#Wikipedia - To bot or not to bot

The controversy of bot created articles in Wikipedia is old. The arguments have been similar for a long time. The most famous bot is Rambot; it created stubs for all the places in the United States. This time the "controversy" is about Lsjbot. It created articles on "species" in several Wikipedias. A species is a recognised animal or plant or insect in its nomenclature.

The Wall Street Journal has taken an interest and, Achim Raschka was asked for an opinion and this can be found on his blog. Achim suggests that as a compromise information may be added to Wikidata in this way we can "provide the data to the authors for example when they start an article to choose if they want to use it".

Wikidata has its own problems with bot generated articles. Articles about species are possibly among the most problematic. The biggest problem is that typically Wikidata knows about at least of some items of a list. When this is not considered by the bot operator, it may result in a lot of not very interesting work merging items and deleting duplicates. In addition to this the conventions in Wikidata for "taxons" is quite different. Taxonomy is not static and consequently the hierarchy in Wikidata is inferred and not explicit. This is a major innovation that hides some of the problems of the taxonomy that is in use.

It is quite clear in the opinion of Achim that Wikidata should only be an aid to those people who write Wikipedia articles. The suggestion is made that Wikidata could serve as a source of information for instance for the Red and white giant flying squirrel, a subject he wrote about. Reasonator includes access to the "Concept cloud" tool, it shows all the articles referred to in any of the Wikipedia articles about the Petaurista alborufus.

Achim's opinion is truly Wikipedia centric. Wikipedia articles written by humans is his holy grail. The objective of the Wikimedia foundation however is "to share in the sum of all knowledge".  We have information about subjects like this giant flying squirrel available and, we can share it to the users of the 265 Wikipedias who do not have an article yet.

We can share in the sum of all available knowledge and we should as long as it is our aim to share our knowledge with everyone and not only with potential Wikipedia article writers.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#Sex ratios in #Wikidata

When you consider sex ratios in Wikidata, it is good to appreciate that there is more than just male and female. It means that every human can be associated in one way or other that is appropriate. What is often forgotten is that for many of the humans in Wikidata there is no information about gender.

When Max Klein came back from the Zurich hackathon, he revisited his work on Sex ratios in Wikidata. In his stats you find the ratio for many Wikipedias but I would like to have "none of the above" included as well.

It may give us an insight which Wikipedias provide us with the most gender information for known humans. When the data is available for May 2013 as well, we may learn from what Wikipedia we gained the most information. The number of links has grown but not by as much as the amount of statements in the same period.

Wikidata currently knows about 2,062,461 "humans" 1,544,137 are male and 277,830 are female. We know that many more humans will be identified and thanks to the gender game you can help reduce the number of humans without gender information.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat and #Windows Mobile in the #computerpress

In the last week two new releases became publicly available. The new  "Maverick Meerkat" is good news for all people already using or considering using Ubuntu. Microsoft's latest Windows mobile is of interest to people considering a new mobile phone.

Most Ubuntu users will upgrade to Maverick Meerkat therefore any articles has an immediate impact on the largest installed base of Linux distributions. It has been easy for journalists to learn about it because the pre releases were publicly available.

Microsoft's new product is only available on new phones so either the journalists are quoting the press information or they were given new toys to play with. It is not unreasonable to expect that other incentives were provided to ensure a good impression.

Much of the information we get is on the Internet, so it is "free" and it is advertisement or infomercial that pays the bandwidth, the salaries. It is however the balance that has to be right.

My time is not free, I am disappointed as the balance was off.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#iPad, iDodo and #Android

First there were e-readers, they were closed but cheap and did one thing well. Then there was the iPad it did took over the attention from the e-readers and is a closed, expensive but more capable tool.

Adroid is different, its website talks about "what is new". You are expected to know that it is an operating system for ... eh ... Its logo is available under a CC-by license ...This operating system is available to any manufacturer and Android phones outsell the iPhone.

Understanding the i-thingies is easy because there is little to choose from. There is only one supplier. Choosing for Android is easy but then you still have to choose the hardware that serves your need best.

I have not really been paying attention.. is there already something sizeable running Android that competes with the iPad ?? Who is manufacturing it, who is selling it in my market ? Do I have to wait like Apple has me wait ??

Did I say that it is your choice what you do with your Android, did I say that it is open source, did I say choice.. your choice?
Thanks,
     GerardM

iFad, iPad or iGilette

Only when you live under a rock, you are unaware that Apple started selling in the USA the iPad. As a marketing campaign it is a text book success that is likely to be studied for some time.

For me it is a truly hyped product, with a computer press that is bought and sold on the idea that the iPad will be the saviour of the press industry. The iPad being the vehicle that sells its content.

Apple sells closed systems. It has shown with its iPhone the extend of its control to ensure that only those products that meet Apple's strategy will be available. As the objective is profit, open and free information is not in Apple's interest; there is no margin.

The iPhone has had several iterations without providing language support for languages like Hindi, Malayalam... Given that the iPad is associated with paid for content, this may change. It is not the need of people but the need of industry that will be served.

There are two reasons why I will not buy an iPad; the most relevant is that I prefer to read my books in bath.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Mobile app to read #Wikipedia on the #iPhone

For $ 2,99 you can "Feed your curiosity and easily read and discover Wikipedia articles on your iPhone or iPod touch".. I learned about this from an article on arstechnica. One of the funny things is that an extra application is promised when the software sells more then 10,000 copies within the next five days.. I wonder what the first day was..

The one thing that intrigues me most is where it says: "Articles allows a user to search any of the different language variants of Wikipedia and switch between languages without opening any preferences." When the software shows you the text of articles properly in Malayalam, Bengali, Chinese or Serbian it may be worth it to pay now for functionality that we hope the mobile support provided by the Wikimedia Foundation will provide in the future.
Thanks,
     GerardM

PS I love their advertisement.. the closest we come to promoting the use of Wikipedia on the mobile are the articles on my blog ..

WALS, The World Atlas of Language Structures

In 2005, Oxford University Press published "The World Atlas of Language Structures" it is a 712 page hard-cover book and is available for £425,00. It comes with a CD that allows you to get a visual grasp where languages are spoken. It is filled to the brim with all kinds of information and it is considered an important work for people studying linguistics.

In a joint project several of the Max Planck Gesellschaft Institutes, published WALS online. It provides a rich resource and uses Google maps to indicate where what languages are spoken. The data is on the Internet and in order to be of value in a world where Open Access is increasingly considered to be essential, the data is available under a Creative Commons license.

For Wikipedians, the license will be disappointing; the CC-by-sa-nc does prevent the use of this data. WALS is considered a standard work and there are many references to the ISO-639-3 standard; check out Finnish for an example. However, many of the languages recognised in this Standard are missing, Stellingwerfs stl, Abau aau to name just two. I hope that this will be resolved as it will increase the value of WALS a lot.

Even when the use of this data is limited, there is a lot to learn from WALS. It integrates many of the facts known about many languages, it presents them in maps, and makes the best use of what Google maps has to offer. With this much information available it is fun to see what languages are spoken where. Wals on line is truly of interest and I heartily recommend it to people who share my interest in languages.
Thanks,
GerardM