Note: LinkBot has been superseded by the Can We Link It link suggesting web tool.
"Can We Link It" has the following benefits above LinkBot, or feature parity with it:
However there are some downsides as compared to LinkBot:
The Link Suggester is a bit of software that takes the article text of a Wikipedia article, and looks for links that could be made to other articles, and that have not been made yet. LinkBot is the bit of software that takes these suggestions and presents them in way that people can easily read them on the Wikipedia. Both bits of software are written and operated by Nickj.
Yes, using a real-world example. Consider the following snippet (wiki codes are shown):
Newtown lies partly in the electorate of [[Grayndler]], currently represented by Anthony Albanese of the [[Australian Labor Party|ALP]].
The output of the link suggester might look like this:
The plan is for it to be added to the article's talk page.
No. The best judges of what are good links are humans, not software. Software does not understand context or meaning, whereas a human does. Therefore, the link suggestions would be added to the article's talk page, and then a human editor can add the links to the article, or disregard or delete them if they are not appropriate.
4 reasons:
The best approach is likely to be a fusion that combines the strengths of humans, and the strengths of software; A bit of software can perform the tedious and repetitive process of finding missing links; and a human is best able to take that information and apply it appropriately to the article.
Yes - look here for a discussion of auto-linking.
Note that most of the arguments against assumed that:
An approach is being used that specifically tries to address these problems - please see below for more information on good links versus bad links.
Exactly, and this is where it gets interesting. Making every single possible link is simply not conducive to the flow of an article. For example, consider the following real-world example wiki sentence:
A reorganisation of local government boundaries in 1968 saw part of Newtown placed under [[Marrickville]] council.
The link suggester, when showing every possible link would show the following for this sentence:
This is a pretty exhaustive list, but these are probably bad things to link on. To avoid this, the Link Suggester applies some simple rules-of-thumb to try and improve the signal-to-noise ratio (i.e. keep the 'good links' and eliminate the 'bad links').
A good link is usually either :
Then there are things that are sometimes worthwhile linking on:
Things that are usually bad links:
Additionally, a link should only be suggested once per article, as per the Wikipedia style.
Also, an article shouldn't link to itself (even by linking to a page that redirects to the original article).
The link suggester will suggest links that meet these criteria:
What remains are generally quite safe links to suggest, with a good signal-to-noise ratio.
The Link Suggester has been run on a local copy of the whole English Wikipedia already for testing purposes, but thus far these results have not been uploaded to the Wikipedia. The aim (if the feedback is suitably positive) is eventually for the LinkBot to upload the suggestions for every article in the English Wikipedia.
Yes, there are two:
No.
No (apart from capitalization differences).
I kept finding that there were articles that I hadn't linked to yet, simply because I didn't know that they existed. I decided that there should be an automated way of suggesting links, based on the text of the article.
Source code for LinkBot is now available. It's a bit of a mess, sorry!
Yes. Please take all the suggestions with a grain of salt. Bad suggestions are almost always because the same combination of words are used to mean different things to different people. I have endeavoured to eliminate bad suggestions, whilst keeping good suggestions, but getting a perfect automated link suggester is probably impossible without genuine Artifical Intelligence.
Also some suggestions can be tangential - that is they're not inherently wrong suggestions, they're just not appropriate to link to in the context that they're suggested. For this reason the suggestions are provided for your review, so that people can make the links they like and disregard the rest.
No, never. If the original article ever gets modified by the software, then that's a bug.
No - at the moment this is a personal project.
On the old Pentium-3 800 MHz which I am using for this:
So total time taken = 7 + 0 (rounding down) + 51 = 58 hours.
Note: These times do not include any uploading of suggestions to the Wikipedia by the LinkBot. This is purely the time taken to generate the suggestions, which the LinkBot can then upload.
Note: These times are proportional to the number of articles in the Wikipedia (and were accurate as of 13-Dec-2004) - so as the Wikipedia continues to grow, the times taken to process the data will increase too.
