Hi Gerard,
On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 12:13 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
I have read your comments on the WIki Indaba. Sad to hear that you could
not make it.
As a movement it is not our task to serve the "2000" languages that you
mention. It is our task to serve the languages that we support in our
existing Wikipedias.
This is not obvious to me if I read the strategic direction [1].
Specifically under Knowledge Equity we say:
"We will welcome people from every background to build strong and
diverse communities. We will break down the social, political, and
technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing
to free knowledge."
Depending on how we want to operationalize "welcome" in the above
sentence, we may not want to focus on Wikipedia as the only project
which will be the path of entry for language communities. Even if it's
clear that we have to focus on Wikipedia, it is not clear to me that
we should focus our support only on the languages that already have a
Wikipedia. What if there are languages in which Wikipedia can be
present and due to the limitations of the specific community around
that language they have not been able to pull off their language
Wikipedia? Of course, I understand the tension. There is argument to
be made that when it comes to Wikipedia, our best bet is to focus on
the languages that are already in. That's why I called out that we
will be challenged with the trade-offs.
Where you talk about subjects that people are likely
to read, there are
many predictive models possible. The big issue in current approaches is
that they start with what we know from projects particularly the English
Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia is biased and consequently many subjects
that may be of a higher relevance in other languages or cultures will not
be suggested when English Wikipedia and its traffic is the yard stone to
measure by.
The ranking model in section 2.2. of
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03235.pdf addresses this issue to a good
extent. There is no emphasis on one Wikipedia in that model. Please
check the list of features.
We still can do better and improve that model to not be based on the
pageviews in the destination language, as I mentioned in the report,
we've had some conversations about picking up that direction, but the
reality is that we have a working model that can predict pageviews in
the destination language based on more universal features than just
what is happening in English Wikipedia. We should use that model when
relevant! :)
Anyway, thank you for reporting on your virtual
presence; you made a
difference in this way.
anytime! :)
Best,
Leila
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction#…
Thanks,
GerardM
On 23 March 2018 at 00:41, Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all,
Here is the report of the one session I attended in Wiki Indaba over the
past weekend:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LZia_(WMF)/Trip_
reports#Wiki_Indaba_2018
Best,
Leila
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