Das Mädchen Doch

Sie sagten ihrer Mutter
Kinder werde sie nie haben
Und als sie geboren wurde
Nannte ihre Mutter sie
Doch

Sie sagten sie sei schwach
Und klein und krank
Und dass sie nicht
Lange zu leben habe
Doch

Ihre Mutter hoffte
Das sie in einer Welt aufwuchs
In der alle gleich behandelt wurden
Aber leider
Doch

Sie sagten Mathe und Autos
Seien nichts für Mädchen
Dass sie sich interessiert
Für Puppen und für Kleidung
Doch

Sie sagten die Welt
Ist wie sie ist
Und sie zu ändern
Sei nichts für kleine kranke Mädchen
Doch

Sie sagten gut dass Du darüber sprachst
Wir sollten darüber nachdenken
Lass uns jetzt darüber debattieren
Und wir (nicht Du) entscheiden dann
Doch

Sie sagten man kann nicht alles haben
Man muss sich entscheiden
Aber so selbstsüchtig
Ich meine, keine Kinder zu wollen
Doch

Sie sagten sie sei unanständig
So ein Leben sei nicht richtig
Benannten sie mit unanständigen Worten
Was sie sich denn erlaube
Doch

Sie sagten das geht doch nicht
So ein Leben sei kein Leben
Das ist jetzt schon sehr anders
Das ist nicht einfach nur Neid
Doch

Sie sagten wir sind halt nicht so
Und wollen auch nicht so sein
Wir sind glücklich wie wir sind
Und deswegen darfst du glücklich nicht sein
Doch

Das Stöckchen behalte ich

So. Ich fange das nächste Stöckchen auf, von Buddy. Also los.

Fünf Dinge, die ich nicht habe, aber gerne hätte

1. Weltfrieden.
2. Das Semantic Web.
3. Einen Roman. Selbstgeschrieben, fertig, und mit Verleger. Und richtig gut.
4. Ein Direktes Neuronales Interface zur Matrix. Ich meine zum Web.
5. Die Eine Richtige.
6. Sechs Richtige.
7. Die Fähigkeit bis Fünf zu zählen.

Die Reihenfolge enspricht nicht der Relevanz.

Fünf Dinge, die ich habe, aber lieber nicht hätte

1. Keine Ahnung.
2. Eine schlecht gewartete Website.
3. Zu wenig Zeit.
4. Mir wird schlecht, wenn ich Gurken esse.
5. Ein paar Kilogramm.

Fünf Dinge, die ich nicht habe, aber auch nicht haben möchte

1. Allzuviel gesunder Menschenverstand.
2. Verzweiflung.
3. Langeweile.
4. Geldsorgen.
5. Die Falsche.

Fünf Dinge, die ich habe und aus keinem Grund der Welt missen möchte

1. Schwesterchen.
2. Freunde.
3. Meine Doktorandenstelle am AIFB.
4. Optimismus. Eine Menge.
5. Musik.

Fünf Menschen, die dies noch nicht beantwortet haben, von denen ich mir das aber wünsche

1. Der Papst.
2. Die Bundeskanzlerin. In ihrem nächsten Podcast.
3. John Lennon.
4. Lisa Simpson.
5. Der unbekannte Soldat.

Das Vermächtnis der Tempelritter

aus der Reihe Filme in 50 Worten

Es gibt keinen Film der besser geeignet ist als dieser, um die Wartezeit auf Indiana Jones 4 zu verkürzen. Ein sehr flotter Film, überraschend intelligenter Plot, annehmbar recherchierter Hintergrund (na ja, ein paar Fehler könnte man natürlich bemäkeln, aber darüber sehe ich hinweg), äußerst witzige Sprüche - er nimmt sich niemals zu ernst, doch vermeidet es auch, albern zu werden, kurz: gute Action, anschauen. Indy hat mindestens so gut zu werden!

Übrigens, meine Mitkinogänger bloggen, wie ich sehe jetzt auch selbst ganz fleißig ihre Meinung zu den angeschauten Filmen - lest Schwesterchens Blogeintrag zum Vermächtnis der Tempelritter und Buddys Blogeintrag zu Alles auf Zucker, von gestern.

Das letzte Einhorn

Wow, was habe ich gestern, nur durch Zufall entdeckt? Als ich mal wieder auf IMDb nach etwas suchte, schlug ich kurz nach, in wie vielen Filmen Christopher Lee schon mitspielte, und dann entdeckte ich die Ankündigung seines 223. Films.

Es gibt wahrscheinlich für jeden einen Film, der so etwas wie eine heilige Kindheitserinnerung ist. Für mich war es der erste Film, den ich überhaupt im Kino gesehen habe: Das letzte Einhorn.

Und - angekündigt für Weihnachten 2004 - kommt die Realverfilmung des letzten Einhorns ins Kino!

Christopher Lee bleibt uns auch nächstes Weihnachten mit einem Fantasyspektakel erhalten (nach drei Jahren Herr der Ringe) und zwar als König Haggard, den er auch schon im Zeichentrickfilm vor über zwei Jahrzehnten sprach. Angela Lansbury - bekannt aus "Mord ist ihr Hobby" - spielt Mamma Fortuna, welche sie auch damals gesprochen hat, und Mia Farrow, die damals Amalthea, also das Einhorn, sprach, spielt die gute Molly. Prinz Lir und Amalthea selber sind noch nicht gecastet, für Prinz Lir schwirrt die Gerüchteküche für Heath Ledger, unseren Ritter aus Leidenschaft, für Amalthea wird jede Dame von Natalie Portman über Uma Thurman bis Cate Blanchett genannt - und keine Infos von offizieller Seite.

Die Musik von America klingt uns wohl immer noch in den Ohren, für die Neuverfilmung wird jedoch u.a. Adiemus für Musik sorgen! Und auf der offiziellen Website des Films gibt es noch viel mehr Material, unter anderem auch das komplette Skript des kommenden Films!

Was garantiert uns einen guten Film? Christopher Lee setzt sich sehr für eine gute Umsetzung ein, und der Autor der Buchvorlage selbst - Peter Beagle - hat das Skript beigesteuert. Wow! Nachdem dieses Jahr der Herr der Ringe Teil III - Die Rückkehr des Königs wohl das bis dahin erfolgreichste Fantasyepos im Kino abschließen wird, haben wir Freunde der Zauberei nächstes Jahr wieder einen zauberhaften Film zu erwarten! Yippee!!!

Außerdem wurde die Nodix-Titelseite wieder ein wenig verkürzt, und die Meldungen von Februar bis April ins Archiv geschoben.

Deep kick

Mark Stoneward accepted the invitation immediately. Then it took two weeks for his lawyers at the Football Association to check the contracts and non-disclosure agreements prepared by the AI research company. Stoneward arrived at the glass and steel building in London downtown. He signed in at a fully automated kiosk, and was then accompanied by a friendly security guard to the office of the CEO.

Denise Mirza and Stoneward had met at social events, but never had time to talk for a longer time. “Congratulations on the results of the World Cup!” Stoneward nodded, “Thank you.”

“You have performed better than most of our models have predicted. This was particularly due to your willingness to make strategic choices, where other associations would simply have told their players to do their best. I am very impressed.” She looked at Stoneward, trying to read his face.

Stoneward’s face didn’t move. He didn’t want to give away how much was planned, how much was luck. He knew these things travel fast, and every little bit he could keep secret gave his team an edge. Mirza smiled. She recognised that poker face. “We know how to develop a computer system that could help you with even better strategic decisions.”

Stoneward tried to keep his face unmoved, but his body turned to Mirza and his arms opened a bit wider. Mirza knew that he was interested.

“If our models are correct, we can develop an Artificial Intelligence that could help you discuss your plans, help you with making the right strategic decisions, and play through different scenarios. Such AIs are already used in board rooms, in medicine, to create new recipes for top restaurants, or training chess players.”

“What about the other teams?”

“Well, we were hoping to keep this exclusive for two or four years, to test and refine the methodology. We are not in a hurry. Our models give us an overwhelming probability to win both the European Championship and the World Cup in case you follow our advice.”

“Overwhelming probability?”

“About 96%.”

“For the European Championship?”

“No. To win both.”

Stoneward gasped. “That is… hard to believe.”

The CEO laughed. “It is good that you are sceptical. I also doubted these probabilities, but I had two teams double-check.”

“What is that advice?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know yet. We need to develop the AI first. But I wanted to be sure you are actually interested before we invest in it.”

“You already know how effective the system will be without even having developed it yet?”

She smiled. “Our own decision process is being guided by a similar AI. There are so many things we could be doing. So many possible things to work on and revolutionise. We have to decide how to spend our resources and our time wisely.”

“And you’d rather spend your time on football than on… I don’t know, healing cancer or making a product that makes tons of money?”

“Healing cancer is difficult and will take a long time. Regarding money… the biggest impediment to speeding up the impact of our work is currently not a lack of resources, but a lack of public and political goodwill. People are worried about what our technology can do, and parliament and the European Union are eager to throw more and more regulations at us. What we need is something that will make every voter in England fall in love with us. That will open up the room for us to move more freely.”

Stoneward smiled. “Winning the World Cup.”

She smiled. “Winning the World Cup.”

---

Three months later…

“So, how will this work? Do I, uhm, type something in a computer, or do we have to run some program and I enter possible players we are considering to select?”

Mirza laughed. “No, nothing that primitive. The AI already knows all of your players. In fact, it knows all professional players in the world. It has watched and analyzed every second of TV screening of any game around the world, every relevant online video, and everything written in local newspapers.”

Stoneward nodded. That sounded promising.

“Here comes a little complication, though. We have a protocol for using our AIs. The protocols are overcautious. Our AIs are still far away from human intelligence, but our Ethics and Safety boards insisted on implementing these protocols whenever we use some of the near-human intelligence systems. It is completely overblown, but we are basically preparing ourselves for the time we have actually intelligent systems, maybe even superhuman intelligent systems.”

“I am afraid I don’t understand.”

“Basically, instead of talking to the AI directly, we talk with them through an operator, or medium.”

“Talk to them? You simply talk with the AI? Like with Siri?”

Mirza scoffed. “Siri is just a set of hard coded scripts and triggers.”

Stoneward didn’t seem impressed by the rant.

“The medium talks with the AI, tries its best to understand it, and then relays the AI’s advice to us. The protocol is strict about not letting the AI interact with decision makers directly.”

“Why?”

“Ah, as said, it is just being overly cautious. The protocol is in place in case we ever develop a superhuman intelligence, in which case we want to ensure that the AI doesn’t have too much influence on actual decision makers. The fear is that a superhuman AI could possibly unduly influence the decision maker. But with the medium in between, we have a filter, a normal intelligence, so it won’t be able to invert the relationship between adviser and decision maker.”

Stoneward blinked. “Pardon me, but I didn’t entirely follow what you — ”

“It’s just a Science Fiction scenario, but in case the AI tries to gain control, the fear is that a superhuman intelligence could basically turn you into a mindless muppet. By putting a medium in between, well, even if the medium becomes enslaved, the medium can only use their own intelligence against you. And that will fail.”

The director took a sip of water, and was pondering what he just heard for a few moments. Denise Mirza was burning with frustration. Sometimes she forgets how it is to deal with people this slow. And this guy had more balls banged against his skull than is healthy, which isn’t expected to speed his brain up. After what felt like half an eternity, he nodded.

“Are you ready for me to call the medium in?”

“Yes.”

She tapped her phone.

“Wait, does this mean that these mediums are slaves to your AI?”

She rolled her eyes. “Let us not discuss this in front of the medium, but I can assure you that our systems have not yet reached the level to convince a four year old to give up a lollipop, never mind a grown up person to do anything. We can discuss this more afterwards. Oh, there he is!”

Stoneward looked up surprised.

It was an old acquaintance, Nigel Ramsay. Ramsay used to manage some smaller teams in Lancashire, where Stoneward grew up. Ramsay was more known for his passion than for his talents.

“I am surprised to see you here”

The medium smiled. “It was a great offer, and when I learned what we are aiming for, I was positively thrilled. If this works we are going to make history!”

They sat down. “So, what does the system recommend?”

