User talk:Sinan Taifour

Welcome!
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Stablepedia feedback
You asked me for some feedback about Stablepedia. In my opinion, it looks pretty good. In order to make absolutely certain that your website doesn't violate Wikipedia's copyright (although it's already better than many Wikipedia mirrors), you might want to add a link to the history of the relevant page on Wikipedia (it's the page's URL with  on the end), and to a copy of the copyright that you host on your own website (it's legal to copy the information in WP:GFDL as long as you don't change it). From an ease-of-use perspective, a search box at the top of each generated page, or in the same place as Wikipedia's search box, might be useful; also, if the page visited turns out to be a stable redirect, showing the stable version of that page's target may also be useful. The other piece of advice I'd suggest (it's optional, but may help) is to put something in your site's stylesheet to hide anything of class 'selfreference', such as ; Wikipedia places this class on things that might not necessarily be useful for mirrors (often, but not always, disambiguation headers to pages in the Wikipedia namespace). Hope that helps! --ais523 16:57, 24 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks a lot for your feedback. Regarding the copyrights notice, i will follow your suggestions. In the meanwhile, as you can see, the "GNU Free Documentation License" link stays at the bottom of every page (as shown in Wikipedia itself). Currently Stablepedia requests rendered pages from Wikipedia, so the general visual interface is very similar. In the near future, i plan to start requesting Wikitext and rendering it myself (as recommended by some Wikipedia tech people). A search box has been requested twice, and it will be included in my next release. Thanks again for your comments, i appreciate it. --Sinan Taifour 17:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

FYI
Wikipedia talk:Stable versions is active again. You may want to discuss stablepedia there. --EMS | Talk 20:28, 26 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks a lot EMS. I posted an entry there, there are quite good suggestions going on! :) --Sinan Taifour 17:05, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

RE: Kudos
Ypu said: You said "And I think your site is great. :-)", I am building a kudos page, i was wondering if you would allow me to include it along with your name :).
 * Sure. That'd be fine. Kevin Baastalk 18:47, 28 March 2007 (UTC)


 * My formula is based off of two things: information theory and probability theory. I realized that to estimate the parameters c and d, you're simply doing maximum likelihood estimation of the exponential distribution.  So, if t(x) represents the time of the xth most recent edit (t(0) being the current time), then the activity rate, $$d=\frac{m}{\sum_{x=1}^m (t(x-1)-t(x))}$$, and the aging rate, $$c=\frac{n}{\sum_{x=1}^n (t(0)-t(x))}$$. (Where n, and m are the number of edits that the averages are taken over.)


 * Because of the influence of the c parameter, on average, the stable version will be the (m/2)th most recent edit. So if you want the stable version to be, on average, k edits behind the most recent Wikipedia revision, then m should equal (k+1)*2.


 * Furthermore, since e^x*e^y=e^(x+y), and e^a > e^b if and only if a > b, the formula can be reduced to $$rating(x)=d*[t(x-1)-t(x)]-c*[t(0)-t(x)]$$ Kevin Baastalk 22:12, 28 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks a lot Kevin. I'm now working on a testing environment. Once i am done i'll look more into your suggestions, implement them, and see the results. I'll tell you once i have resutls :) --Sinan Taifour 17:04, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Well Done -- What comes next.
Congratulations on what one hopes is an interim step before Wikipedia really implements stable versions. To the extent that your algorithm identifies potentially stable versions, it might provide a helpful tool to flag candidates for consideration as the current stable version.

Why not think about an interface for your algorithm that will display an article's history and highlight those edits that the algorithm indicates are candidates for stablepedia (perhaps also displaying the numerical score). It would be a real help once (if) procedures for flagging the stable version are implemented. --SteveMcCluskey 19:42, 9 April 2007 (UTC)