Dear Dieter,
thanks a lot for your offer. This is clearly something where STI
International would be an ideal partner to join forces with. I will come
back to you with more concrete proposals. But at first I want to make
sure that we have taken all technical measures to minimize the remaining
manual effort.
Regards,
Markus
On 12/01/12 23:11, Dieter Fensel wrote:
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 semantic-...@w3.org, 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/
