Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links/Challenge

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[edit] Using bots

I know we can't use a bot to edit articles, but can we use a preprocessing bot to detect "obvious" disambig links before manually editing an article? Or one that goes through all the disambiguation pages and presents a nice searchable list of meanings for each dab? ~~ N (t/c) 01:28, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

You know, I've been mulling this over a lot - the ultimate purpose behind this challenge is to tap into competitive spirits in order to fix a large number of links in a short period of time... maybe there should be separate categories of contestants (bot assisted and manual) kind of like there's pro and amatuer sports. What do you think? -- BD2412 ^talk 01:41, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I think there should be three categories:

1. Manual
2. Using solvedisambiguation.py or another existing bot
3. Using own bot (must submit source)

~~ N (t/c) 02:06, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

That sounds good, and we can customize the prizes to match the categories. I'm going to add individual sign-up categories on the project page for the above, and for judges per the discussion below. -- BD2412 ^talk 04:19, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Judging

I've been thinking a bit about how we make sure people meet rules 5 & 7 (inaccurate disambig's and missing obvious disambig's). Should we have neutral (non-competing) judges look over everyone's entries? (I'd feel better with two or three sets of eyes looking over things). If so, I'd volunteer to be a judge.

I think it'd be necessary to make sure everyone gets an equal amount of scrutiny. Also, you know at some point someone may pipe up with the argument that the point is to disambiguate correctly not quickly. Having a good judging process will defuse this a bit. Whitejay²⁵¹ 03:08, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree that judging will be important, as the ultimate goal of this project is to improve Wikipedia - I'll put a sign-up for both judges and competitors on the project page. If we have, say, 5 editors competing, they could rack up 1000 disambigs in an hour, which is a lot to check - so judging will likely have to be through some kind of fairly random sampling process, maybe with a focus on links that are typically difficult to disambiguate. We'll probably need about as many judges as we have competitors, but there's also nothing to prevent competitors from checking each others work (in a collegial way, of course). On the other hand, at least it will be easy to pick out links to check, because each user will have a lengthy stretch of disambig fixes in their contributions. -- BD2412 ^talk 04:06, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pre-challenge preparations

I'm enthusiastic about anything to help along link repair. In the rules it seems that you can open tabs before the contest. So, depending on the performance of your computer, you could open up 500 tabs/windows, make the neccessary edits and then wait for the start of the race to then spend one hour submiting all the edits? Seems a little dodgey.--Commander Keane 09:02, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

• Dodgey, yes, but inevitable - part of my rationale for that rule is that there's simply no effective way to determine when a user opened a tab. Besides, I have a decent computer and DSL and I can't have more than about 50 open before my computer gets overwhelmed and turns into a slushbucket. On top of that, if we have a bunch of contestants who all try that strategy, I suspect they'll all aim for the easy fixes (e.g. "American") and edit-conflict each other out. And, of course, if we do have two or three users knock out 500 disambig links apiece over the course of an hour, that's a good thing for Wikipedia! -- BD2412 ^talk 13:00, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it is good for Wikipedia and I don't have a problem with it if 50 is generally the technical limitation. While I'm here, I noticed that if you miss an obvious link then you get disqualifed. Does this include every current entry from Link repair and link maintainence? That could make the competition a tortoise versus hare event, interesting. --Commander Keane 03:08, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

No mere footrace, this will require strategy and attention to detail! Makes it more fun, I think. But to be clear (and I think this is what you meant) the editor does not get disqualified from the competition for missing a link, he just doesn't get the article counted in his favor. -- BD2412 ^talk 03:25, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

I was about to point out the distinction between the participant geting disqualified and the particular edit not counting towards their total - but you caught me in a edit conflict. (Yes if someone is being a hare and misses a whole bunch of disambigs, they'll get tripped up. Like BD2412 says this is looking like it might take some forethought as how to approach the problem to win, as opposed to a mad rush.) Anyway, this reminds me, do we want to say that multiple edits to the same page count as just one edit? I can see reasons for both sides on the question. On the one hand, people can fix mistakes if the realize that they missed some obvious ones on a page. On the other hand, people can pad their number by choosing to do one at a time on single page. Whitejay²⁵¹ 03:39, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

That's why I think it has to be one point per article, not per edit. In my experience, most articles have just one link to disambig - but some are chock full of them. I think it will balance out. -- BD2412 ^talk 03:42, 6 October 2005 (UTC)