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Scenario Beschreibung EN
Creating, editing, and extending Wikipedia articles is performed in a browser-based setting using the Mediawiki markup language. Currently, the typical workflow in content creation and editing includes the following steps:
- Open a Wikipedia page in editing mode
- Write/edit article text in markup language
- Actively go to a different page to look for additional resources (e.g., Wiki Commons for license free media files, or digital libraries for references)
- Search in the external sources for relevant resources (manual search), and identify resources to include
- Manually copy and paste the resource or reference into the currently edited Wikipedia page
The envisioned workflow description emerged from several discussions of KBL-AMBL with Wikipedia representatives from Switzerland (Wikimedia foundation, Switzerland) on how to improve the above process for editors.
The EEXCESS Wikitool supports Wikipedia editors in searching, finding and including relevant media objects and scientific references while editing a Wikipedia page. The Wikitool works similar as the current EEXCESS Chrome Browser Extension, but with a reduced set of core functionalities with specific implementations added. The tool can be activated and deacti- vated manually. While editing the Wikitool generates context-sensitive queries automatically (pas- sively in the view of the editor) and searches for relevant content. The search can also be trig- gered actively by the editor. The Wikitool presents (Wikipedia-)external content in a dedicated win- dow, which can be shown or hidden manually. The Wikitool is able to recognize the current domain (wikipedia.org), and the language of the Wikipedia instance (e.g., DE.wikipedia.org, EN.wikipedia.org). In its first version the tool should only access two different types of resources
- the Wikicommons media database
- digital libraries for scientific resources (e.g., Mendeley, ZBW)
This restriction is due to the strict licensing policy of Wikimedia Foundation. Only media files with trusted free-content-sharing licenses are to be included in Wikipedia pages. Found resources can easily be included into the page (either by using one-click or drag and drop). Depending on the type of the resource (media file, scientific resource) the insertion into the text should either be handled as direct inclusion (i.e., the File markup syntax), or as a reference 5. In both cases, the correct usage of the Wiki markup has to be ensured.
From the scenario description above, we derived the following requirements
- The Wikitool should be able to detect whether the current page is a Wikipedia page
- The Wikitool should be able to detect whether the current page is in editing mode
- The Wikitool should be able to detect the language of the current Wikipedia instance (DE or EN
- The Wikitool should be able to derive automatic queries from the currently edited paragraph
- The Wikitool should allow for manual query input
- The Wikitool should query Wikicommons and a set of digital libraries (the latter via the EEXCESS federated recommender)
- The Wikitool should merge the results in one result list and display the list
- The Wikitool should allow to easily integrate resources into the current page
- The Wikitool should include the resources with the appropriate markup for i)references or ii) media files
During discussions with the Wikipedians two further possible extensions of the Wikitool emerged. The first one describes a dedicated query that focuses on media files already included in “articles of similar topics”. The rationale behind this approach is that allready used media files in similar contexts have been preapproved by other editors for being appropriate in that specific context, e.g. in another language, and thus might qualify for being relevant in the actual context as well. The second extension would enable the inclusion of wikicommons-external media files as well. This is scenario however is of more complexity and needs to trigger a dedicated licensing-approval and wikicommons media-import procedure beforehand. Further, the Wikicommons data base will be integrated into the EEXCESS framework and will be accessible through the federated recommender.