Scribe

Background

Underserved Wikipedias (i.e. Wikipedias with a low number of articles and/or editors) often have a problem to recruit new editors to create high-quality articles. A lot of effort is invested into the recruitment and sustaining of new editors, especially in the human involvment level. For example, the Teahouse on English Wikipedia offers a plattform to exchange with other editors with a focus on a newcomer-friendly environment.

However, many of those efforts are limited in their application to the different Wikipedia communities. Particularly in under-resourced Wikipedia communities, the doubled commitment might lead to a decrease in productivity of the efforts.

Therefore, additionally to the community engagement, technical solutions to the problem need to be explored.

What

We proposed the tool Scribe in previous work. This repository presents the prototype of Scribe as a Wikipedia userscript.

Scribe supports editors in creating new articles. The focus of Scribe is twofold: First, when editors start writing the article, the tool suggests them section headings, so that the have a skeleton for their article to fill. Second, Scribe suggests references for each section that the editors can choose to include. The goal is to support the writing of high-quality articles, that conform the standards of existing articles and have a high coverage of articles.

When

This version of Scribe was built from 17th-19th of May 2019 at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Prague.

Future Work

This repository represents the prototype of Scribe. It is a proof of concept, and is not aimed to be in production in the current form. However, it is a starting point for the work of Scribe. The future work is tracked as tickets with the future work tag. Please refer to the issues to find details on the future work. In summary, we will focus on a better selection of section headings and reference selection, with a focus on reference quality and appropriateness.

Backend

Dependencies

Running the Scribe server requires:

• NodeJS >= 8.0.0
• *nix operating system
• NewsApi.org api key
• Core.ac.uk api key
• Bing Search & Translate api keys

Developing

npm i
cp .env.example .env
# Update .env properties
npm run start:dev

There is also a VSCode launch configuration in .vscode/launch.json which has debugging support.

Deploying

The official Scribe backend is hosted on Heroku: https://scribe-mediawiki.herokuapp.com/ruok Contact @ISNIT0 for help with deploying this yourself

Gadget/common.js

The "front-end" code can be found at ./common.js. You will need to add this to your MediaWiki user's common.js, see here for more documentation.

Contributing

Pull requests and issues are welcome. It's best to check with @luciekaffee as to her progress before spending much time developing this code-base.

License

MIT - LICENSE

Contributors

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!