Dear Leila,
thank you for elaborating how this mailing came about.
I would like to address the ethical aspect of your project.
In saying
"For the purposes of this research, we are
taking the following approach: we take a
more global approach to identify missing
content, rank them by their importance,
and recommend them to editors. The
editor should make the final call
whether the recommendation they
receive should go to the destination
language."
you certainly leave it to the editor whether or not to take action and actually translate
an article you have suggested.
However, I think a threshold is crossed here with the Wikimedia Foundation interfering
into the editors' business. It has generally been accepted that the Foundation will
not care about content creation, except for handling DMCA takedown requests as office
actions.
It still has to be addressed whether the Foundation may solicit the creation of content,
and if so, in which manner? I gather from the discussion on German Wikipedia that most
experienced editors think no. This is a volunteering project, and everyone taking part in
it decides for himself what he would like to do. We have never had suggestions like this.
Indeed, I think this is a delicate matter concerning the relation between the Community
and the Foundation that should be dealt with in the first place. Which roles do we play?
Or, which roles do you change, or rather play with? when sending out such a suggestion?
And, of course, an opt-in for such experiments would be fine. I think a lot of people
would even be inclined to subscribe to such a list because after all we are interested in
what you are doing, aren't we? ;)
Best regards,
Jürgen.
Am 26.06.2015 um 20:40 schrieb Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
Hi everyone,
Thank you for your feedback. It's really appreciated. My responses below, all in
one-batch to avoid many emails to the list. Sorry if it's too long in advance.
2015-06-25 16:50 GMT-07:00 Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>om>:
This is such a delightful experience. Whoever is working on translation interfaces and
translation research this way: very nicely done indeed.
Thank you! It's great to hear that you liked it. There are many things we would like
to improve about the algorithm and hearing that you like it makes us more motivated. If
you have more specific comments, feel free to leave us a comment on the talk page.
The translation tool is owned by Language Engineering team. You can read more about it
here, though I'm guessing you've already seen that. Sorry if it's repetitive.
On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 12:29 AM, Emmanuel Engelhart <kelson(a)kiwix.org> wrote:
[...]
I have received this kind of email too. "No",*this is not delightful at all*.
This kind of email bores me, like many other Wikipedians (see
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Le_Bistro_du_jour#Wikimedia_Fo…).
AFAIK I don't have asked to received that kind of email, and the definition of what
you do is "spamming" (and please don't answer to this by talking about the
"opt-out" option, "opt-in" is the respectful way of doing). Can you
please stop this immediately?
I'm sorry that you received an email when you don't like to receive one. This is
not nice and I apologize for that. The opt-out option is available through the email you
have received. We will make sure you do not receive any future research related emails if
you unsubscribe. The test on French Wikipedia is over now.
The opt-out/opt-in discussion deserves a dedicated effort considering the needs of
everyone involved. I'm committed for improving the communications with users regarding
research projects and will do what I can on that front.
FYI, the Wikipedia in French has an article evaluation program (like on Wikipedia in
English) based on wikiprojects, so honestly I think they already know pretty well where
are the weakness without the help of a robot:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:%C3%89valuation/Index
Thank you for this pointer.
On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 12:42 AM, Jane Darnell <jane023(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting viewpoint, Emmanuel! I am always fascinated to know what others think I might
be interested in, even if the "other" is just a bot. Like Sam I was delighted,
and I might even be prompted to do a translation (though not one of the ones they
suggested, but an article which I made myself and is in the same general area). I disagree
by the way, that each Wikipedia has to decide on their own what is "encyclopedia
worthy" in that language. I think the projects need to start trusting each other more
and be open to *aggressive* translation efforts as a way to educate new (multi-lingual)
editors, and also to promote a neutral point of view. Let's wikibomb everybody
aggressively with translation suggestions!
