Shortipedia:Help

Hi, and welcome to Shortipedia, the free web knowledge base that anyone can edit.

This is a very preliminary documentation. Feel free to edit and improve it.

What is Shortipedia?
Shortipedia is a wiki that allows to enter facts about anything, and the sources for these facts -- or rather, claims or statements. This means you may find facts that contradict each other, because they come from different sources -- but you should always find also the source of each fact. We don't make the decision on which of these claims are true in Shortipedia, because we think it is not our job to do so. Instead, we save the sources for all these facts, and then you can decide on which sources to trust, and which sources not to trust.

How do I use Shortipedia?
You can simply search and browse through the pages, like with a normal wiki. The main part of your screen will be occupied by the Wikipedia article on the topic you are browsing. Pages may, especially in the beginning, be created on the fly, and thus may take some time. You cannot change the content of the Wikipedia article from within Shortipedia, but above it you will find a link to the original article. The top area of the side bar holds the facts that have been saved in Shortipedia. Here you can also add further facts, but we will come to this in a moment. Next you will find a list of labels. If you are logged in, you can select which language labels to display. So you can browse and search for the information you are interested in. Underneath the labels, you usually find a number of boxes in the Section "Web of Data". These contain descriptions of entities that we found on the Semantic Web that appear to be identical to the topic of the page. You can bind these entities to the topic of the current page, and thus let Shortipedia know that it is indeed about the same entity. Then you can view what kind of information is available about this entity. You can also go to the source of the data and browse it using a Semantic Web data browser.

All knowledge in Shortipedia is available in standard formats like RDF for the further processing through tools, so that also your apps can profit from the knowledge on the Web. Thus, unlike in Wikipedia, applications can actually read the facts in Shortipedia and work with this knowledge. We envision Shortipedia to become a knowledge base that provides content not only for human readers, but also for their tools and applications.

How do I edit Shortipedia?
There are a number of ways you can improve the Shortipedia knowledge base. In general, words in red indicate that there is something to do.

First you can add labels and descriptions in the languages you know to entities. The idea of the labels and the descriptions is that they, together, uniquely identify an entity for a speaker of the given language. To give an example: a label like 'Europa' would be ambiguous, but together with a description it should unambigously identify an entity -- be it 'A planet of Jupiter', 'A mythical phoenician princess', or 'A 1990 movie by Lars von Trier'.

The second way you can edit Shortipedia is by binding the topics to external entities (see beneath for a bit more on the binding business). There are several ways to bind topics in Shortipedia to external entities, first you can bind it to a Wikipedia article (you will find the link to do so just above the displayed article), or you can bind an entity from the Web of Data to the given topic (every box in the Web of Data entry has a little 'bind' button for that), or you can bind properties and property values to Shortipedia topics (the selection comes up when clicking on the property or value).

Finally, you can modify Shortipedia by adding facts. You can add facts to Shortipedia in two principal ways:
 * 1) You can add facts directly in the facts section on the top of the sidebar, by clicking on Add. Select a property, select a value, and save. Afterwards you can add sources for this fact.
 * 2) You can copy facts from the Semantic Web. First you need to map the property and the property value (if it is not a number or a string or another literal, in which case no mapping for the property value is required). Then you can select the fact, click on "Add fact" at the top of the entity, and the fact will be added to the Shortipedia page (including a reference to the original source)

This way we hope to quickly grow to an interesting sized knowlede base for the Web.

Why should I log in?
Once you have created an account, you can set your language preferences. There are two major settings for the language preferences: first, on the basic info tab select the interface language you usually want to use. Then you can also select the check box that allows the system to use the list of specified languages instead of the default selection. For this, select in the last tab the languages you want to see.

There is also a second reason for why we want you to log in: because by tying edits to an identity (it may be anonymous, but still an identity) it will become possible to calculate trust ratings for the edits, as well as provide praise for the editors of Shortipedia.

What is this binding and unbinding business?
Words, in any natural language, are highly ambiguous. That is why Wikipedia has disambiguation pages, and why dictionaries and encyclopedias have multiple entries for a single term. Humans are highly skilled at dealing with this ambiguity. For computers though this is still very hard. The Semantic Web is a set of standards that wants to enable knowledge sharing and reuse on a global level -- to put it in another way, the Semantic Web aims to achieve for databases what the Web did for hypertext: instead of being locked in within a single system, all the systems can directly and natively interact with each other, access each others knowledge, and share.

One major ingredient to enable this is to be able to unambigously identify entities. And as said, words have shown to be problematic for that. So on the Semantic Web, instead of words, URIs are used, also called WebIDs. Every URI identifies one entity. Note that, on the other hand, every entity can have an arbitrary numbers of URIs. In Shortipedia, every page is about one entity, and Shortipedia provieds an URI for that entity. What you see in the Web of Data section of the sidebar are further entities fromt he Semantic Web, including their URIs, that Shortipedia thinks might also identify the same entity. If you agree, click on "bind". This let's Shortipedia know that the identifier indeed refers to the same entity.

What is the point of Shortipedia
We have dreamed for a number of years of a Semantic Wikipedia (read our papers on the topic, where we explain why this would be a good thing). On this site we want to demonstrate the feasability of the approach, and eventually lay the seed to what may one day become a Semantic Wikipedia (or, with a bit of less pathos, a Wikimedia Data Commons). So, we are fully aware that this system is not up to par yet, and there are tons of things that need improvement, but for something that was hacked together by two persons in three weeks it ain't that bad.

But as said, eventually we hope for Shortipedia to move to the WMF servers and become the common knowledge base for all Wikipedias (and beyond), just like Wikimedia Commons is the common media repository for the Wikipedias. But it is obvious that this goal can only be achieved together with the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Isn't this whole thing just another Freebase?
It is very similar, indeed, and we assume that Freebase and Shortipedia will exchange data in the long run (we already provide data from Freebase in the interface). The differences to Freebase are, among others:
 * Shortipedia is open source
 * Shortipedia is schema-less, i.e. there is no concept of domains in Shortipedia and all properties are global. This means that Freebase can and does offer better visualization and editing support than Shortipedia can, but on the other hand Shortipedia is more flexible with regards to the data we can collect
 * Shortipedia keeps and asks for references for all facts
 * Shortipedia allows for inconsistencies and does not require everyone to agree on facts (but rather asks to keep the sources)
 * Shortipedia is multi-lingual. Whereas Freebase allows for a multi-lingual interface to its data, this did not happen yet
 * Shortipedia is manually curated. Freebase has loaded big amounts of data from numerous sources, and put huge effort in succesfully cleaning up the data afterwards. Shortipedia aims at adding data manually, so we do not expect to achieve the size of Freebase any time soon

Oh, yeah, and Shortipedia has no community yet. I mean, we just started, and we don't have a clue if it will turn out to be succesful. Freebase has a huge and succesful community surrounding the service already.

Terminology
Shortipedia has pages about topics. Every page is in a specific language, and there are pages in every language about every Shortipedia topic. Topics can be linked to articles in Wikipedia. Topics have and need labels (and short descriptions) in every language, otherwise Shortipedia cannot display the appropriate labels. Claims are only entered once, and then translated to all languages, based on the translated labels. Claims always have the form attribute-value for a topic, i.e. with the topic they form a subject-predicate-object triple. Entities from the Web of Data can refer to the topic of a page. This is stated by binding the entity to the page.