Hello All,
Recently there are lot of discussions (in this list also) regarding the
translation project by Google for some of the big language wikipedias. The
foundation also seems like approved the efforts of Google. But I am not sure
whether any one is interested to consult the respective language community
to know their views.
As far as I know only Tamil, Bengali, and Swahili Wikipedians have raised
their concerns about Google's project. But, does this means that other
communities are happy about Google efforts? If there is no active community
in a wikipedia how can we expect response from communities? If there is no
response from a community, does that mean that Google can hire some native
speakers and use machine translation to create articles for that wikipedia?
Now let us go back to a basic question. Does WMF require a wiki community to
create wikipedia in any language? Or can they utilize the services of
companies like Google to create wikipedias in N number of languages?
One of the main point raised by the supporters of Google translation is
that, Google's project is good *for the online version of the language*.That
might be true. But no body is cared to verify whether it is good for
Wikipedia.
As pointed out by Ravi in his presentation in Wikimania, (
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddpg3qwc_279ghm7kbhs), the Google
translation of wikipedia articles:
- will affect the biological growth of a Wikipedia article
- will create copy of English wikipedia article in local wikis
- it is against some of the basic philosophies of wikipedia
The people outside wiki will definitely benefit from this tool, if Google
translation tool is developed for each language. I saw the working example
of this in Poland during Wikimania, when some people who are not good in
English used google translator to communicate with us. :)
Apart from the points raised by Ravi in his presentation, this will affect
the community growth.If there is no active wiki community, how can we expect
them to look after all these junk articles uploaded to wiki every day. When
all the important article links are already turned blue, how we can expect
any future potential editors. So according to me, Google's project is
killing the growth of an active wiki community.
Of course, Tamil Wikipedia is trying to use Google project effectively. But
only Tamil is doing that since they have an active wiki community*. Many
Wiki communities are not even aware that such a project is happening in
their wiki*.
I do not want to point out specific language wikipedas to prove my point.
But visit the wikipedias (especially wikipedias* that use non-latin scripts*)
to view the status of google translation project. Loads of junk articles
are uploaded to wiki every day. Most of the time the only edit in these
articles is the edit by its creator and the inter language wiki bots.
This effort will definitely affect community growth. Kindly see the points
raised by a Swahali
Wikipedian<http://muddybtz.blog.com/2010/07/16/what-happened-on-the-google-challenge-t…>.
Many Swahali users (and other language users) now expect a laptop or some
other monitory benefits to write in their wikipedia. That affects the
community growth.
So what is the solution for this? Can we take lessons from
Tamil/Bengali/Swahili wikipedias and find methods to use this service
effectively or continue with the current article creation process.
One last question. Is this tool that is developing by Google is an open
source tool? If not, we need to answer so many questions that may follow.
Regards
Shiju Alex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shijualex
For those who don't want to read the whole email, we need:
* A person who is well introduced in Wikinews.
* A person who is well introduced in Wikiversity.
* A person who knows to program in Python and willing to spend 2
hours/week in archiving our mailing list on Meta [1].
* Your advices in defining what "substantial activity" (at Incubator,
Multilingual Wikisource or Beta Wikiversity) means for the approval of
new projects, especially in the cases of new Wikinews and Wikiversity
editions.
Please, send your applications and comments to me at
millosh(a)gmail.com. If you are applying for Wikinews or Wikiversity
"position", please write your thoughts on what "substantial activity"
means for the project type for which "position" you are applying.
It is not hard to define implicitly or explicitly "substantial
activity" for new editions of Wikipedia and for new editions of other
projects which have dynamics similar to Wikipedia (Wiktionary,
Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource). You can write an
article, word definition, quote, book chapter or you can add a source
once and you don't need to see that project for months. In the case of
Wikinews, daily activity matters. In the case of Wikiversity, you need
real people around.
Thus, we need both: your input on question what "substantial activity"
for new Wikinews and Wikiversity editions means; as well as two
persons who would be willing to take care about new requests for
Wikinews and Wikiversity editions. If you have some important note
related to the same question, but about other projects (which have
Wikipedia-like dynamics), please send your comments, too. If you have
any other comment related to the Language proposal policy [2] (except
that it would be good to have Wikinews edition in Sumerian or so),
please send them, too.
Our archives [1] are outdated because of Jesse's lack of time. It is 2
hours/week task. For that position we need a confidential person who
knows to program in Python, but not necessarily (then, it is 4
hours/week task).