In PHP, running on Debian Linux 3.0.
Currently the main speed-limiting factor is political, and not technical. This is because there is maximum allowed limit of 6 transactions per minute for bots (although there is some discussion on allowing exceptions to this rule where there is consensus on it).
At the 6 transactions per minute rate, uploading all the suggestions to the Wikipedia would take 24 days, which is a very long time (and runs the high risk of the suggestions becoming out of touch with the article if it has been edited in the intervening period).
The fastest the LinkBot could probably go is around 30 or 40 transactions per minute, at which rate uploading suggestions would take around 5 days (which is far more realistic). So, if after the trial phase goes well, and if it still seems a good idea to run it on the whole Wikipedia, then I will see if there is consensus on raising the transactions per minute limit on the LinkBot.
Yes - for current examples here is the edit log for LinkBot.
There are also some much older examples (these are from Phase 1, done with manual cutting and pasting, around late October 2004):
Absolutely - you can leave both positive feedback and negative feedback (if you're not sure which, pick whichever you think is most appropriate). You can also let me know about suggested links that probably should never be suggested.
If no links were suggested, then the reason was one of the following:
Manual exclusions (never suggesting a link to a page, even though it qualifies as a "good link") are added because of one or more of the following reasons:
The idea of adding suggestions to the talk pages is that:
The problems with listing them separately as a big series of list pages are that:
I am looking for pages to contribute to. A friend suggested writing my own personal bio, then submitting it to this linkify bot as a way to find pages I might be interested in editing. dfrankow 17:02, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
If I create some of the links as suggested by the link bot, it is acceptable to delete that part of the link bot text on the talk page, or is that considered as bad as deleting the comments of a real person? I'd rather not have to put a comment after every suggestion saying that it is now taken care of, but if the text just stays, other people will waste time investigating every suggestion again.-- ragesoss 15:24, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
Note: LinkBot has been superseded by the Can We Link It link suggesting web tool.
"Can We Link It" has the following benefits above LinkBot, or feature parity with it:
However there are some downsides as compared to LinkBot:
The Link Suggester is a bit of software that takes the article text of a Wikipedia article, and looks for links that could be made to other articles, and that have not been made yet. LinkBot is the bit of software that takes these suggestions and presents them in way that people can easily read them on the Wikipedia. Both bits of software are written and operated by Nickj.
Yes, using a real-world example. Consider the following snippet (wiki codes are shown):
Newtown lies partly in the electorate of [[Grayndler]], currently represented by Anthony Albanese of the [[Australian Labor Party|ALP]].
The output of the link suggester might look like this:
The plan is for it to be added to the article's talk page.
No. The best judges of what are good links are humans, not software. Software does not understand context or meaning, whereas a human does. Therefore, the link suggestions would be added to the article's talk page, and then a human editor can add the links to the article, or disregard or delete them if they are not appropriate.
4 reasons:
The best approach is likely to be a fusion that combines the strengths of humans, and the strengths of software; A bit of software can perform the tedious and repetitive process of finding missing links; and a human is best able to take that information and apply it appropriately to the article.
Yes - look here for a discussion of auto-linking.
Note that most of the arguments against assumed that:
An approach is being used that specifically tries to address these problems - please see below for more information on good links versus bad links.
Exactly, and this is where it gets interesting. Making every single possible link is simply not conducive to the flow of an article. For example, consider the following real-world example wiki sentence:
A reorganisation of local government boundaries in 1968 saw part of Newtown placed under [[Marrickville]] council.
The link suggester, when showing every possible link would show the following for this sentence:
This is a pretty exhaustive list, but these are probably bad things to link on. To avoid this, the Link Suggester applies some simple rules-of-thumb to try and improve the signal-to-noise ratio (i.e. keep the 'good links' and eliminate the 'bad links').
