Category: 4. Society-at-large
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Design and Implementation of the Sweble Wikitext Parser: Unlocking the Structured Data of Wikipedia [WikiSym 2011]
Abstract: The heart of each wiki, including Wikipedia, is its content. Most machine processing starts and ends with this content. At present, such processing is limited, because most wiki engines today cannot provide a complete and precise representation of the wiki’s content. They can only generate HTML. The main reason is the lack of well-defined…
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WOM: An Object Model for Wikitext [Technical Report]
Abstract: Wikipedia is a rich encyclopedia that is not only of great use to its contributors and readers but also to researchers and providers of third party software around Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia’s content is only available as Wikitext, the markup language in which articles on Wikipedia are written, and whoever needs to access the content…
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The Parser That Cracked The MediaWiki Code
I am happy to announce that we finally open sourced the Sweble Wikitext parser. You can find the announcement on my research group’s blog or directly on the Sweble project site. This is the work of Hannes Dohrn, my first Ph.D. student, who I hired in 2009 to implement a Wikitext parser. So what about…
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Revamping German Copyright Law #EIDG
The German Enquete commission “Internet and Digital Society” is a multilateral commission instituted by the German parliament to discuss and make recommendations on, well, Internet and digital society. I’m a member of an expert advisory council for one of the parties involved in the commission. I received the following catalog of questions and thought I’d…
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My Position on Privacy (Seven Things About Me)
Stormy Peters recently tagged me to post seven items about my life. This is a “viral” pyramid scheme; you are supposed to write these seven items and then tag seven other people to do the same. It is not the first time I got such a request; I also got tagged on Facebook to post…
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Learning from Wikipedia: Open Collaboration within Corporations
Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that has taken the Internet by storm. It is written and administered solely by volunteers. How exactly did this come about and how does it work? Can it keep working? And maybe more importantly, can you transfer its practices to the workplace to achieve similar levels of dedication and…