Hi Markus, all: I think it would be sufficient to 1. Try to remove the recent spam 2. Enforce a strict registration schema and allow edits only to registered participants.
I think the community is small enough so that we could easily determine eligibility of new people. Best Martin On Jan 12, 2012, at 6:43 PM, 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/ > -------------------------------------------------------- martin hepp e-business & web science research group universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen e-mail: [email protected] phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217 fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620 www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group) http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal) skype: mfhepp twitter: mfhepp Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data! ================================================================= * Project Main Page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/
