Hoi, A few questions: - how expensive is it to add all references, undoubled, from all our projects to Wikidata AND have them link to where they are used - how expensive is it to check if these references are still there and link to content at archive.org - how expensive is it to create a search engine with the subjects and the titles what can be searched for - consider this an experiment, what would happen if we make it available to the public without fanfare? - how expensive would it be to allow a public to add links to youtube and whatever when they are linked to subjects [1]
- how expensive is it to flag to Wikipedias and other projects that lists are likely incorrect based on information that we have in the wiki sphere? [1] I watched How gut microbes keep us healthy as we age | Tim Spector & Nicola Segata - YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_3dfXbVl2k> could link it to these two scientists but I am adding citations for the key paper.. Gut micro-organisms associated with health, nutrition and dietary interventions - Scholia <https://qlever.scholia.wiki/work/Q140511862> Thanks, GerardM On Sat, 11 Jul 2026 at 22:59, Michael Snow via Wikimedia-l < [email protected]> wrote: > On 7/11/2026 10:43 AM, Alex Stinson via Wikimedia-l wrote: > > *Interfaces are cheap, informed curators are expensive* > > Agentic AI, Coding tools and LLMs are making the cost of new interfaces > *extremely > cheap, *so cheap that I am commissioning a complex knowledge repository > for a fraction of the cost and time it would take otherwise. Interface > projects like WikiProject Med's offline medical Wikipedia App, which used > to take several months of highly specialized software development, can now > be spun up in a long weekend with a Claude Code Max subscription. Sage's > tool is a perfect example of this: perfect for a small market of users, > unlikely to be a "headline" Wikimedia tactic for getting in front of users, > because Youtube and AI search interfaces already do this exact thing. > > What is not cheap for all of the other platforms (and is often paid for by > ads), but which we have in abundance, is motivated humans who can > continue curating the knowledge (and more than 25 years of experiments on > facilitating knowledge equity focused gap filling). The questions we need > to address are: > > - Do the curators understand the future of distribution to other > humans we need to be building for across multiple future internet > scenerios? > - Do the curation practices serve diverse forms of access (languages, > geographies, topics) from that distribution? > - Do the curators understand demand and how curation choices affect > distribution to that demand? > > These three questions all implicitly require some kind of training and > education for curators, on matters not directly affecting curation > activity. Our volunteers are motivated, yes, but what motivates is the > curation they enjoy, not necessarily tangential considerations. People > contribute because "I see a typo", "I'm collecting bits of trivia in this > space", "This leaves out a key fact", or "That's just flat wrong", and the > wiki makes them all (relatively) easy to fix. For us, it's "cheap" as in > we've lowered the investment required to participate. Some curators will be > willing to invest additional engagement on big-picture issues, so it may > nevertheless be helpful to offer such training, but there's still > investment cost on both sides and I do not see it moving the needle when > focusing on the competitive landscape. > > > - Can we recruit the next generation of curators who don't "assume" > that the pageview metric is the reason we contribute? > > I question whether that assumption is in fact prevalent. Even in the world > of professional media, those paid to curate or generate content often > resist the implications, whether out of principled beliefs or because they > fear impact to their livelihood. This conversation has emphasized such > metrics because those participating care about reaching a broader audience. > But in terms of what motivates curation at a basic level, once it is > established that there is some audience out there, I don't know that the > order of its magnitude matters all that much. Audience demand results in > more information to curate and more space in which to work, and I think > that motivates equally with reach if not more. People may find it as > satisfying to work on en:Wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, even > though en:Taylor Swift and en:Travis Kelce undoubtedly have higher > pageviews. > > To use the wheat production infographic as another illustration, > personally I care less about the interface behavior than what I could do to > help better curate. Suppose I had information about how much wheat Sudan > produced in 2011 (currently "no data"), or wanted to address the > anachronistic use of present-day national boundaries going back all the way > to 1961? Where would I even start? Otherwise, maybe it increases the visual > appeal of one article a bit, and we could even reproduce that across a > bunch of articles, but we'd also be throwing up massive barriers to > maintenance. > > What we most need is to simplify, to make it easier for volunteers to > steer in the direction we would like them to go. Then they can self-select > according to what meets their interests. I believe the success of Wikidata > so far - "success" in the sense that its potential aligns more with "early > Wikipedia" than "early Wikiversity" - is in large part because it provides > a vast new space for curation, and has been integrated in a way that makes > it easy for those interested to go and participate, while it is > simultaneously easy to ignore for those who are less interested. > > --Michael Snow > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines > at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > Public archives at > https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/ZOHA3G3WMEDAGX6DUPOE7QCHK2HRYNWU/ > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
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