Category: 4.4 Wikis and Wikipedia

Wikipedia has long been suffering from its rather raw “wiki markup” editing experience. The reason is that the underlying software is stuck in the mud and any progress is slow and painful. Right now there is some excitement over progress on the “visual editor” of Mediawiki. As you can see in the video below the…

I’m at Wikimania 2013, listening in on the WikiData session. WikiData is the Wikimedia Foundation’s attempt to go beyond prose in Wikipedia pages and provide a reference data source. An obvious problem is that any such data source needs an underlying model of the world, and that sometimes it is not only hard to gain…

The WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 proceedings have been made available online. Please see below for the table of contents, including through-clickable papers. All papers listed can be cited as appearing in the Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (WikiSym + OpenSym 2013). ACM, 2013.   FRONTMATTER FW Abstract Foreword, Table of Contents,…

The English Wikipedia is currently embroiled in a debate on sexism (local copy), because of classifying female American novelists as “American Women Novelists” while leaving male American novelists in the more general category “American Novelists”, suggesting a subordinate role of female novelists. I find this debate regrettable for the apparent sexism but also interesting for…