Re: status and problems on sematicweb.org

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-web@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/
>

-- 
Dieter Fensel
Director STI Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Austria
http://www.sti-innsbruck.at/
phone: +43-512-507-6488/5, fax: +43-512-507-9872

Received on Thursday, 12 January 2012 23:12:01 UTC