funding nobody wants to use it
- wouldn't it better to be frozen?
I appreciate and admire people who started up the wiki. Please, don't
let it be the rotting memorial to the past of the Semantic Web.
-----
Sincerely yours,
Yury Katkov, WikiVote llc
--
Dr. Markus Kroetzsch
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Room 306, Parks Road, OX1 3QD Oxford, United Kingdom
+44 (0)1865 283529 http://korrekt.org/
--
Dieter Fensel
Director STI Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Austria
http://www.sti-innsbruck.at/
phone: +43-512-507-6488/5, fax: +43-512-507-9872