“Well, it recommends to increase the pressure on the government for a second referendum on Brexit.”

Stoneward stared at Ramsay, stunned. “Pardon me?”

“It is quite clear that the Prime Minister is intentionally sabotaging any reasonable solution for Brexit, but is too afraid to yet call a second referendum. She has been a double agent for the remainers the whole time. Once it is clear how much of a disaster leaving the European Union would be, we should call for a second referendum, reversing the result of the first.”

“I… I am not sure I follow… I thought we are talking football?”

“Oh, but yes! We most certainly are. Being part of an invigorated European Union after Brexit gets cancelled, we should strongly support a stronger Union, even the founding of a proper state.”

Stoneward looked at Ramsay with exasperation. Mirza motioned with her hands, asking for patience.

“Then, when the national football associations merge, this will pave the way for a single, unified European team.”

“The associations… merge?”

“Yes, an EU-wide all stars team. Just imagine that. Also, most of the serious competition would already be wiped out. No German team, no French team, just one European team and — “

“This is ridiculous! Reversing Brexit? Just to get a single European team? Even if we did, a unified European team might kill any interest in international football.”

“Yeah, that is likely true, but our winning chances would go through the roof!”

“But even then, 96% winning chances?”

“Oh, yeah, I asked the same. So, that’s not all. We also need to cause a war between Argentina and Brazil, in order to get them disqualified. There are a number of ways to get to this — ”

“Stop! Stop right there.” Stoneward looked shocked, his hands raised like a goalie waiting for the penalty kick. “Look, this is ridiculous. We will not stop Brexit or cause a war between two countries just to win a game.”

The medium looked at Stoneward in surprise. “To ‘just’ win a game?” His eyes wandered to Mirza in support. “I thought this was the sole reason for our existence. What does he mean, ‘just’ win a game? He is a bloody director of the FA, and he doesn’t care to win?”

“Maybe we should listen to some of the other suggestions?”, the CEO asked, trying to soothe the tension in the room.

Stoneward was visibly agitated, but after a few moments, he nodded. “Please continue.”

“So even if we don’t merge the European associations due to Brexit, we should at least merge the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish associations in — ”

“No, no, NO! Enough of this association merging nonsense. What else do you have?”

“Well, without mergers, and wars, we’re down to 44% probability to win both the European and World Cup within the next twenty years.” The medium sounded defeated.

“That’s OK, I’ll take that. Tell me more.” Stoneward has known that the probabilities given before were too good to be true. It was still a disappointment.

“England has some of the best schools in the world. We should use this asset to lure young talent to England, offer them scholarships in Oxford, in Cambridge.”

“But they wouldn’t be English? They can’t play for England.”

“We would need to make the path to citizenship easier for them, immigration laws should be more integrative for top talent. We need to give them the opportunity to become subjects of the Queen before they play their first international. And then offer them to play for England. There is so much talent out there, and if we can get them while they’re young, we could prep up our squad in just a few years.”

“Scholarships for Oxford? How much would that even cost?”

“20, 25 thousand per year and student? We can pay a hundred scholarships and it wouldn’t even show up in our budget.”

“We are cutting budgets left and right!”

“Since we’re not stopping Brexit, why not dip into those 350 million pounds per week that we will save.”

“That was a lie!”

“I was joking.”

“Well, the scholarship thing wasn’t bad. What else is on the table?”

“One idea was to hack the video stream and bribe the referee, and then we can safely gaslight everyone.”

“Next idea.”

“We could poison the other teams.”

“Just stop it.”

“Or give them substances that would mess up their drug tests.”

“Why not getting FIFA to change the rules so we always win?”

“Oh, we considered it, but given the existing corruption inside FIFA it seems that would be difficult to outbid.”

Stonward sighed. “Now I was joking.”

“One suggestion is to create a permanent national team, and have them play in the national league. So they would be constantly competing, playing with each other, be better used to each other. A proper team.”

“How would we even pay for the players?”

“It would be an honor to play for the national team. Also, it could be a new rule to require the best players to play in the national team.”

“I think we are done here. These suggestions were… rather interesting. But I think they were mostly unactionable.” He started standing up.

Mirza looked desperately from one to the other. This meeting did not go as she had intended. “I think we can acknowledge the breadth of the creative proposals that have been on the table today, and enjoy a tea before you leave?”, she said, forcing a smile.

Stoneward nodded politely. “We sure can appreciate the creativity.”

“Now imagine this creativity turned into strategies in the pitch. Tactical moves. Variations to set pieces.”, the medium started, his voice slightly shifting.

“Yes, well, that would certainly be more interesting than most of the suggestions so far.”

“Wouldn’t it? And not only that, but if we could talk to the players. If we could expand their own creativity. Their own willpower. Their focus. Their energy to power through, not to give up.”

“If you’re suggesting to give them drugs, I am out.”

Ramsay laughed. “No, not drugs. But a helmet that emits electromagnetic waves and allows the brain muscles to work in more interesting ways.”

Stoneward looked over to the CEO. “Is that a possibility?”

Mirza looked uncomfortable, but tried to hide it. “Yes, yes, it is. We had tested it a few times, and the results were quite astonishing. It is just not what I would have expected as a proposal.”

“Why? Anything wrong with that?”

“Well, we use it for our top engineers, to help them focus when developing and designing solutions. The results are nothing short of marvelous. It is just, I didn’t think football would benefit that much from improved focus.”

Stoneward chuckled, as he sat down again. “Yes, many people underestimate the role of a creative mind in the game. I think I would now like a tea.” He looked to Ramsay. “Tell me more.”

The medium smiled. The system will be satisfied with the outcome.

(Originally published July 28, 2018 on Medium)

Denny macht Milchreis

Heute wollte ich Milchreis kochen. Wie geht das?

Zuerst geht man zu Leo und findet heraus, dass Milchreis auf Englisch rice pudding heißt. Es gibt nämlich keine deutsche Wikipedia-Seite zu Milchreis! Wahrscheinlich den deutschen Wikipedianern nicht enzyklopädisch genug. Mit rice pudding jedenfalls können wir sowohl auf den englischen Wikipediaartikel zu rice pudding zugreifen, als auch in Google Base nach rice pudding suchen. Hmm, die ersten Hits sind nur Fertiggerichte. Heute ist Feiertag - wieso weiß das dämliche Ding nicht, dass ich nicht einkaufen kann?

Also klicke ich auf recipes, um die Suche einzuschränken. Mist, war falsch, ich kriege vor allem Rezeptbücher. Zurück. Auf recipe klicken. Wieder rice pudding eingeben (dass sich das Ding das nicht merken konnte!), und neues Glück. Ja, das Ergebnis sieht gut aus. 45 Milchreisrezepte. Verdammt, die Milch ist übergekocht.

Herdplatte wechseln. Die eine abkühlen lassen. Mit einem Klick kann ich die Suche auf die recipe of the day verkürzen, der Rest will anscheinend nur was verkaufen. Doch die sind nicht weiter kategorisierbar. Doof. Hätte gerne nach Zutaten oder Kalorien weiter verfeinert. Na ja, Google Base ist nicht das Semantic Web, sondern nur eine erste UI Studie dorthin, oder?

Kippe den Reis in die kochende Milch. Überlege mir, dass mir das Semantic Web hier nur hätte helfen können, wenn ich das Haus auch mit Ubiquitous Computing oder Ambient Intelligence ausgestattet hätte. Genug komische Begriffe in die Gegend geworfen.

Der Milchreis klumpt. Suche in Google nach milchreis verklumpt. Dritter Hit sagt (aus einem Gaming-Forum) : "Och Mist, jetzt ist mein Milchreis verklumpt, hätte ich doch schneller rühren müssen!" Rühren! Ich rühre. Sehe derweil einen weiteren Hit: Den Milchreis sollte man nach dem Kochen abspülen und mit Milch weiter kochen. Verflixt! Reis zuerst kochen. Das hat mir meine Mama auch schon gesagt, letztes Mal. Schon wieder vergessen. Aber in den amerikanischen Rezepten auf Google Base wurde das nicht erwähnt.

Der ertse Hit führt übrigens auf Frag Mutti - Das Nachschlagewerk (nicht nur) für Junggesellen. Sachen gibt's. Dort gibt es ein hünsches T-Shirt: Milchreis schmeckt hervorragend, wenn man es kurz vor dem Verzehr durch ein saftiges Steak ersetzt. Oh, bei Frag Mutti im Milchreisrezept heißt es auch, den Reis nicht vorher aufkochen. Anscheinend gibt es mehrere Varianten (und beide von Mama? Ich bin verwirrt). Außerdem soll man den Milchreis für ein bis zwei Stunden ins Bett mitnehmen. Spart Energie. Das hätte meine Mama nie gesagt! Wir sind ja schließlich katholisch.

Und jetzt wisst ihr, warum man mich üblicherweise nicht in die Nähe einer Küche lässt.

Der Manchurian Kandidat

aus der Reihe Filme in 50 Worten, heute mal ein Film, der schon läuft

Ein hochkomplizierter Plan soll sicherstellen, dass der mächtigste Mensch der Welt, der nächste Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten, eine willenlose Marionette für einen weltweit agierenden Superkonzern wird. Ein Einzelner - wie immer von Denzel Washington dargestellt - beginnt die Wahrheit zu erahnen und stellt sich gegen die Verschwörung, doch es glaubt ihm Niemand...

Warum auch? Der in den Film ausgeübte Plan ist viel zu kompliziert, kann an viel zu vielen Stellen scheitern, als dass es auch nur ein halbwegs intelligenter Mensch wirklich angehen würde. Die Ziele, die Manchurian erreichen möchte, könnten so viel leichter erreicht werden, mit weit weniger Risiken. Ein recht spannender Thriller, mit einigen sehr netten Überraschungen, ein gutgemachter Film - aber die Grundidee des Plots ist hanebüchend.

Der Name Zdenko

Heute sah ich dass der Artikel Zdenko - mein eigentlicher Name - auf der Englischen Wikipedia verändert wurde. Jemand hatte die Bedeutung des Namens von dem, was ich für richtig hielt (slawische Form von Sidonius) zu etwas was ich nie zuvor gehört habe (Koseform von Zdeslav) verändert, aber nicht die Quelle angepasst. Ich dachte, das wird eine schnelle Korrektur, habe aber dennoch in die Quelle geschaut - und, schau an, die Quelle sagte weder das eine noch das andere, sondern behauptete der Name stammt von dem slawischen Wort zidati, bauen, errichten.

Das führte mich zu einer zweitstündigen Odyssee durch verschiedene Quellen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, wo ich Belege für alle drei Bedeutungen finden konnte - außerdem Quellen, die behaupteten, dass der Name von dem Slawischen Wort zdenac, Brunnen, abgeleitet ist, dass auch der Name Sidney von Sidonius stamme, und eine Hessische Quelle die vehement darüber schimpfte, dass doch Zdenko und Sidonius nichts miteinander zu tun haben (auch die Slowenische Wikipedia sagt, dass die Namen Zdenko und Sidonius zwar einen gemeinsamen Namenstag haben, aber nicht der gleiche Name sind). Dafür aber führt die gleiche Quelle aus, dass der im Osthessischen gebrauchte Name Denje wohl von Zdenka kommt (so nah an Denny!)

Denje gefällt mir als Name.

Kurzgesagt: wenn Du denkst, Etymologie sei kompliziert, sei gewarnt: Anthroponomastik ist deutlich schlimmer!

Der Papst ist tot, Hurra?

Die Umfrage Perspektive Deutschland, die ich ansonsten eigentlich nur empfehlen kann, weil die Fragen echt in die Tiefe gehen und die daraus generierten Reports durchaus inhaltlich bemerkenswert sind, hat mich bei der derzeit laufenden Umfrage doch irgendwie überrascht:

Frage: Wie haben die Ereignisse der letzten zwölf Monate, z.B. der Tod von Papst Johannes Paul II., ihre Meinung gegenüber der katholischen Kirche beeinflusst?

Antwortmöglichkeiten: Stark verbessert - verbessert - nicht verändert - verschlechtert - stark verschlechtert - weiß nicht

Sonst denken die von der Umfrage aber durchaus etwas nach.

