You were implying that for profit companies are less trustworthy than nonprofit ones, so yeah i was countering it. Not meant to be an ad hominem. We have been grilled before, so I am used to it.
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I’m assuming you don’t speak Mandarin, and this lab was in an English speaking country. So, of course they would speak English.
The numbers show that there are more Mandarin speakers than English speakers, even including second language speakers, but apparently the plural of anecdote is data now.
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Again, you are correct in pure numbers. As for the second language, that is probably skewed because of Cantonese and other Chinese language speakers learning Mandarin.
My point is this: place yourself in any country in the world besides China. Which language would you rather speak (or put another way, which language is likely to make your life easier in this hypothetical country): English or Mandarin?
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That is the correct and only choice though, to achieve the goal … such that these two concepts are inseparable. If the choice is between the original page that is fully up to date or an out of date copy slathered with ads… which one would any reasonable person choose?
The former. I will say it again though, > 98% of our traffic is NOT to the scrapes, it is to non-scrape pages USING the scrapes in the “hover” bubbles/cards. We cannot rank SEO-wise on the scrapes and are not trying to.
Look at this page:
I don’t know where Lake Placid is in New York. The article does not have an links to it. It doesn’t have links to Steven Holcomb, the Olympic Training Center, Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014, etc either. I am too lazy to navigate away from the article to learn more, so I just continue reading. Even if the info is slightly out of date (it won’t be as we perfect our bot), it is easier than navigating away from the page. THAT is why we have the Wikipedia pages
Now assume the article was wiki-ized (like WikiNews (OMG WE ARE COPYING THEM)). The proper nouns and other words would be linked or hover-bubbled so I don’t have to navigate away to learn more info. That is just one aspect that we are trying to fix
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Potentially yes. There are of course economic and moral points of view to the effect that since BB/BBBBS function as pure intermediaries where no goods or services are actually created, that any profits generated are parasitic in nature. Essentially advertising driven ads for either actual content or another layer of advertising driven ads for content.
Of course this is quickly a slippery slope to all kinds of pedantic nonsense so I apologize for even bringing it up.
By body count possibly so but despite the PRC spending money building and advertising for what turned out to be a complete damp squib in the “Confucius Center” programs in the English speaking world, the industry of teaching English to the Chinese shows no signs of slowing down at all.
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Just as an aside, as the previous DTO for Wikimedia, I really hope you folks are using the XML or database dumps for Wikipedia, and not scraping the site! (If not, and you need some hints on that setup, please PM me, I’m happy to provide details and direction).
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I believe we are using the API calls. I personally did not code the scraping part (our CEO Sam did), but I saw bits and pieces of it. Same with Wikidata (which we partially scraped)
We have a VERY beta feature here
https://www.everipedia.com/tools/big_data_scholar/
Which is basically a SQL query with WHERE statements on the infobox key/values. Our idea is to, at least in the future, be able to find things like: All females who were born in Los Angeles who were educated at Columbia and have 2 children.
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But that’s the thing. Going by an option that is a default choice of plurality is actually quite the opposite of inclusion. Sure it is a valid choice if you are just starting out and hardpressed with resources, and something to build upon later, but be careful not to paint yourself into a corner.
Believe me, more languages > more users > more $$$. We have a lot of the infrastructure and tags already in place. On a technical note, we will use Django i18n Internationalization and localization | Django documentation | Django . We had 20 languages active at one point, but the translations were so bad (Google Translate) we took them off. When we can afford professional translations, we will do it. Spanish will probably be the next language because quite a few of our power users are Hispanic / Latino.
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So. Many. New. Accounts.
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Best of luck. It’s a crowded market, one in which you usually go niche or go home. I adore RationalWiki for its snarky tone, I just don’t see a big future in store for YetAnotherGeneralWiki. Then again, orkut was huge in Brazil. Maybe you will tap a hidden niche.
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This I believe, but does that mean you’ll prioritise languages based on potential revenue from users interested in particular language?
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We will probably do Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German initially. I know that is Eurocentric, but it is easier for us to deal with Latin-alphabet languages first because of a few remaining Unicode/UTF8 issues we need to deal with. Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, and Hindi will likely be next because of their large populations.
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I find the use of inclusivity weird here. This project seems to be more inclusive to articles on random things that aren’t of interest to more than a couple people. Which, cool. But a big problem at Wikipedia is that the editors and contributors are often deliberately exclusive to people - women, people of color, LGBT. I’m a PhD biologist, and none of my women friends and colleagues contribute to Wikipedia because they’ve had such negative experiences. This project doesn’t have a code of conduct or diversity statement. Without setting up some parameters on the types of interactions that are welcome, I’m really doubtful this site will be any better to contribute to than Wikipedia.
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Right. We do have a lot of competitors. We really, really didn’t want to be “just another wiki clone”. That’s why we started from scratch and did not use MediaWiki. The site is coded in Django mainly, with a lot of jQuery on the front end.
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Our founding team is 2 Iranian-Americans (one Jewish, one Muslim), me (Italian heritage), and a Swedish national. Our two highest power users are both Latino. The next highest users are Sri Lankan, Palestinean, and Indian. We DO have a woman problem, but not by choice! We need more female and LGBT editors PLEASE!
Also, some of our highest viewed pages are POC and/or women:
https://www.everipedia.com/cardi-b/
https://www.everipedia.com/lisa-boothe/
https://www.everipedia.com/sajad-gharibi/
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The downvoting of citations could lead to brigading and large-scale edit wars, especially if it deletes citations without human moderators being involved in the loop. The BBS software we uses hides posts for a configurable amount of time after 5 flags and alerts the stalwart Orenwolf when a post gets multiple flags. Does Evripedia have plans and systems in place to deal with Misguided Faith Editors? (who may be acting in what they believe is good faith by bending Tue site contents to represent solely their views)
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This is the rub, to me. I don’t donate significant time to any organization that doesn’t have a clearly spelled out harassment policy, nor do I allow my students to use work time to do so. By not having such a policy, you are making the choice not to have editors from vulnerable populations. There’s an example of a conference anti-harrassment policy that I’ve seen adapted to open source software projects, hackathons, people’s personal labs, etc here:
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Jimmy Wales wasn’t “founder of Wikipedia”, and do you know about things like the “nofollow” exemption for wikilinks to sites like Wikia, which enabled Jimmy to profit off of privileged page ranking for Wikia, based on Wikipedia’s site strength and reputation? Also, Jimmy opined that a Klingon-language Wikipedia was inappropriate for the Wikimedia Foundation, and so called for its shut-down, then guess what language Wikia site emerged a few days later? Oren, you sound like a very nice person, but I don’t think you know just how self-interested is the person you’re using as an example.
