Newpedia

Newpedia is a simpler scratch-space to develop new material:

• A place not designed to be high quality, where everything can be in flux, possibly wrong, in need of clarification and polishing and correction.
• A place that can be used to build draft articles, images, and other media before posting them to Wikipedia
• A place where everyone is welcome to start a new topic, and share what they know: relying on verifiability over time (but not requiring it immediately), and without any further standard for notability
• A place with no requirements to edit: possibly style guidelines to aspire to, but where newbies who don’t know how the tools or system works are welcomed and encouraged to contribute more, and not chastised for getting things wrong.
• A place where higher volume automated article creation is welcome, including outputs from language models

Scripts can be written to help editors work through the most polished Newpedia items and push them to Wikipedia and Wikisource and Commons. Scripts can be written to prompt LLMs to generate and fill out outlines. Other encyclopedias could draw from the results (perhaps filtered by categories indicating what workflows had gone into each or how drafty they are) and use them to suggest open tasks to their own editors

History

SJ floated the idea in 2013. In 2022, Mako discussed Newpedia (or double-plus-newpedia) in a panel. Erik Moeller talked about how the current focus on notability is keeping all of our projects from growing, in “Ghosts of Wikipedia Future“.

In 2023 a range of LLM experiments were run on different wikis, with extensive supervision and rewriting. This is a collection of outputs with a range of levels of automation/reformatting/supervision, with an eye towards minimizing rewriting to allow evaluation of how to make the raw model outputs more useful.

Tools

• Template: np - indicate the source and degree of clean-up applied to it
• LLMs:
  • Bing Chat has the best inline citations at the moment. Limited access
  • ChatGPT is likely to hallucinate references and details, but can summarize general knowledge and render code examples or code completion that's pretty good [and can be run to test it]
  • Galactica was intended to have a "wiki" output format, but people didn't get to experiment much with it before it was taken offline
  • LLaMA may be useful but has just now been released; waiting for access

Examples

New York Boros

NYCboros >> Ouroboros .

Lists of redlinks, stubs, and good articles to expand:

Queens

"You are a renowned historian of Queens. Summarize the history and current status of ___, with references from historical reocords where available:"

schools

• PS 149 Christa McAuliffe school
• PS 149 Danny Kaye school

houses

• Ocean Bay Apartments (Bayside)
• Astoria Houses

parks

• Idlewild Park
• Hook Creek Park

buildings

• Fort Totten Battery
• New York Architectural Terra Cotta Works Building
• Queens Borough Public Library, Poppenhusen Branch
• Congregation Derech Emunoh
• Queensbridge Tower
• Richmond Hill Republican Club
• Bulova Corporate Center
• Queens General Court House
• 104th Field Artillery Armory

streets

• Jewel Avenue (Queens)
• Goethals Avenue (Queens)
• Jackson Avenue (Queens)

monuments

• Flight 587 Memorial
• Forms in Transit
• Column of Jerash (Queens)

other

• Brinckerhoff Cemetery
• Elevator Historical Society