Der am schnellsten gebrochene Vorsatz

1. Keine Vorsätze haben.

Schneller als den kann man keinen Vorsatz brechen.

Der neue Pythonblogger

Wow, es funktioniert! Jetzt kann ich auch bloggen, wenn ich nicht zu Hause bin -- was gerade in den letzten Wochen allzu häufig der Fall war. Dadurch sollte diese Seite endlich wieder ein wenig aufleben, ich hoffe sehr, dass es klappt.

Das Problem war ja, dass dies ein sehr einfacher Webspace ist, und darin keine Scripte erlaubt sind. Also besteht die ganze Seite aus statischen HTML-Seiten. Es gibt keine Webschnittstelle, wie es der normale Blogger gewohnt ist, wo er einfach von überall aus seinen Eintrag machen kann.
Jetzt also habe ich einen Weg erstellt, dies zu umgehen. Der Nodix-Blogger ist ein Python-Skript, dass zunächst den derzeitigen Stand von der Website bezieht, dann den neuen Eintrag aufnimmt, die Seiten generiert und dann alles hochlädt.
Python wird es auf jeder Linux- und Mac-Kiste geben, lediglich bei Windows ist das noch nicht so verbreitet. Vielleicht mach ich ja noch ein Windows-Executable daraus, dann kann ich es wirklich von überall nutzen.

Ich weiß nicht, wie verbreitet dieses Problem ist: sollten sich noch drei Leute per Mail bei mir melden, dass sie dieses Werkzeug auch gerne hätten, werde ich es auch veröffentlichen.

Also jetzt: bis bald wieder!

Dick werden...

Was las mir Schwesterchen schönes vor? (ohne jedoch eine Quelle anzugeben)

"Dick wird man nicht von dem, was man Heiligabend bis Neujahr isst, sondern von dem, was man Neujahr bis Heiligabend isst"

Wahr gesprochen!

Die Aktion 10000 ist beendet!

Danke, danke, für den Applaus! Ihr seid wirklich fantastisch! Mehr als 4 Monate vor dem eigentlich angepeilten Termin wurde das angestrengte Ziel von 10000 Hits erreicht! Vielen, vielen Dank, ich habe es selber am Anfang mehr denn stark bezweifelt. Ihr seid fantastisch!

Und wie danke ich es? Mit Aktionslosigkeit! Ich bin nunmal ein böser Mensch. Als Erklärung kann ich nur wiederholt darauf hinweisen, dass meine Studienarbeit meine Zeit fordert - aber, in genau 10 Tagen ist Abgabe, dann ist auch dieses geschafft.

Dafür folgendes Versprechen: von nun an versuche ich mindestens drei Mal die Woche hier und an dieser Stelle Euch mit Kommentaren zu langweilen. Keine Ahnung wozu, das halte ich mir offen - je nachdem, worauf ich gerade Lust habe. Meistens nichts Sinnvolles, aber, so hoffe ich, zumindest ab und an Interessantes oder Unterhaltendes. Und falls mal nicht, verzeiht für die gestohlene Zeit. Kurz sollen sie sein. Ich weiß aber jetzt schon, dass ich mich nicht immer daran halten werde.

Hier aber noch einmal: Danke, Danke, Danke! Für euren vielen Besuche. Für eure aufmunternden Worte, mündlich wie schriftlich. So macht es richtig Spaß, sich ein wenig mit einer Website zu versuchen.

Die GUI - XUL, HTML und CSS

Das Herzstück von Mozilla ist die Renderingengine Gecko. Sie liest zum Beispiel (X)HTML ein und stellt dieses dann auf dem Monitor dar. Damit lassen sich bereits sehr interaktive und sich äußerst dynamisch anfühlende Webseiten erstellen, insbesondere wenn man JavaScript mit verwendet. An Beispielen wie GMail oder start.com kann man erkennen, wieviel heute schon mit HTML möglich ist. Dennoch: viele GUI-Elemente wie Listen, Menüs oder Knöpfe sind in HTML eher umständlich umgesetzt. Darum wurde XUL, die XML User Interface Language, eingeführt, eine XML-Sprache zur Beschreibung von graphischen Benutzerschnittstellen.

Mit XUL ist es dann möglich zu beschreiben, wo bestimmte Elemente auftauchen, welche wo auftauchen, etc. Dadurch wird es zum Beispiel leicht fallen, verschiedene Versionen der GUI zu erstellen, eine für Experten und eine für Anfänger. Insbesondere könnte man sich einen Schritt-für-Schritt-Wizard für die Heldenerschaffung vorstellen, wie sie in den meisten anderen Editoren wie Helden praktiziert wird. Meine persönliche Vorliebe bleibt dennoch beim "Immer alles veränderbar"-Modus. Aber die Codebasis wird sehr einfach beides hergeben.

Ein weiterer Vorteil von XUL ist, dass damit das User Interface interpretiert, nicht compiliert wird. Das hat den Vorteil, dass, wenn man das Aussehen des Programms verändern will, man nicht eine ganze Programmierumgebung mit Compiler etc. braucht, sondern einfach nur einen Texteditor und etwas XML- oder HTML-Kenntnisse. Hoffnung dabei: schöne neue Skins und bessere Bedienbarkeit können von wesentlich mehr Leuten beigesteuert werden als bisher.

Apropos Skins: ja, auch das wird möglich sein. Wie von Thunderbird und Firefox gewohnt, sind XUL-basierte Anwendung vollkommen mit CSS und ähnlichem skinbar. Das heißt Farben, Hintergründe, Aussehen der Elemente sind steuerbar. Ich stelle mir jetzt schon ein Horasreich-Skin, ein Myranor-Skin und ein G7-Skin vor. Mal sehen. Es wird letztlich von Eurer Kreativität abhängen.

Auch hier ist das wichtige: man muss dafür keine Programmierumgebung besitzen und keine Programmierkenntnisse haben (auch wenn sie natürlich nicht schaden). Der wichtigste Teil des neuen Designs ist es, die einzelnen Teile der Architektur orthogonal zu gestalten, so dass man an einem bestimmten Teil arbeiten kann, ohne das man ein Experte in allen sein muss. Etwas, was bei der ersten Version sträflichst vernachlässigt wurde.

Nächstes Mal: zum Datenmodell und der Datenhaltung.

Die Hasselhof-Rekursion

Achtung! Schäden für das Gehirn sind nicht ausgeschlossen.

Wer hier klickt, ist selber schuld.

Die McDonalds-Verschwörung

Folgendes basiert nur teilweise auf Fakten. Welche Teile mag der geneigte Leser selbst entscheiden, ist ja schließlich eine freie Welt.

In Stuttgart gab es seit jeher (= seitdem ich mich erinnern kann) eine ganze Menge McDonalds. Allein in der Königsstraße +/- 50 Meter waren es läppische vier. Dahinter steckte der Plan, dass durch die Menge der McDonalds zwar in jedem Einzelnen der Gewinn sinkt, aber wenn bloß jeder Platz, wo möglicherweise ein Burger King einziehen hätte können, durch einen Mc ausgefüllt wird, geht dennoch der ganze Gewinn aus FastFood-Konsum ja an das große gelbe M.

Doch nun erzittern die zahlreichen Mitarbeiter! Es kommt der erste Burger King in die Stuttgarter Innenstadt, und zwar in den Hauptbahnhof. Dort wird schon nach Mitarbeitern geworben, und Gerüchten zufolge würden die Topleute bereits abgeworben...

Die zwei Türme

Woooowwwww.... die Zwei Türme gesehen! Wahnsinn! Danke, Danke, Danke, Peter Jackson für diesen Film! Wahooo! Argh... noch ein Jahr... Heul!

Außerdem komme ich erst zwischen den Jahren wieder zu Updates. Sorry...

Dieter-Hamann-Bridge

Leider ohne ursprünglichen Autor, soeben in meinem Mailkasten gelandet:

"Engländer ärgern - macht alle mit!!!

Hallo, das ist doch der Spaß wert ;-)

Wer erinnert sich nicht an das glorreiche 1:0 der deutschen Fußball-Nationalmannschaft im letzten Spiel vor dem Abriss des altehrwürdigen Wembley-Stadions? (Wie sehr die Engländer diese Niederlage geschmerzt hat, lässt sich übrigens gut in David Beckham "My Side" nachlesen.)

Nun ist es an der Zeit, Didi Hamann für seinen Sieg-Freistoß (ca. 25 Meter Entfernung, flach über den nassen Rasen ins untere linke Eck!) entsprechend zu würdigen: Mittlerweile ist das Wembley-Stadion wieder aufgebaut und zum Stadion führt eine neue Brücke, die noch namenlos ist. Deswegen hat die London Development Agency einen Wettbewerb ausgeschrieben, bei dem der Name gewinnt, der am häufigsten genannt wird. Und das ist unsere Chance!

Also hier für "Dietmar-Hamann-Bridge" voten:
http://www.lda.gov.uk/server.php?show=ConForm.9

In der Begründung bitte angeben: 'In tribute to the player who scored the last goal in the old stadium'

P.S. Schickt den Link mal an alle Freunde und Bekannte und/oder stellt ihn in die bekannten und internen Foren - wäre doch gelacht wenn wir die Tommies nicht noch ein bisschen Ärger könnten."

Da mach' ich mit!

Diplomarbeit Halbzeit

Der Zwischenvortrag zu meiner Diplomarbeit ist gelaufen, die Folien dazu - in verschiedensten Formaten - finden sich für den interessierten, unter der Adresse www.nodix.de/da. Kommentare sind stets hoch willkommen!

Diplomarbeit abgegeben

Yehhhhhaaa, heute fristgerecht die Ausarbeitung der Diplomarbeit abgegeben. Der Quelltext dazu ist auch schon fertig, und jetzt geht es darum, so schnell wie möglich die dazugehörige Website aus dem Boden zu stampfen.

Und hier ist sie, eine weitere Website, die auf Nodix ihren Anfang nimmt: XML4Ada95!

Dem Aufmerksamen wird auffallen, dass das Layout großteils von der Website zum DSA4 Werkzeug übernommen ist. Dazu kann ich nur sagen: stimmt. Aber da ich lediglich so schnell wie möglich den Inhalt online stellen wollte, habe ich den DSA4WzDocGen einfach leicht erweitert, damit er mir jetzt meine XML4Ada95-Seiten erstellen kann. Vielleicht trenne ich die beiden Layouts ja wieder, sobald ich etwas mehr Zeit habe, aber im Moment geht es eher um Inhalte, Inhalte, Inhalte... (und häßlich ist doch das Layout allemal nicht, oder?)

Diplomarbeit am Horizont

Diese Woche, wenn auch knapp, doch pünktlich: hier die neue Folge der nutkidz!

In nächster Zeit stehen die ersten Infos zu meiner Diplomarbeit auf dieser Seite an. Desweiteren noch eine Ankündigung: nächste Woche gibt es aufgrund des besonderen Tages einen besonderen nutkidz-Comic! Weil der brandaktuell sein wird, kann er unter Umständen ein wenig später kommen. Wer noch nicht dahinter gekommen ist, wovon ich rede, soll sich nächste Woche überraschen lassen!

Do you hear the people sing?

"Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men..."

Yesterday, a London performance of Les Miserables was interrupted by protesters raising awareness about climate change.

The audience booed.

It seems the audience was unhappy about having to experience protests and unrest during the performance of protests and unrest they wanted to enjoy.

The hypocrisy is rich in this one, but a very well engineered and expected one. But I guess only with the luxury of being detached from the actual event one can afford to enjoy the hypocrisy. I assume that for many people attending a West End London production of Les Miserables aims to be a proper highlight of the year, if not more. It's something that children gift their parents for the 30th wedding anniversary. It may be the reason for a trip to London. In addition, attending a performance like this is an escapist act, that you don't want interrupted with the problems of the real world. And given that it is a life performance, it seems disrespectful to the cast, to the artists, who pour their lives into their roles.