A good link is usually either :
Then there are things that are sometimes worthwhile linking on:
Things that are usually bad links:
Additionally, a link should only be suggested once per article, as per the Wikipedia style.
Also, an article shouldn't link to itself (even by linking to a page that redirects to the original article).
The link suggester will suggest links that meet these criteria:
What remains are generally quite safe links to suggest, with a good signal-to-noise ratio.
The Link Suggester has been run on a local copy of the whole English Wikipedia already for testing purposes, but thus far these results have not been uploaded to the Wikipedia. The aim (if the feedback is suitably positive) is eventually for the LinkBot to upload the suggestions for every article in the English Wikipedia.
Yes, there are two:
No.
No (apart from capitalization differences).
I kept finding that there were articles that I hadn't linked to yet, simply because I didn't know that they existed. I decided that there should be an automated way of suggesting links, based on the text of the article.
Source code for LinkBot is now available. It's a bit of a mess, sorry!
Yes. Please take all the suggestions with a grain of salt. Bad suggestions are almost always because the same combination of words are used to mean different things to different people. I have endeavoured to eliminate bad suggestions, whilst keeping good suggestions, but getting a perfect automated link suggester is probably impossible without genuine Artifical Intelligence.
Also some suggestions can be tangential - that is they're not inherently wrong suggestions, they're just not appropriate to link to in the context that they're suggested. For this reason the suggestions are provided for your review, so that people can make the links they like and disregard the rest.
No, never. If the original article ever gets modified by the software, then that's a bug.
No - at the moment this is a personal project.
On the old Pentium-3 800 MHz which I am using for this:
So total time taken = 7 + 0 (rounding down) + 51 = 58 hours.
Note: These times do not include any uploading of suggestions to the Wikipedia by the LinkBot. This is purely the time taken to generate the suggestions, which the LinkBot can then upload.
Note: These times are proportional to the number of articles in the Wikipedia (and were accurate as of 13-Dec-2004) - so as the Wikipedia continues to grow, the times taken to process the data will increase too.
In PHP, running on Debian Linux 3.0.
Currently the main speed-limiting factor is political, and not technical. This is because there is maximum allowed limit of 6 transactions per minute for bots (although there is some discussion on allowing exceptions to this rule where there is consensus on it).
At the 6 transactions per minute rate, uploading all the suggestions to the Wikipedia would take 24 days, which is a very long time (and runs the high risk of the suggestions becoming out of touch with the article if it has been edited in the intervening period).
The fastest the LinkBot could probably go is around 30 or 40 transactions per minute, at which rate uploading suggestions would take around 5 days (which is far more realistic). So, if after the trial phase goes well, and if it still seems a good idea to run it on the whole Wikipedia, then I will see if there is consensus on raising the transactions per minute limit on the LinkBot.
Yes - for current examples here is the edit log for LinkBot.
There are also some much older examples (these are from Phase 1, done with manual cutting and pasting, around late October 2004):
Absolutely - you can leave both positive feedback and negative feedback (if you're not sure which, pick whichever you think is most appropriate). You can also let me know about suggested links that probably should never be suggested.
If no links were suggested, then the reason was one of the following:
Manual exclusions (never suggesting a link to a page, even though it qualifies as a "good link") are added because of one or more of the following reasons:
The idea of adding suggestions to the talk pages is that:
The problems with listing them separately as a big series of list pages are that:
I am looking for pages to contribute to. A friend suggested writing my own personal bio, then submitting it to this linkify bot as a way to find pages I might be interested in editing. dfrankow 17:02, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
If I create some of the links as suggested by the link bot, it is acceptable to delete that part of the link bot text on the talk page, or is that considered as bad as deleting the comments of a real person? I'd rather not have to put a comment after every suggestion saying that it is now taken care of, but if the text just stays, other people will waste time investigating every suggestion again.-- ragesoss 15:24, 11 January 2006 (UTC)