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Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

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Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#61

Post by Hello71 »

downandout wrote: post #60

They could have made this and many other advances years ago, had they adopted contextual advertising. I don't think anyone would argue that the advertiser-financed services provided by Google are a bad thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements#Argum...

Insignificant revenue. The click-through rate might very well be so low that only a small amount of revenue would be brought in by the ads. It would not be worth barraging thousands of readers with ads for only a few pennies of revenue.

Ads cheapen the encyclopedia. By their very nature, ads are biased content intended to influence people. They are thus diametrically opposed to the goals of a neutral encyclopedia intended to inform people. They would cheapen the encyclopedia in the eyes of many readers, as evidenced by the numerous anti-ad comments received during every donation drive.

Contributors may leave. Many contributors vigorously oppose ads (see the forking of the Spanish Wikipedia, 1, 2, 3, 4), and in 2009 the Wikimedia Foundation promised to keep "Wikipedia. Ad-free forever." Since about 2002, Jimbo Wales has repeatedly stated that he opposes all advertising on Wikipedia as well. Based on these statements, some editors have probably contributed with the understanding that their content would not be diluted with ads. Changing the long-standing no-ads policy now could reasonably be perceived as a bait and switch tactic. Numerous contributors are likely to leave as a result and new ones are less likely to start. Contributor goodwill is Wikipedia's main asset and should not be gambled with.

Annoying and distracting. Readers come to us for encyclopedic information, not for ads. Ads have to be processed by the brain (if only subconsciously) and therefore distract and annoy. "The free encyclopedia" also means: free from distractions and annoyances.

Privacy violation. If an ad consolidator such as Google AdSense is used, the privacy of our readers is compromised. The consolidator will invariably learn which Wikipedia articles a given IP address reads or searches for; they can then correlate that information with other data they may have about that IP address (e.g. Gmail account).

et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#62

Post by downandout »

Hello71 wrote: post #61
downandout wrote: post #60

They could have made this and many other advances years ago, had they adopted contextual advertising. I don't think anyone would argue that the advertiser-financed services provided by Google are a bad thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements#Argum... Insignificant revenue. The click-through rate might very well be so low that only a small amount of revenue would be brought in by the ads. It would not be worth barraging thousands of readers with ads for only a few pennies of revenue. Ads cheapen the encyclopedia. By their very nature, ads are biased content intended to influence people. They are thus…

Wrong.

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#63

Post by maxerickson »

samegreatsleeve wrote: post #51
cpeterso wrote: post #50

I'm surprised no one (AFAICT) has attempted a family tree of all humans. There is an obvious demand for this information because many commercial services exist. Users are paying to upload their personal genealogical data to proprietary for-profit silos. Yet this data would be much more productive in an open system with user data from all services. You could seed the database with famous people's family trees from Wik…

The genealogists are always happy to share their data. It's part of the culture. There's no open source genealogy programmers because the young nerds that do open source dont care about genealogy.

http://gramps-project.org/

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~ddr/GeneWeb/en/

There are others. I guess there aren't many, but there are some.

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#64

Post by yuvipanda »

themgt wrote: post #15

Wikidata is interesting ... it seems to be a normal MediaWiki install with the custom-developed "WikiBase" extension: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikibase It'd be nice if the WikiMedia projects had a proper GitHub presence - it's hard to get a sense how plausible a self-hosted version of this is.

There's gerrit.wikimedia.org, and it is mirrored to github.com/wikimedia. Not sure how you can get a sense of how plausible a self hosted veresion of this is from that though :) The mediawiki.org page you linked is the best resource for that.

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#65

Post by sp332 »

sp332 wrote: post #56
nostromo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disambiguation could be challenging. (Does "The Sun" link to our closest star or the tabloid in the UK.) It would be a fun project to try and determine the correct link based on the context.

This reminds me of an article I read about IBM's Watson. As a demo in front of a lot of people, a researcher was going through a stack of journals and feeding in data about anthrax. Most of the data was about animals, but the researcher was asking Watson to extrapolate possible effects on people. Watson responded "I assume by people you mean humans, and not People magazine." Edit: found the link (PDF) http://www.cs.m…

Late edit: funny that I remembered this being Watson when it's actually Cyc, a longtime rival of the Watson project.

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#66

Post by derleth »

samegreatsleeve wrote: post #53
derleth wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The articles that get deleted by the little notability hitlers are contributions with no cost incurred by anyone, save the trivial storage space. Godwin, and wrong on the merits, as well. The stuff that gets deleted is the stuff that can't be verified, which means there's no way to fact-check it. It isn't about storage space or clutter: It's about not having stuff in there that can't be verified.

It's inaccurate to say that wikipedia is fact checked or verified. The existence of a citation does not imply the existence of a fact check or a verification, or verifiability. Even when citations are high quality, the info they're supporting is still usually unverifiable due to wikipedia's disconnection from the community of experts. Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest plagiarist / content farm on the Interne…

Absolutely none of this is true and reflects your bias more than anything else. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Wikipedia would know it to be false. Your lack of knowledge is apparent and your opinions are of no value.

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#67

Post by theon144 »

downandout wrote: post #62
Hello71 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements#Argum... Insignificant revenue. The click-through rate might very well be so low that only a small amount of revenue would be brought in by the ads. It would not be worth barraging thousands of readers with ads for only a few pennies of revenue. Ads cheapen the encyclopedia. By their very nature, ads are biased content intended to influence people. They are thus…

Wrong.

Your arguments are very persuasive, although they could use a bit elaboration.

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#68

Post by downandout »

theon144 wrote: post #67
downandout wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong.

Your arguments are very persuasive, although they could use a bit elaboration.

He copied and pasted from a Wikipedia page, so I spent as much time crafting my response as he did. More importantly, those arguments are so blatantly wrong on their surface that I don't believe they justify more than a one word response.

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#69

Post by tezza »

eksith wrote: post #59

Well, this discussion is quickly moving toward the shortcomings of Wikipedia. There's plenty of opinion of the deletion-happy (if that's the operative term) policy of the admins, especially as it pertains to notability, and I think this is a common complaint : http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/rants/wikipedia-delete.ht... I do something that may seem like trying to fix a leaky dam with chewing gum, but every time I…

If you're happy relying on a 3rd party site... I recommend archive.is for keeping records of pages.

http://archive.is/EOZqQ - The Imaginary Theatre ( post deletion obviously :( )

Re: Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository

#70

Post by eru »

helium wrote: post #35
mindcrime wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just make the link to the disambiguation page, if there is one? Otherwise, make it a special link that doesn't go anywhere directly, but uses some javascript/CSS to raise a dialog when clicked, that gives you the different choices?

I don't think it would be a good idea if wikipedia required that you to run Javascript to navigate the site, and it would make for pretty bad SEO.

Wikipedia doesn't need to care to much about SEO.
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