On the other side, the existential dread about climate change, and the insufficient actions by world leaders seem to demand increasingly bolder action and more attention. We are teaching our kids that they should act if something is not right. And we are telling them about the predictions for climate change. And then we are surprised if they try to do something? The message that climate change will be extremely disruptive to our lives and that we need to act much more decisively has obviously not yet been understood by enough people. And we, humanity, our leaders, elected or not, are most certainly not yet doing enough to try to prevent or at least mitigate the effects of climate change that are starting to roll over us.

It would be good, but admittedly unlikely, if both sides could appreciate the other more. Maybe the audience might be a bit appreciative of seeing the people sing the song of angry men in real. And maybe the protesters could choose their targets a bit more wisely. Why choose art? There are more disruptive targets if you were to protest the oil industry than a performance of Les Miserables. To be honest, if i were working for the oil industry, this is exactly the kind of actions I would be setting up. And with people who are actually into the cause. That way I can ensure that people will talk about interrupted theater productions and defaced paintings, instead of again having the hottest year in history, of floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, and the thousands of people who already died due to climate change induced catastrophes - and the billions more whose life will be turned upside down.

• The Guardian on the event

Dogma, 22 Uhr, Pro7

Hui, diese Woche habe ich die pünktlichen nutkidz einfach vergessen. Sorry, soll nicht wieder vorkommen! Dafür bastel ich an der Diplomarbeit mit Erfolg weiter! Und nicht vergessen, heute abend, Dogma um 22:20 auf Pro7!

Dolly Parton's What's up?

Dolly Parton is an amazing person. On "Rockstar", her latest album, she covered a great number of songs, with amazing collaborators, often the original interpreters or writers. In her cover of "What's up?", a song I really love, with Linda Perry, she changed a few lines of the lyrics, as one often does when covering, to make a song their own.

Instead of "Twenty-five years and my life is still...", she's singing "All of these years and my life is still..." - and makes total sense, because unlike Linda Perry she wasn't 25 when she wrote it, she was 77 when she recorded it.

Instead of "I take a deep breath and I get real high", Dolly takes "a deep breath and wonders why", and it makes sense, because, hey, it's Dolly Parton.

But here's the line that hurts, right there when the song reaches its high point:

"And I pray,

Oh my God do I pray!

I pray every. single. day.

for a revolution!"

She changed one letter in the last word:

"for a resolution"

And it just breaks my heart. Because it feels so weak. Because it seems to betray the song. Because it seems to betray everything. And also because I might agree with her, and that feels like betrayal too.

• Dolly Parton and Linda Perry: What's up?

Double copy in gravity

When I was younger, I understood these theories much better. Today I read them like a fascinated, but a bit distant bystander.

But it is terribly interesting. What does turning physics into math mean? When we find a mathematical shortcut that works but we don't understand - is this real? What is the relation between mathematical formulas and reality? And will we finally understand gravity some day?

It was an interesting article, but I am not sure I understood it all. I guess, I'm getting old. Or just too specialized.

• https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-gravity-is-a-double-copy-of-other-forces-20210504/

Doug Lenat (1950-2023)

When I started studying computer science, one of the initiation rites was to read the Jargon File. I stumbled when I read the entry on the microlenat:

microlenat: The unit of bogosity. Abbreviated μL, named after Douglas Lenat. Like the farad it is considered far too large a unit for practical use, so bogosity is usually expressed in microlenats.

I had not heard of Douglas Lenat then. English being my third language, I wasn’t sure what bogosity is. So I tried to learn a bit more to understand it, and I read a bit about Cyc and Eurisko, but since I just started computer science, my mind wasn’t really ready for things such as knowledge representation and common sense reasoning. I had enough on my plate struggling with resistors, electronegativity, and fourier transformations. Looking back, it is ironic that none of these played a particular role in my future, but knowledge representation sure did.

It took me almost ten years to come back to Cyc and Lenat’s work. I was then studying ontological engineering, a term that according to Wikipedia was coined by Lenat, a fact I wasn’t aware of at that time. I was working with RDF, which was co-developed by Guha, who has worked with Lenat at Cycorp, a fact I wasn’t aware of at that time. I was trying to solve problems that Lenat had tackled decades previously, a fact I wasn’t aware of at that time.

I got to know Cyc through OpenCyc and Cyc Europe, led by Michael Witbrock. I only met Doug Lenat a decade later when I was at Google.

Doug’s aspirations and ambitions had numerous people react with rolling eyes and sneering comments, as can be seen in the entry in the Jargon File. And whereas I might have absorbed similar thoughts as well, they also inspired me. I worked with a few people who told me “consider yourself lucky if you have a dozen people reading your paper, that’s the impact you will likely have”, but I never found that a remotely satisfactory idea. Then there were people like Doug, who shouted out “let’s solve common sense!”, and stormed ahead trying to do so.

His optimism and his bias to action, his can-do attitude, surely influenced me profoundly in choosing my own way forward. Not only once did I feel like I was channeling Lenat when I was talking about knowledge bases that anyone can edit, about libraries of functions anyone can use, or about abstract representations of natural language texts. And as ambitious as these projects have been called, they all carefully avoid the incomparably more ambitious goals Doug had his eyes set on.

And Doug didn’t do it from the comfort of a tenured academic position, but he bet his career and house on it, he founded a company, and kept it running for four decades. I was always saddened that Cyc was kept behind closed doors, and I hope that this will not hinder the impact and legacy it might have, but I understand that this was the magic juice that kept the company running.

One of Doug’s systems, Eurisko, became an inspiration and namesake for an AI system that played the role of the monster of the week in a first season episode of the X-Files, a fact I wasn’t aware of until now. Doug was a founder and advisory member of the TTI/Vanguard series of meetings, to which I was invited to present an early version of Abstract Wikipedia, a fact I wasn’t aware of until now. And I am sure there are more facts about Doug and his work and how it reverberated with mine that I am unaware of still.

Doug was a person ahead of their time, a person who lived, worked on and saw a future about knowledge that is creative, optimistic and inspiring. I do not know if we will ever reach that future, but I do know that Doug Lenat and his work will always be a beacon on our journey forward. Doug Lenat died yesterday in Austin, Texas, two weeks shy of his 73rd birthday, after a battle with cancer.

To state it in CycL, the language Cyc is written in:

 (#$dateOfDeath #$DougLenat "2023-08-31")

 (#$restInPeace #$DougLenat)

Draft: Collaborating on the sum of all knowledge across languages

For the upcoming Wikipedia@20 book, I published my chapter draft. Comments are welcome on the pubpub Website until July 19.

Every language edition of Wikipedia is written independently of every other language edition. A contributor may consult an existing article in another language edition when writing a new article, or they might even use the Content Translation tool to help with translating one article to another language, but there is nothing that ensures that articles in different language editions are aligned or kept consistent with each other. This is often regarded as a contribution to knowledge diversity, since it allows every language edition to grow independently of all other language editions. So would creating a system that aligns the contents more closely with each other sacrifice that diversity?

Differences between Wikipedia language editions

Wikipedia is often described as a wonder of the modern age. There are more than 50 million articles in almost 300 languages. The goal of allowing everyone to share in the sum of all knowledge is achieved, right?

Not yet.

The knowledge in Wikipedia is unevenly distributed. Let’s take a look at where the first twenty years of editing Wikipedia have taken us.

The number of articles varies between the different language editions of Wikipedia: English, the largest edition, has more than 5.8 million articles, Cebuano — a language spoken in the Philippines — has 5.3 million articles, Swedish has 3.7 million articles, and German has 2.3 million articles. (Cebuano and Swedish have a large number of machine generated articles.) In fact, the top nine languages alone hold more than half of all articles across the Wikipedia language editions — and if you take the bottom half of all Wikipedias ranked by size, they together wouldn’t have 10% of the number of articles in the English Wikipedia.

It is not just the sheer number of articles that differ between editions, but their comprehensiveness does as well: the English Wikipedia article on Frankfurt has a length of 184,686 characters, a table of contents spanning 87 sections and subsections, 95 images, tables and graphs, and 92 references — whereas the Hausa Wikipedia article states that it is a city in the German state of Hesse, and lists its population and mayor. Hausa is a language spoken natively by 40 million people and as a second language by another 20 million.

It is not always the case that the large Wikipedia language editions have more content on a topic. Although readers often consider large Wikipedias to be more comprehensive, local Wikipedias may frequently have more content on topics of local interest: the English Wikipedia knows about the Port of Călărași that it is one of the largest Romanian river ports, located at the Danube near the town of Călărași — and that’s it. The Romanian Wikipedia on the other hand offers several paragraphs of content about the port.

The topics covered by the different Wikipedias also overlap less than one would initially assume. English Wikipedias has 5.8 million articles, German has 2.2 million articles — but only 1.1 million topics are covered by both Wikipedias. A full 1.1 million topics have an article in German — but not in English. The top ten Wikipedias by activity — each of them with more than a million articles — have articles on only hundred thousand topics in common. 18 million topics are covered by articles in the different language Wikipedias — and English only covers 31% of these.

Besides coverage, there is also the question of how up to date the different language editions are: in June 2018, San Francisco elected London Breed as its new mayor. Nine months later, in March 2019, I conducted an analysis of who the mayor of San Francisco was, according to the different language versions of Wikipedia. Of the 292 language editions, a full 165 had a Wikipedia article on San Francisco. Of these, 86 named the mayor. The good news is that not a single Wikipedia lists a wrong mayor — but the vast majority are out of date. English switched the minute London Breed was sworn in. But 62 Wikipedia language editions list an out-of-date mayor — and not just the previous mayor Ed Lee, who became mayor in 2011, but also often Gavin Newsom (2004-2011), and his predecessor, Willie Brown (1996-2004). The most out-of-date entry is to be found in the Cebuano Wikipedia, who names Dianne Feinstein as the mayor of San Francisco. She had that role after the assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in 1978, and remained in that position for a decade in 1988 — Cebuano was more than thirty years out of date. Only 24 language editions had listed the current mayor, London Breed, out of the 86 who listed the name at all.

An even more important metric for the success of a Wikipedia are the number of contributors: English has more than 31,000 active contributors — three out of seven active Wikimedians are active on the English Wikipedia. German, the second most active Wikipedia community, already only has 5,500 active contributors. Only eleven language editions have more than a thousand active contributors — and more than half of all Wikipedias have fewer than ten active contributors. To assume that fewer than ten active contributors can write and maintain a comprehensive encyclopedia in their spare time is optimistic at best. These numbers basically doom the mission of the Wikimedia movement to realize a world where everyone can contribute to the sum of all knowledge.

Enter Wikidata

Wikidata was launched in 2012 and offers a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other wikis of the Wikimedia movement, and to anyone in the world. Wikidata contains structured information in the form of simple claims, such as “San Francisco — Mayor — London Breed”, qualifiers, such as “since — July 11, 2018”, and references for these claims, e.g. a link to the official election results as published by the city.

One of these structured claims would be on the Wikidata page about San Francisco and state the mayor, as discussed earlier. The individual Wikipedias can then query Wikidata for the current mayor. Of the 24 Wikipedias that named the current mayor, eight were current because they were querying Wikidata. I hope to see that number go up. Using Wikidata more extensively can, in the long run, allow for more comprehensive, current, and accessible content while decreasing the maintenance load for contributors.

Wikidata was developed in the spirit of the Wikipedia’s increasing drive to add structure to Wikipedia’s articles. Examples of this include the introduction of infoboxes as early as 2002, a quick tabular overview of facts about the topic of the article, and categories in 2004. Over the year, the structured features became increasingly intricate: infoboxes moved to templates, templates started using more sophisticated MediaWiki functions, and then later demanded the development of even more powerful MediaWiki features. In order to maintain the structured data, bots were created, software agents that could read content from Wikipedia or other sources and then perform automatic updates to other parts of Wikipedia. Before the introduction of Wikidata, bots keeping the language links between the different Wikipedias in sync, easily contributed 50% and more of all edits.

Wikidata allowed for an outlet to many of these activities, and relieved the Wikipedias of having to run bots to keep language links in sync or of massive infobox maintenance tasks. But one lesson I learned from these activities is that I can trust the communities with mastering complex workflows spread out between community members with different capabilities: in fact, a small number of contributors working on intricate template code and developing bots can provide invaluable support to contributors who more focus on maintaining articles and contributors who write large swaths of prose. The community is very heterogeneous, and the different capabilities and backgrounds complement each other in order to create Wikipedia.