Jane, thank you for your comment. We're happy that you welcomed receiving such
recommendations. For the purposes of this research, we are taking the following approach:
we take a more global approach to identify missing content, rank them by their importance,
and recommend them to editors. The editor should make the final call whether the
recommendation they receive should go to the destination language. Ideally, we want to
loop back editors' expertise and feedback to the algorithm, i.e., if you as an editor
think a recommendation is not useful in a language, we should be able to collect that
information from you, feed it to the algorithm, and let the algorithm learn. This needs to
happen down the road (hopefully not too far down) for the algorithm to be able to serve
the needs of each language and community.
On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 1:29 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>
wrote:
I still wonder what made a bot think I speak French? Surely, a few minor edits on fr.wp
can't be the trigger?
(well, I had two years at school, but I barely remember enough to identify the
language...)
I'am copying from here:
We determine which editors are suitable for receiving recommendations for translating
from the source to the target language via two methods. The first is scraping the target
users' User pages for a Babel template that indicates that they speak the source
language. The second is selecting target users who have an account with the same username
in the source language, have made at least one edit in both the source and target
Wikipedias, have made at least one edit in either language within the last year and have
matching email addresses for the two accounts.
Based on the feedback from the test, it is clear that we need to raise the bar on the
contributions to source/destination languages for the future steps. We initially had a 100
byte limit in each of the source and destination language in the past year as a bar, but
that one somehow didn't get to the code (code issue) and we didn't realize this
until we received the feedback. Based on the feedback, we may want to consider even higher
bars for choosing editors, one thing we do not want to do is to ignore those with few
edits completely. Those may be people who have contributed few times and recommendations
can encourage them to contribute more and come back. Any feedback on how we can improve
this aspect further is appreciated.
On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 6:58 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting, I figured I received the mail because of joining translation projects. It
seems that it's enough to have made a single edit in both language wikipedias in the
last year.
we changed the wording of the page to make it clearer. I think there was a confusion
caused by our wording. please read here.
I hope you will do this in both directions for each language pair (both suggestions from
FR --> EN and from EN --> FR.)
the way the algorithm makes the final recommendations is language agnostic so we can
easily expand them to other language pairs. the goal is to have them for the top 30
languages (to and from), the top 50 if we have enough data to make good enough
recommendations. We do hope that the engineering aspect of receiving these recommendations
can also move as fast so we can offer the editors the recommendations in a way that works
smoothly with their workflow.
On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 8:32 AM, Jim <trodel(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I strongly disagree that this is spamming. Like others have mentioned, I was not offended
by the email (though I wasn't "delighted") by it either, I think it is a
reasonable attempt to encourage editors to put some efforts into languages other than
English.
Plus it is easy to unsubscribe from the research mailing list.
Thanks for sharing your point of view and happy to hear we did not bother you by it. As
mentioned earlier, I hope that we (all parties involved, not just research) can resolve
the email conversation in a way that more people are happier with the outcome.
On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 9:38 AM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Spamming - a question what the e-mail function of WP is ment for.
I was very surprised to get the request though my French is limited, I hardly ever edited
on fr.WP,
The feedback about limited French language knowledge is a great feedback that we have
heard clearly. Thank you for sharing that and sorry that you were chosen. This is
something we have already changed in our code to increase the threshold on the way we
choose future participants.
and the suggested topics have totally nothing to do with what I do on Wikipedia. So I do
think that the mail was not quite appropriate, and it gives me a not so favorable
impression about the people or initiative behind.
I'm sorry if the recommendation has disappointed you. As mentioned in the
recommendation email, you will be in one of the two groups: those who receive random but
still important (with the algorithm's definition of importance) recommendations or
those who receive personalized and important recommendations. Since we have not finalized
the analysis of the test I cannot look to see which group you were in since that may have
impact on the results. I hope this helps us build more trust, and hopefully we can learn
much more when the results are out. Thank you for your time.
Thanks again everyone. I will continue monitoring this list. We are also busy with the
talk page so you may experience some delay. Apologize in advance if that happens. Just be
sure that we will get back to you. :-)
Best,
Leila
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