However, Wikidata’s structured claims are of a limited expressivity: their subject always must be the topic of the page, every object of a statement must exist as its own item and thus page in Wikidata. If it doesn’t fit in the rigid data model of Wikidata, it simply cannot be captured in Wikidata — and if it cannot be captured in Wikidata, it cannot be made accessible to the Wikipedias.

For example, let’s take a look at the following two sentences from the English Wikipedia article on Ontario, California:

“To impress visitors and potential settlers with the abundance of water in Ontario, a fountain was placed at the Southern Pacific railway station. It was turned on when passenger trains were approaching and frugally turned off again after their departure.”

There is no feasible way to express the content of these two sentences in Wikidata - the simple claim and qualifier structure that Wikidata supports can not capture the subtle situation that is described here.

An Abstract Wikipedia

I suggest that the Wikimedia movement develop an Abstract Wikipedia, a Wikipedia in which the actual textual content is being represented in a language-independent manner. This is an ambitious goal — it requires us to push the current limits of knowledge representation, natural language generation, and collaborative knowledge construction by a significant amount: an Abstract Wikipedia must allow for:

1. relations that connect more than just two participants with heterogeneous roles.
2. composition of items on the fly from values and other items.
3. expressing knowledge about arbitrary subjects, not just the topic of the page.
4. ordering content, to be able to represent a narrative structure.
5. expressing redundant information.

Let us explore one of these requirements, the last one: unlike the sentences of a declarative formal knowledge base, human language is usually highly redundant. Formal knowledge bases usually try to avoid redundancy, for good reasons. But in a natural language text, redundancy happens frequently. One example is the following sentence:

“Marie Curie is the only person who received two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.”

The sentence is redundant given a list of Nobel Prize award winners and their respective disciplines they have been awarded to — a list that basically every large Wikipedia will contain. But the content of the given sentence nevertheless appears in many of the different language articles on Marie Curie, and usually right in the first paragraph. So there is obviously something very interesting in this sentence, even though the knowledge expressed in this sentence is already fully contained in most of the Wikipedias it appears in. This form of redundancy is common place in natural language — but is usually avoided in formal knowledge bases.

The technical details of the Abstract Wikipedia proposal are presented in (Vrandečić, 2018). But the technical architecture is only half of the story. Much more important is the question whether the communities can meet the challenges of this project?

Wikipedia and Wikidata have shown that the communities are capable to meet difficult challenges: be it templates in Wikipedia, or constraints in Wikidata, the communities have shown that they can drive comprehensive policy and workflow changes as well as the necessary technological feature development. Not everyone needs to understand the whole stack in order to make a feature such as templates a crucial part of Wikipedia.

The Abstract Wikipedia is an ambitious future project. I believe that this is the only way for the Wikimedia movement to achieve its goal, short of developing an AI that will make the writing of a comprehensive encyclopedia obsolete anyway.

A plea for knowledge diversity?

When presenting the idea of the Abstract Wikipedia, the first question is usually: will this not massively reduce the knowledge diversity of Wikipedia? By unifying the content between the different language editions, does this not force a single point of view on all languages? Is the Abstract Wikipedia taking away the ability of minority language speakers to maintain their own encyclopedias, to have a space where, for example, indigenous speakers can foster and grow their own point of view, without being forced to unify under the western US-dominated perspective?

I am sympathetic with the intent of this question. The goal of this question is to ensure that a rich diversity in knowledge is retained, and to make sure that minority groups have spaces in which they can express themselves and keep their knowledge alive. These are, in my opinion, valuable goals.

The assumption that an Abstract Wikipedia, from which any of the individual language Wikipedias can draw content from, will necessarily reduce this diversity, is false. In fact, I believe that access to more knowledge and to more perspectives is crucial to achieve an effective knowledge diversity, and that the currently perceived knowledge diversity in different language projects is ineffective at best, and harmful at worst. In the rest of this essay I will argue why this is the case.

Language does not align with culture

First, it is wrong to use language as the dimension along which to draw the demarcation line between different content if the Wikimedia movement truly believes that different groups should be able to grow and maintain their own encyclopedias.

In case the Wikimedia movement truly believes that different groups or cultures should have their own Wikipedias, why is there only a single Wikipedia language edition for the English speakers from India, England, Scotland, Australia, the United States, and South Africa? Why is there only one Wikipedia for Brazil and Portugal, leading to much strife? Why are there no two Wikipedias for US Democrats and Republicans?

The conclusion is that the Wikimedia movement does not believe that language is the right dimension to split knowledge — it is a historical decision, driven by convenience. The core Wikipedia policies, vision, and mission are all geared towards enabling access to the sum of all knowledge to every single reader, no matter what their language, and not toward capturing all knowledge and then subdividing it for consumption based on the languages the reader is comfortable in.

The split along languages leads to the problem that it is much easier for a small language community to go “off the rails” — to either, as a whole, become heavily biased, or to adopt rules and processes which are problematic. The fact that the larger communities have different rules, processes, and outcomes can be beneficial for Wikipedia as a whole, since they can experiment with different rules and approaches. But this does not seem to hold true when the communities drop under a certain size and activity level, when there are not enough eyeballs to avoid the development of bad outcomes and traditions. For one example, the article about skirts in the Bavarian Wikipedia features three upskirt pictures, one porn actress, an anime screenshot, and a video showing a drawing of a woman with a skirt getting continuously shorter. The article became like this within a day or two of its creation, and, even though it has been edited by a dozen different accounts, has remained like this over the last seven years. (This describes the state of the article in April 2019 — I hope that with the publication of this essay, the article will finally be cleaned up).

A look on some south Slavic language Wikipedias

Second, a natural experiment is going on, where contributors that are more separated by politics than language differences have separate Wikipedias: there exist individual Wikipedia language editions for Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbocroatian. Linguistically, the differences between the dialects of Croatian are often larger than the differences between standard Croatian and standard Serbian. Particularly the existence of the Serbocroatian Wikipedia poses interesting questions about these delineations.

Particularly the Croatian Wikipedia has turned to a point of view that has been described as problematic. Certain events and Croat actors during the 1990s independence wars or the 1940s fascist puppet state might be represented more favorably than in most other Wikipedias.

Here are two observations based on my work on south Slavic language Wikipedias:

First, claiming that a more fascist-friendly point of view within a Wikipedia increases the knowledge diversity across all Wikipedias might be technically true, but is practically insufficient. Being able to benefit from this diversity requires the reader to not only be comfortable reading several different languages, but also to engage deeply enough and spend the time and interest to actually read the article in different languages, which is mostly a profoundly boring exercise, since a lot of the content will be overlapping. Finding the juicy differences is anything but easy, especially considering that most readers are reading Wikipedia from mobile devices, and are just looking to satisfy a quick information need from a source whose curation they trust.

Most readers will only read a single language version of an article, and thus any diversity that exists across different language editions is practically lost. The sheer existence of this diversity might even be counterproductive, as one may argue that the communities should not spend resources on reflecting the true diversity of a topic within each individual language. This would cement the practical uselessness of the knowledge diversity across languages.

Second, many of the same contributors that write the articles with a certain point of view in the Croatian Wikipedia, also contribute on the English Wikipedia on the articles about the same topics — but there they suddenly are forced and able to compromise and incorporate a much wider variety of points of view. One might hope the contributors would take the more diverse points of view and migrate them back to their home Wikipedias — but that is often not the case. If contributors harbor a certain point of view (and who doesn’t?) it often leads to a situation where they push that point of view as much as they can get away with in each of the projects.

It has to be noted that the most blatant digressions from a neutral point of view in Wikipedias like the Croatian Wikipedia will not be found in the most central articles, but in the large periphery of articles surrounding these central articles which are much harder to keep an eye on.

Abstract Wikipedia and Knowledge diversity

The Abstract Wikipedia proposal does not require any of the individual language editions to use it. Each language community can decide for each article whether to fall back on the Abstract Wikipedia or whether to create their own article in their language. And even that decision can be more fine grained: a contributor can decide for an individual article to incorporate sections or paragraphs from the Abstract Wikipedia.

This allows the individual Wikipedia communities the luxury to entirely concentrate on the differences that are relevant to them. I distinctly remember that when I started the Croatian Wikipedia: it felt like I had the burden to first write an article about every country in the world before I could write the articles I cared about, such as my mother’s home village — because how could anyone defend a general purpose encyclopedia that might not even have an article on Nigeria, a country with a population of a hundred million, but one on Donji Humac, a village with a population of 157? Wouldn’t you first need an article on all of the chemical elements that make up the world before you can write about a local food?

The Abstract Wikipedia frees a language edition from this burden, and allows each community to entirely focus on the parts they care about most — and to simply import the articles from the common source for the topics that are less in their focus. It allows the community to make these decisions. As the communities grow and shift, they can revisit these decisions at any time and adapt them.

At the same time, the Abstract Wikipedia makes these differences more visible since they become explicit. Right now there is no easy way to say whether the fact that Dianne Feinstein is listed as the Mayor of San Francisco in the Cebuano Wikipedia is due to cultural particularities of the Cebuano language communities or not. Are the different population numbers of Frankfurt in the different language editions intentional expressions of knowledge diversity? With an Abstract Wikipedia, the individual communities could explicitly choose which articles to create and maintain on their own, and at the same time remove a lot of unintentional differences.

By making these decisions more explicit, it becomes possible to imagine an effective workflow that observes these intentional differences, and sets up a path to integrate them into the common article in the Abstract Wikipedia. Right now, there are 166 different language versions of the article on the chemical element Helium — it is basically impossible for a single person to go through all of them and find the content that is intentionally different between them. With an Abstract Wikipedia, which contains the common shared knowledge, contributors, researchers, and readers can actually take a look at those articles that intentionally have content that replaces or adds to the commonly shared one, assess these differences, and see if contributors should integrate the differences in the shared article.

The differences in content may be reflecting difference in policies, particularly in policies of notability and reliability. Whereas on first glance it might seem that the Abstract Wikipedia might require unified notability and reliability requirements across all Wikipedias, this is not the case: due to the fact that local Wikipedias can overlay and suppress content from the Abstract Wikipedias, they can adjust their Wikipedias based on their own rules. And the increased visibility of such decisions will lead to easier identify biases, and hopefully also to updated rules to reduce said bias.

A new incentive infrastructure

The Abstract Wikipedia will evolve the incentive infrastructure of Wikipedia.

Presently, many underrepresented languages are spoken in areas that are multilingual. Often another language spoken in this area is regarded as a high-prestige language, and is thus the language of education and literature, whereas the underrepresented language is a low-prestige language. So even though the low-prestige language might have more speakers, the most likely recruits for the Wikipedia communities, people with education who can afford internet access and have enough free time, will be able to contribute in both languages.

In which language should I contribute? If I write the article about my mother’s home town in Croatian, I make it accessible to a few million people. If I write the article about my mother’s home town in English, it becomes accessible to more than a hundred times as many people! The work might be the same, but the perceived benefit is orders of magnitude higher: the question becomes, do I teach the world about a local tradition, or do I tell my own people about their tradition? The world is bigger, and thus more likely to react, creating a positive feedback loop.

This cannibalizes the communities for local languages by diverting them to the English Wikipedia, which is perceived as the global knowledge community (or to other high-prestige languages, such as Russian or French). This is also reflected in a lot of articles in the press and in academic works about Wikipedia, where the English Wikipedia is being understood as the Wikipedia. Whereas it is known that Wikipedia exists in many other languages, journalists and researchers are, often unintentionally, regarding the English Wikipedia as the One True Wikipedia.

Another strong impediment to recruiting contributors to smaller Wikipedia communities is rarely explicitly called out: it is pretty clear that, given the current architecture, these Wikipedias are doomed in achieving their mission. As discussed above, more than half of all Wikipedia language editions have fewer than ten active contributors — and writing a comprehensive, up-to-date Wikipedia is not an achievable goal with so few people writing in their free time. The translation tools offered by the Wikimedia Foundation can considerably help within certain circumstances — but for most of the Wikipedia languages, automatic translation models don’t exist and thus cannot help the languages which would need it the most.

With the Abstract Wikipedia though, the goal of providing a comprehensive and current encyclopedia in almost any language becomes much more tangible: instead of taking on the task of creating and maintaining the entire content, only the grammatical and lexical knowledge of a given language needs to be created. This is a far smaller task. Furthermore, this grammatical and lexical knowledge is comparably static — it does not change as much as the encyclopedic content of Wikipedia, thus turning a task that is huge and ongoing into one where the content will grow and be maintained without the need of too much maintenance by the individual language communities.

Yes, the Abstract Wikipedia will require more and different capabilities from a community that has yet to be found, and the challenges will be both novel and big. But the communities of the many Wikimedia projects have repeatedly shown that they can meet complex challenges with ingenious combinations of processes and technological advancements. Wikipedia and Wikidata have both demonstrated the ability to draw on technologically rather simple canvasses, and create extraordinary rich and complex masterpieces, which stand the test of time. The Abstract Wikipedia aims to challenge the communities once again, and the promise this time is nothing else but to finally be able to reap the ultimate goal: to allow every one, no matter what their native language is, to share in the sum of all knowledge.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the valuable suggestions on improving the article to Jamie Taylor, Daniel Russell, Joseph Reagle, Stephen LaPorte, and Jake Orlowitz.

Bibliography

• Bao, Patti, Brent J. Hecht, Samuel Carton, Mahmood Quaderi, Michael S. Horn and Darren Gergle. “Omnipedia: bridging the wikipedia language gap.” in Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012), edited by Joseph A. Konstan, Ed H. Chi, and Kristina Höök. Austin: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012: 1075-1084.
• Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language (the Making of Europe). La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea. Translated by James Fentress. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995 (1993).
• Graham, Mark. “The Problem With Wikidata.” The Atlantic, April 6, 2012. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikidata/255564/
• Hoffmann, Thomas and Graeme Trousdale, “Construction Grammar: Introduction”. In The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale, 1-14. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Kaffee, Lucie-Aimée, Hady ElSahar, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Christophe Gravier, Frédérique Laforest, Jonathon S. Hare and Elena Simperl. “Mind the (Language) Gap: Generation of Multilingual Wikipedia Summaries from Wikidata for Article Placeholders.” in Proceedings of the 15th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2018), edited by Aldo Gangemi, Roberto Navigli, Marie-Esther Vidal, Pascal Hitzler, Raphaël Troncy, Laura Hollink, Anna Tordai, and Mehwish Alam. Heraklion: Springer, 2018: 319-334.
• Kaffee, Lucie-Aimée, Hady ElSahar, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Christophe Gravier, Frédérique Laforest, Jonathon S. Hare and Elena Simperl. “Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata.” in Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2, edited by Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, and Amanda Stent. New Orleans: ACL Anthology, 2018: 640-645.
• Schindler, Mathias and Denny Vrandečić. “Introducing new features to Wikipedia: Case studies for Web Science.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 26, no. 1 (January-February 2011): 56-61.
• Vrandečić, Denny. “Restricting the World.” Wikimedia Deutschland Blog. February 22, 2013. https://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/02/22/restricting-the-world/
• Vrandečić, Denny and Markus Krötzsch. “Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase.” Communications of the ACM 57, no. 10 (October 2014): 78-85. DOI 10.1145/2629489.
• Kaljurand, Kaarel and Tobias Kuhn. “A Multilingual Semantic Wiki Based on Attempto Controlled English and Grammatical Framework.” in Proceedings of the 10th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2013), edited by Philipp Cimiano, Oscar Corcho, Valentina Presutti, Laura Hollink, and Sebastian Rudolph. Montpellier: Springer, 2013: 427-441.
• Milekić, Sven. “Croatian-language Wikipedia: when the extreme right rewrites history.” Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, September 27, 2018. https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Croatia/Croatian-language-Wikipedia-when-the-extreme-right-rewrites-history-190081
• Ranta, Aarne. Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2011.
• Vrandečić, Denny. “Towards a multilingual Wikipedia,” in Proceedings of the 31st International Workshop on Description Logics (DL 2018), edited by Magdalena Ortiz and Thomas Schneider. Phoenix: Ceur-WS, 2018.
• Wierzbicka, Anna. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Wikidata Community: “Lexicographical data.” Accessed June 1, 2019. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data
• Wulczyn, Ellery, Robert West, Leila Zia and Jure Leskovec. “Growing Wikipedia Across Languages via Recommendation.” in Proceedings of the 25th International World-Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016), edited by Jaqueline Bourdeau, Jim Hendler, Roger Nkambou, Ian Horrocks, and Ben Y. Zhao. Montréal: IW3C2, 2016: 975-985.

Dramatische nutkidz-Folge

Schwesterchen machte mich darauf aufmerksam, dass ich den supercoolen nutkidz, den ich letzte Woche ankündigte, gar nicht heute zeigen kann, weil die derzeitige Story noch läuft... und die mag ich nicht unterbrechen. Hier also die Fortsetzung!

Und die Folge endet mit dramatischer Musik: wieso hat Till keine Seele? Was wird aus Chrissies Seele? Wird der Teufel alle nutkidz beherrschen? Kann der Geistliche die nutkidz noch irgendwie retten? Wollen die das überhaupt? Bleibt dabei, wenn nächste Woche ein paar Fragen geklärt und viele neue aufgeworfen werden - bei den nutkidz!

Drumline

aus der Reihe Filme in 50 Worten (Frage: gehe ich eigentlich zu häufig ins Kino?)

Eine Geschichte, von der wir uns fragen, warum sie nicht schon lange erzählt wurde: ein junger und überaus talentierter Trommler bekommt darob ein Stipendium für die renommierte A&T, wo er unbedingt in den Spielmannszug aufgenommen werden will. Härteste Trainingsbedingungen, ein Disziplin verlangender Drum Major, seine eigene Arroganz und eine völlig unmotivierte Liebesgeschichte mit dem ersten Mädchen, dass er auf dem Campus anspricht - wer hätte gedacht, dass Trommler für Spielmannszüge so hart rangenommen werden, bis sie endlich ihre Lektion gelernt haben. "Da draußen hört Dich keiner, da draußen hört man nur die Band!"

Sehr coole Trommeleinlagen, für die sich ein THX-Kino oder eine wirklich gute Anlage lohnen. Ansonsten erschien mir der Film eher lustig, weil die Leute dass alles so furchtbar ernst nahmen (ich weiß, wäre ich da drin, würde ich ganz anders empfinden).

Definitiv eine unverbrauchte Geschichte, frische Schauspieler, tolle Trommeln, wenig Überraschungen.

Du nimmst meine Schnalle, ich nehm Deine...

Tja, manchmal denkt man, dass es eigentlich ganz einfach ist: ich bin mit Deiner Frau durchgebrannt, hier, nimm Du dafür meine, OK?

Zumindest dachte dass dieser Herr. Na, mal sehen, wie es ausgeht.

EMWCon 2019, Day 1

Today was the first day of the Enterprise MediaWiki Conference, EMWCon, in Daly City. Among the attendees were people from NASA (6 or more people), UIC (International Union of Railways), the UK Ministry of Defence, the US radioactivity safety agencies, cancer research institutes, the Bureaus of Labour Statistics, PG&E, General Electric, and a number of companies providing services around MediaWiki, such as WikiTeq, Wikiworks, dokit, etc., with or without semantic extensions. The conference was located at the Headquarter of Genesys.

I'm not going to comment on all talks, and also I will not faithfully report on the talks - you can just go to YouTube to watch the talks themselves. The following is a personal, biased view of the first day.

NASA made an interesting comment early on: the discussion was about MediaWiki and its lack of fine-grained access control. You can set up a MediaWiki easily for a controlled group (so that not everyone in the world can access it), but it is not so easy to say "oh, this set of pages is available for people in this group, and managers in that org can access the pages with this markers", etc. So NASA, at first, set up a lot of wiki installations, each one for such specific groups - but eventually turned it all around and instead had a small number of well-defined groups and merged the wikis into them, tearing down barriers within the org and making knowledge wider available.

Evita Hollis from General Electric had an interesting point in her presentation on how GE does knowledge sharing: they use SharePoint and Yammer to connect people to people, and MediaWiki to connect people to Knowledge. MediaWiki has been not-exactly-great at allowing people to work together in real-time - it is a different flow, where you capture and massage knowledge slowly into it. There is a reason why Ops at Wikimedia do not use a wiki during an incident that much, but rather IRC. I think there is a lot of insight in her argument - and if we take that serious, we could actually really lift MediaWiki to a new level, and take Wikipedia there too.

Another interesting point is that SharePoint at General Electric had three developers, and MediaWiki had one. The question from the audience was, whether that reflect how difficult it is to work with SharePoint, or whether that reflected some bias of the company towards SharePoint. Hollis was adamant about how much she likes Sharepoint, but the reason for the imbalance was that MediaWiki, particularly Semantic MediaWiki, allows actually much more flexibility and power than SharePoint without having to touch a single line of wiki source code. It is a platform that allows for rapid experimentation by the end user (I am adding the Spiderman adage about great power coming with great responsibility).

Daren Welsh from NASA talked about many different forms of biases and how they can bubble up on your wiki. Very interesting was one effect: if knowledge from the wiki is becoming too readily availble, people may start to become dependent on it. They had tests where they took away the wiki randomly from flight controllers in training, in order to ensure they are resourceful enough to still figure out what to do - and some failed miserably.

Ike Hecht had a brilliant presentation on the kind of quick application development Semantic MediaWiki lends itself to. He presented a task manager, a news feed, and a file management system, calling them "Semantic Structures That Do Stuff" - which is basically a few pages for your wiki, instead of creating extensions for all of these. This also resonated with GE's statement about needling less developers. I think that this is wildly underutilized and there is a lot of value in this idea.

Thanks to Yaron Koren - who also gave an intro to the topic - and Cindy Cicalese for organizing the conference, and Genesys for hosting us. All presentations are available on YouTube.

• EMWCon website

EMWCon 2019, Day 2

Today was the second day of the Enterprise MediaWiki Conference, EMWCon, in Daly City at the Genesys headquarters.

The day started with my keynote on Wikidata and the Abstract Wikipedia idea. The idea was received very friendly.

Today, the day was filled with stories from people building systems on top of MediaWiki, and in particularly Semantic MediaWiki, Cargo, and some Wikibase. This included SFMoma presenting their system to collaboratively document art, using Cargo and Lua on the League of Legends wiki, running a whole wiki farm for Finnish memory and language institutions, the Lost Plays database, and - what I found particularly impressive - an engineer at NASA who implemented a workflow for document approval including authorization, audibality, and a full Web interface within a mere week, and still thinking that it could have been done much faster.

A common theme was "how incredibly easy it was". Yes, almost everyone mentioned something they got stumped on, and this really points to the community needing maybe more usage on StackOverflow or IRC or something, but in so many use cases, people who were not developers were able to create pretty complex workflows and apps right there in their browsers. This also ties in with the second common theme, that a lot of the deployments of such wikis are often starting "under the radar".

There were also genuinely complex solutions that were using Semantic MediaWiki as a mere component: Matteo Busanelli was presenting a solution that included lifting external data sources, deploying ontologies, reasoning, and all the whistles and bells - a very impressive and powerful architecture.

The US government uses Semantic MediaWiki in many places, most notably Intellipedia used by more than 16 intelligence agencies, Diplopedia by the Department of State, and Powerpedia for the Department of Energy. EPA's Statipedia is no more, but new wikis are popping up in other agency, such as WikITA for the International Trade Administration, and for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Canada's GCpedia was mentioned with a lot of respect, and the wish that the US would have something similar.

NASA has a whole wiki farm: within mission control alone they had 12 different wikis after a short while, many grown bottom up. They noticed that it would make sense to merge them together - which wasn't easy, neither technically nor legally nor managerially. They found that a lot of their knowledge was misclassified - for example, they classified handbooks which can be bought by anyone on Amazon. One of the biggest changes the wiki caused at NASA was that the merged ISS wiki lead to opening more knowledge to more people, and drawing the circles larger. 20% of the people who have access to the wikis actively contribute to the wikis! This is truly impressive.

So far, no edit has been made from space - due to technical issues. But they are working on it.

The day ended with a panel, asking the question where MediaWiki is in the marketplace, and how to grow.

Again, thanks to Yaron Koren and Cindy Cicalese for organizing the conference, and Genesys for hosting us. All presentations are available on YouTube.

• EMWCon Spring 2019

EMWCon Spring 2019

I'm honored to be invited to keynote the Enterprise MediaWiki conference in Daly City. The keynote is on Thursday, I will talk about Wikidata and beyond - towards an abstract Wikipedia.

The talk is planned to be recorded, so it should be available afterwards for everyone interested.

• EMWCon 2019 Spring

EON2006 deadline extension

We gave the workshop on Evaluating Ontologies for the Semantic Web at the WWW2006 in Edinburgh an extension to the end of the week, due to a number of requests. I think it is more fair to give an extension to all the authors than to allow some of them on request and to deny this possibility to those too shy to ask. If you have something to say on the quality of ontologies and ontology assessment, go ahead and submit! You still have a week to go, and short papers are welcomed as well. The field is exciting and new, and considering the accepted ESWC paper the interest in the field seems to be growing.

A first glance of the submissions reveals an enormous heterogeneity of methods and approaches. Wow, very cool and interesting.

What surprised me was the reaction of some: "oh, an extension. You didn't get enough submissions, sorry". I know that this is a common reason for deadline extensions, and I was afraid of that, too. A day before the deadline there was exactly one submission and we were considering cancelling the workshop. It's my first workshop and thus such things make me a whole lot nervous. But now, two days after the deadline I am quite more relaxed. The number of submissions is fine, and we know about a few more to come. Still: we are looking for more submissions actively. For the sole purpose of gathering the community of people interested in ontology evaluation in Edinburgh! I expect this workshop to become quite a leap for ontology evaluation, and I want the whole community to be there.

I am really excited about the topic, as I consider it an important foundation for the Semantic Web. And as you know I want the Semantic Web to lift off, the sooner the better. So let's get these foundations right.

For more, take a peek at the ontology evaluation workshop website.

Comments are still missing on this post.

ESWC2005 is over

The ESWC2005 is over and there have been a lot of interesting stuff. Check the proceedings! There were some really nice idea, like RDFSculpt, good work like temporal RDF (Best Paper Award), the OWL-Eu extensions, naturally the Karlsruhe stuff like ontology evolution, many many persons to meet, get to know, many chats, and quite some ideas. Blogging from here is quite a mess, the uplouad rate is catastrophal, so I will keep this short, but I certainly hope to pick up on some of the talks and highlight the more interesting ideas (well, interesting to me, at least). Stay tuned! ;)

ESWC2006 is over

I have been the week in Budva, Montenegro, at the ESWC2006. It was lovely. The keynotes were inspiring, the talks had a good quality, and the SemWiki workshop was plain great. Oh, and the Semantic Wikipedia won the best poster award!

But what is much more interesting is the magic that Tom Heath, the Semantic Web Technologies Co-ordinator, managed: the ESWC website is a showcase of Semantic Web technologies! A wiki, a photo annotation tool, a chat, a search, a bibliography server, a rich semantic client, an ontology, the award winning flink... try it out!

Now I am in Croatia, and taking my first real break since I started on the Semantic Web. Offline for three weeks.

Yay.

Economic impacts of large language models, a take

Regarding StableDiffusion and GPT and similar models, there is one discussion point floating around, which I find seems to dominate the discussion but may not be the most relevant one. As we know, the training data for these models has been "basically everything the trainers could get their hands on", and then usually some stuff which is identified as possibly problematic is removed.

Many artists are currently complaining about their images, for which they hold copyright, being used for training these models. I think these are very reasonable complaints, and we will likely see a number of court cases and even changes to law to clarify the legal aspects of these practises.

From my perspective this is not the most important concern though. I acknowledge that I have a privileged perspective in so far as I don't pay my rent based on producing art or text in my particular style, and I entirely understand if someone who does is worried about that most, as it is a much more immediate concern.

But now assume that these models were all trained on public domain images and texts and music etc. Maybe there isn't enough public domain content out there right now? I don't know, but training methods are getting increasingly more efficient and the public domain is growing, so that's likely just a temporary challenge, if at all.

Does that change your opinion of such models?

Is it really copyright that you are worried about, or is it something else?

For me it is something else.

These models will, with quite some certainty, become similarly fundamental and transformative to the economy as computers and electricity have been. Which leads to many important questions. Who owns these models? Who can run them? How will the value that is created with these models be captured and distributed across society? How will these models change the opportunities of contributing to society, and there opportunities in participating in the wealth being created?

Copyright is one of the current methods to work with some of these questions. But I don't think it is the crucial one. What we need is to think about how the value that is being created is distributed in a way that benefits everyone, ideally.

We should live in a world in which the capabilities that are being discovered inspire excitement and amazement because of what might be possible in the future. Instead we live in a world where they cause anxiety and fear because of the very real possibility of further centralising wealth more effectively and further destabilizing lives that are already precarious. I wish we could move from the later world to the former.

That is not a question of technology. That is a question of laws, social benefits, social contracts.

A similar fear has basically killed the utopian vision which was once driving a project such as Google Books. What could have been a civilisational dream of having all the books of the world available everywhere has become so much less. Because of the fears of content creators and publishers.

I'm not saying these fears were wrong.

Unfortunately, I do not know what the answer is. What changes need to happen. Does anyone have links to potential answers, that are feasible? Feasible in the sense that the necessary changes have a chance of being actually implemented, as changes to our legal and social system.

My answer used to be Universal Basic Income, and part of me still thinks it might be our best shot. But I'm not as sure as I used to be twenty years ago. Not only about whether we can ever get there, but even whether it would be a good idea. It would certainly be a major change that would alleviate many of the issues raised above. And it could be financed by a form of AI tax, to ensure the rent is spread widely. But we didn't do that with industrialization and electrification, and there are reasonable arguments against.

And yet, it feels like the most promising way forward. I'm torn.

If you read this far, thank you, and please throw a few ideas and thoughts over, in the hope of getting unstuck.

Ein Film sie alle zu finden

11 Oscar-Nominierungen für den Herrn der Ringe Teil 3 - Die Rückkehr des Königs!

Ein halbes Jahrzehnt Nodix

Vor genau fünf Jahren habe ich Nodix begründet. Wie jedes Jahr (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005) heißt das Rückblick und Ausblick und ein wenig Zahlenspielchen, sowie Versprechen, die ich nicht einlösen werde.

Laut dem Zähler auf dieser Website hatten die Nodix-Seiten im ersten Jahr 2.000, im zeiten 20.000, dann 44.000, und dann 115.000 Besuche. Und letztes Jahr? Laut dem Zähler ging die Zahl auf 92.000 neue Besuche zurück. Was bedeutet das? Sind es tatsächlich weniger Besucher als früher? Nun ja, überraschend wäre es nicht -- einen Großteil des Jahres waren die Seiten eher ruhig, manche einfach tot, und vor fast zwei Monaten gab es einen fiesen Angriff auf Nodix, der alle Daten löschte, und die Daten immer noch nicht wieder zurück sind.

Genauer in die Zugriffsstatistiken geschaut, können wir aber sehen, dass Nodix nicht unbedingt weniger Besucher anlockt: laut der 1&1-Statistik hatten wir schon 2004 nicht 115.000 Besucher sondern 198.000 -- und letztes Jahr nicht etwa 92.000, sondern sage und schreibe 416.454 Besucher! Nicht Seitenaufrufe.

Woher die Diskrepanz? Ich tippe auf die Feeds. Seit Ende 2004 setzen die Nodix-Seiten vermehrt auf Feeds, und ihr, werte Leser, nutzt diese Gelegenheit natürlich auch, und das ist auch gut so. Der Abruf eines Feeds jedoch erhöht nicht den Zählerstand auf der Seite. Auch weiß ich nicht, ob die Statistik von 1und1 Abrufe des Feeds, der sich nicht verändert hat, auch mitzählt -- sprich, wird jedesmal, wenn jemand, der einen RSS-Feed der Nodix-Seiten abonniert hat, online geht und Feeds checkt, der Zähler erhöht? Dann wäre die Zahl von 416.454 natürlich deutlich überhöht! Aber dann wiederum biete ich auf semantic.nodix.net auch einen Feed im RSS-Format, den Feedburner aus dem Atom-Feed erstellt, den ich nicht mitzählen kann. Und PlanetRDF smusht semantic.nodix-Einträge auch noch mit. Was cool ist. Aber über Reichweite kann man dann letztlich nur noch die Kristallkugel befragen. Sie ist genauso glaubwürdig wie der Zähler von 1und1 oder der auf dieser Seite und jetzt etwa 273.000 anzeigt.

Oder kurz: ich habe eigentlich keine Ahnung, wieviele Leser Nodix eigentlich hat. Nada.

Also kommen wir zu den Rück- und Ausblicken: nutkidz sind wieder da, bisher regelmäßig, und das soll auch so bleiben. Auch die englische Übersetzung läuft prima. Apropos Übersetzungen: nach einer langen Pause ist auch die deutsche Übersetzung von something*positive wieder angelaufen. Ihr kennt das nicht? Ist auch ein Webcomic - und ein sehr fieser dazu! Ich würde sagen, ab 16 und nichts für schwache Gemüter. nakit-arts läuft prima -- Schwesterchen, gratuliere! Dies ist bei weitem der erfolgreichste Blog auf den Nodix-Seiten und auch um längen die schönste Seite von Nodix. Nur weiter so! semantic.nodix läuft und läuft gut. Wer sich für meine Arbeit interessiert, sollte da mit-lesen. Das DSA4 Werkzeug - nun, die Seite ist tot, ich denke noch darüber nach, und wenn alles nach Plan läuft, wird es dieses Jahr einen neuen Start geben. Dazu mehr zu gegebenem Zeitpunkt. XML4Ada95 hat ein Interesse geweckt ähnlich wie die Sprache selbst ;) -- ich will die Seite bald noch ein letztes Mal ändern, und dann ist das Projekt beendet. Nodix ist groß, wie ihr seht. Und es wird dieses Jahr noch weiter wachsen.

Also, auf in die zweite Hälfte des Jahrzehnts! Eine drittelmillion soll der Zähler am Jahresende anzeigen!

Ein neuer Anfang

Alles, was aufwändiger ist als ein Blog scheint zur Zeit nicht zu funktionieren.

Wie viele von Euch wissen, verfolge ich seit langem das Ziel, ein Programm zu erstellen, welches beim Spielen von DSA in der vierten Edition Spielern und Spielleitern zur Hand geht. Wie ebenfalls die meisten wissen, war das Projekt leider die letzten Monate tot. Dies hatte mehrere Gründe: einerseits habe ich schlichtweg viel weniger Zeit als früher, und schließlich habe ich mich mit den Aufgaben beim DSA4 Werkzeug übernommen. Ich wollte sowohl das Programm erstellen - in allen Aspekten, Datenhaltung, User Interface, Logos, als auch die dazugehörige Website betreuen, als auch die Dokumentation schreiben, als auch eine Softwarebibliothek in C++ erstellen, die für DSA4-Tools gedacht ist, als auch die Druckausgabe verfeinern, als auch das XML-Format definieren, als auch die entstehende Community verwalten. Das mag eine ganz kurze Zeit funktioniert haben -- aber es musste, als ich meinen Beruf angetreten habe, schief gehen. Dummerweise liebe ich auch noch meinen Beruf, was mich zwar persönlich erfreut, aber der Entwicklung des DSA4 Werkzeugs nicht gut tut.

Ich werde in diesem Blog anfangen, die weitere Entwicklung des DSA4 Werkzeugs nach außen zu präsentieren. Dies ist ein vorläufiger Ersatz für eine echte Website, die einen Community-Prozess erlaubt. Aber diese Website werde ich nicht aufstellen. Ebenso werde ich tatsächlich nur wenige Emails im Zusammenhang mit dem DSA4 Werkzeug ausführlich beantworten. Ich brauche jemanden, der sich bereit erklärt, eine dazugehörige Website zu pflegen, und jemanden, der mir bei der Community helfen will. Ich erinnere mich, dass ich früher teilweise mehr Zeit in die Website und die Beantwortung von Emails investiert habe, als in die eigentliche Entwicklung. Dies muss ich diesmal vermeiden. Die Community war großartig! Ich brauche bloß an Leute wie Twel oder Wolfgang denken, die unglaubliches geleistet haben. Wer sich berufen fühlt, zu helfen, melde sich bitte bei mir.

Damit klar ist: ich werde auch in Zukunft nicht auf magische Weise mehr Zeit haben. Aber meine Erfahrungen in Industrie und Forschung, sowie das Wissen und die Erfahrung, die ich inzwischen über Open Source Community Prozesse und Software Engineering angesammelt habe, erlauben mir -- so die Hoffnung -- einige Fehler der ersten zwei Versionen des DSA4 Werkzeugs zu vermeiden. Die Architektur des alten DSA4 Werkzeugs war sehr durchdacht, und extrem flexibel. Leider war sie auch sehr kompliziert: metatemplate-Programmierung in C++ ist megacool, aber es macht den Einstieg für andere nicht gerade einfach. Einer der Gründe, warum es in den Monaten der aktiven Entwicklung keine 100 Zeilen von anderen Entwicklern in den Quelltext geschafft haben, oder warum niemand das Projekt aufgegriffen hat, nachdem ich offensichtlich nicht mehr weiterarbeitete. Dies wird der Hauptpunkt, den ich angreifen werde.

In den nächsten Tagen - ja, wirklich, Tagen - werde ich hier anfangen, in Blogeinträgen die neue Architektur zu skizzieren, sowie diverse Punkte auflisten. Zu einem Zeitplan möchte ich mich nicht durchringen, wann das Programm fertig wird. Aber ich kann versprechen, dass ein neuer Anfang gemacht ist. Warum? Weil das nicht Absicht ist, sondern auf erstem Code beruht. Zugegeben, bisher nur auf meiner Platte. Aber sobald es vorzeigbar ist, auch wieder auf SourceForge im CVS.

Ein neuer Blogger

Schon wieder habe ich das Bloggingformat gewechselt - diesmal nichts selbstgeschriebenes, sondern einfach Blogger.com verwendet. Superleicht zu bedienen, bloß der Import der alten Daten war etwas hakelig...

Solltet Ihr irgendwo Fehler entdecken, bitte melden.

Ein neues Jahr steht an

2005 war ein gutes Jahr. Ich werde es vermissen. Und dennoch freue ich mich auch auf 2006. Auch das nächste Jahr wird sicher sehr spannend, und wenn es auch nur halb so gut ist zu mir wie 2005 es war, dann kann ich mich glücklich schätzen.

Vor zwei Jahren versuchte ich mich mit einer Prognose für 2004 für das kommende Jahr, und obwohl sie so unglaublich generisch gehalten war, ging sie in die Hose. Deswegen habe ich es 2004 unterlassen, was für 2005 wahrzusagen, und, wenn ich zurückblicke, war das eine gute Entscheidung. Es wäre wieder in die Hose gegangen. Oder sieht jemand das letzte Einhorn im Kino?

2006 wird sehr spannend. Auf der Arbeit wird das EU Projekt SEKT zu Ende gehen. Das heißt, die ganzen spannenden Case Studies werden die SEKT Technologien benutzen und wir werden furchtbar viele Erfahrungsberichte sammeln. Sehr spannende Zeiten! Auch dem BMBF Projekt SmartWeb, an dem ich eher am Rande beteiligt bin, stehen spannende Zeiten bevor: die Fußball WM ist eines ihrer Case Studies! Na, da hat man sich ja mal was vorgenommen. Die Semantische Erweiterung der Wikipedia steht an, ebenso der Workshop auf der WWW zum Thema Ontologieevaluierung -- dem Thema meiner Dissertation, die nebenher auch noch entstehen soll.

Soviel zur Arbeit. Privat? Das ist immer viel schwerer einzuschätzen. Ich würde gerne eine USA-Reise machen. Am liebsten dieses Jahr, wenn es die Zeit erlaubt, sonst halt 2007. Quer durch die Staaten. In Neuengland anfangen und rüber nach Kalifornien. Das wäre cool. Mal wieder auf den RatCon gehen. Neue Freunde kennenlernen, alte behalten, noch ältere neu entdecken (Michael, wenn Du das liest, meld Dich doch mal!)

Ich will dieses Jahr ebenso gesundbleiben wie die vorhergehenden. Na gut, ein wenig öfter zum Arzt gehen kann nicht schaden. Ich merke, dass ich nicht mehr 16 bin. Etwas abnehmen, das wäre cool! Mehr Bewegung und etwas gesünder essen. Gar nicht mal unbedingt weniger. Nur besser. Und halt Bewegung. Seufz.

Weiterhin so häufig ins Kino gehen. Aber mehr darüber Bloggen. Vernünftigere Kritiken schreiben. Ich merke in letzter Zeit bin ich etwas blahblah. Text ist da, aber kein Inhalt mehr. Will ich wieder ändern. Seht euch nur das gestrige Post an. Wen hätte ich dadurch überzeugt, zum Konzert mitzukommen, wenn man die Bands nicht schon kennt. Das haben weder Amber noch Saltatio verdient.

Die nutkidz sind da, haben gar eine neue Folge erhalten! 2006 werden viel mehr neue Folgen kommen.

Ach ja, die eigenen Projekte. Das DSA4 Werkzeug. Ich habe versprochen, zum Status etwas zu schreiben, noch vor Weihnachten. Wie üblich habe ich mein Versprechen bezüglich des DSA4 Werkzeugs gebrochen. Na ja, fast. Geschrieben habe ich es, aber nicht veröffentlicht. Ich muss das noch umarbeiten. Überhaupt, DSA: dieses Jahr habe ich da einiges getan: sowohl an der Sieben Gezeichneten Kampagne mitgearbeitet, wie auch am Jahr des Feuers. Soviel werde ich nächstes Jahr wohl kaum auf die Beine stellen. Obwohl - ein Abenteuervorschlag ist eingereicht. Ein sehr gewagter. Mal sehen, was rauskommt.

Kurz, 2006 wird ein interessantes Jahr. An guten Vorsätzen mangelt es mir nicht. An Möglichkeiten zum Glück auch nicht. An guten Freunden und Kollegen, mit denen ich meine Ziele erreichen kann, ebenfalls nicht. Was also soll schon schiefgehen? Jeder Tag, nicht nur jedes Jahr, ist ein neuer Anfang. Man darf nur nicht vergessen, sich mal auszuruhen. Hinsetzen. Nachdenken. Das fehlt mir ein wenig. Das wäre eigentlich ein guter Vorsatz.

Mehr Zeit zum Nachdenken.

Im Moment bin ich aber etwas in Eile, verzeiht. Jetzt zunächst zum Konzert, und dann womöglich gleich nach Erfurt, beziehungsweise, nach Lützensömmern, tief im Thüringischen. Dort Silvester feiern, und das nächste Jahr begrüßen. Aber ich werde mir diesen guten Vorsatz im Hinterkopf behalten. Mehr Zeit zum Nachdenken.

Einen guten Rutsch!

Eine Stimme im Himmel

"Wolfgang, bist Du Dir wirklich sicher?"

Man sitzt ganz gemütlich im Flugzeug. Am Anfang erfährt man noch, dass nicht der Kapitän, sondern der erste Offizier fliegt. Dann, plötzlich, über die Lautsprecher kam der oben stehende Satz. Und man denkt sich: oh, der Anfänger scheint Schwierigkeiten zu haben und fragt den Chef. Zumal es ein wirklich turbulenter Flug ist (im wörtlichen Sinne).

"Wolfgang, hier spricht Dein Gewissen - bist Du Dir wirklich sicher?"

Was bedeutet das? Hat der Offizier, oder gar der Kapitän zufällig den falschen Schalter umgelegt? Doch die Auflösung folgt stante pede, nach dem Wetterbericht:

"Allen Fluggästen einen schönen Tag und wir hoffen, dass Wolfgang seine Entscheidung, das Junggesellendasein zu beenden nicht bereuen wird."

Puh...

Eine Viertelmillion

Heute Nacht überschritt die Zahl der Besucher der Nodix-Webseiten die Viertelmillion.

Vielen Dank für die vielen treuen Besucher auf nakit-arts, auf semantic.nodix, hier, und auch auf den zur Zeit deutlich vernachlässigten Seiten nutkidz, something*positive, DSA4 Werkzeug und XML4Ada95. Ihr seid großartig.

Eklige Metzger

Ich will ja gar nicht wissen, was das für ein Zeug ist... bäh!

Hier fehlt noch ein Bild.

England eagerly lacking cofidence

My Google Alerts just send me the following news alert about Croatia. At least the reporters checked all their sources :)

England players lacking confidence against Croatia International Herald Tribune - France AP ZAGREB, Croatia: England's players confessed to a lack of confidence when they took on football's No. 186-ranked nation in their opening World Cup ...

England eager to break Croatia run Reuters UK - UK By Igor Ilic ZAGREB (Reuters) - England hope to put behind their gloomy recent experiences against Croatia when they travel to Zagreb on Wednesday for an ...

Enjoying dogfood

I guess the blog's title is a metaphor gone awry... well, whatever. About two years ago at Semantic Karlsruhe (that is people into semantic technologies at AIFB, FZI, and ontoprise) we installed a wiki to support the internal knowledge management of our group. It was well received and used. We also have an annual survey about a lot of stuff within our group, to see where we can improve. So last year we found out, that the wiki was received OK. Some were happy, some were not, nothing special.

We switched to a Semantic MediaWiki since last year, which was a labourous step. But it seems to have payed off: recently we had our new survey. The scale goes from very satisfied (56%) over satisfied (32%) and neutral (12%) to unsatisfied (0%) and very unsatisfied (0%).

You can tell I was very happy with these results -- and quite surprised. I am not sure, how much the semantics made the difference, or maybe we did more "gardening" on the wiki since we felt more connected to it, and gardening cannot be underestimated, both in importance and resources. In this vein, very special thanks to our gardeners!

One problem a very active gardener pointed out not long ago was that gardening gets hardly appreciated. How do other small-scale or intranet wiki tackle this problem? Well, in Wikipedia we have the barnstars, and related cool stuff -- but that is basically working because we have an online community and online gratification is OK for that (or do I misunderstand the situation here? I am not a social scientist). But how to translate that to an actually offline community that has some online extensions like in our case?

Entschuldigung!

Die Farbe war doch furchtbar! Rosa. Ich habe mich ja schon selbst kaum auf Nodix getraut... Hiermit kehren wir zu dem gewohnten langweiligen Grau in Grau zurück, welches wir erst zu schätzen wissen, nachdem wir gesehen haben, welche furchtbaren Farbkombinationen sonst noch möglich sind.

Auf der DSA4 Werkzeug-Website gab es ein kleines Update auf Version 1.16a.

Erdös number, update

I just made an update to a post from 2006, because I learned that my Erdös number has went down from 4 to 3. I guess that's pretty much it - it is not likely I'll ever become a 2.

Erste Bewerbung

Wie peinlich: die erste Bewerbung ist raus, und da befindet sich diese Website in einem so desolaten, unordentlichen Zustand (und natürlich verweise ich auf Nodix, wenn ich mich bewerbe). Und dennoch, wie bereits geschrieben, am Freitag und Montag ist (sind? - es ist ja nur eine Prüfung, die aber in zwei Teilen) die Prüfung, im Moment habe ich einfach nicht die Zeit, an Nodix weiterzuarbeiten.
Tja, dann kann ich nur hoffen, dass die Inhalte von Nodix überzeugend sind, auch mit der derzeitigen, nicht ganz optimalen Navigationsstruktur...

Apropos Inhalte: heute gibt es auch endlich neue Inhalte! In der Abteilung Philosophie stehen ab sofort meiine beiden letzten Hausarbeiten zum Lesen bereit. Viel Spaß damit! Auf Kommentare und heiße Diskussionen bin ich natürlich sehr gespannt (und bitte nicht wundern, wenn ich erst Dienstag antworte!)