All of the new members will be full members of the Language committee,
which means that they will participate in other parts of the new
language editions approval.
[1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Archives
[2] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_proposal_policy
Hello. It’s Robert Harris once again. It’s been just over a
month since I began working on the study commissioned by the Wikimedia Board on
Potentially Objectionable Content on WMF projects. During that time, I’ve
spoken to many people inside and outside Wikimedia, but the time has come, I
think, to actively begin a discussion within the communities about some of the
questions which I've encountered, specifically around Commons and
images within Commons. To that end,
I’ve posted a series of questions for discussion on the Meta page that hosts
the study (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_C….) Please feel free to visit the page and contribute to the
discussion. And please post the link, if you might, anywhere within the
projects where you think it might be relevant.
I look forward to the comments of any of you who wish to join the discussion.
The WMF mission is to provide free knowledge to the world. Wikipedia, in
particular, hopes to summarize all notable topics into a neutral sum.
Accomplishing this goal means Wikipedia an the WMF will have to evolve.
Consider the implications of the mission: Every single work that contains
notable topics must have complete coverage in Wikipedia. While every article
need not cite every work, every article must accurately summarize every
notable opinion of every notable topic in every work.
Some have interpreted the role of the proposed citations project as one of
merely centralizing the citations that already exist in Wikipedia. The
mission, however, calls for a broader vision. This new project should have a
bibliography of all works since that is the scope of the mission. The nature
of knowledge further calls for us to understand the links between items
containing knowledge, their categorical context and their abstract
relationships. This broad, unambiguous view of works and their topics will
allow us to explicate them neutrally and select only the most notable ones
for inclusion. It will, in the limit of time, prevent our judgment from
being clouded by the limited, local view of knowledge that we currently
have.
The proposed new project has the following features: It is a bibliography of
all kinds of works that fall under the umbrella of the WMF mission. Works
and collections of works contain disambiguating user contributed text and
media. Works can link to other works. Works come together to form
categories. People can use this site as their personal bibliography,
encouraging participation of a much greater community of users and curation
of the bibliography them.
There are many challenges to creating a project of such scale, but in order
to accomplish our goals of freeing knowledge we must strive to collect it
and understand it in a more nuanced way than we currently are.
Brian Mingus
Graduate student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder
... on this weeks NY Times "tech talk" podcast. Subjects include:
flagging enthusiasm for Wikipedia, the differences between the
Foundation & the contributor base, WMF efforts to increase diversity,
Google Translation Toolkit, British Museum collaborations, and a very
brief mention of flaggedrefs.
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/technology/techtalk.html
Starts at 16:02 and runs for 7 minutes.
-- Phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Hi folks,
It's been a little while since I've sent out an update (sorry about that).
The Pending Changes trial continues apace, with 1,382 articles configured
to use the feature as of this writing.
Most of the work on the software that powers Pending Changes is focused on
refactoring and stability. Some of the performance problems associated with
this feature have been fixed, and we believe we have fixed all of the
user-visible performance problems. Looking at our backend systems, there's
some areas where this feature is still causing more load than it should,
which is where our work is focused now.
Aaron Schulz, who has done the lion's share of the development to date
(thanks Aaron!) continues to stay involved, but at a much reduced level as
he focuses on non-Wikimedia stuff, while Chad Horohoe ramps up.
We'll be publishing some statistics soon which outline per page metrics on
revisions under Pending Changes. Nimish Gautam and Devin Finzer (Devin is
an intern that is working for Wikimedia Foundation this summer) are working
on some statistics that they'll be publishing soon. More discussion is
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Metrics
It will be time for a vote soon about whether to keep Pending Changes
enabled on en.wikipedia.org. We'll be pinging folks in the community about
the post-trial discussion. If we're rigidly following the proposal, the
trial will end on August 15, regardless of whether a vote has happened.
However, we're probably already running late for making a decision by then.
For a variety of operational reasons, we plan to leave the feature running
while the community decides whether to keep the feature on, assuming that
process lasts no more than a month or so after August 15.
The main discussion area for this feature is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Feedback
If you have comments/suggestions/questions, that's a good place to post
them.
Rob
Hi All:
I'm still riding the wave of enjoyment I caught at
Wikimania in Gdansk, thanks for that :).
One of the topics that came up in my conversations
there had to do with Wikimedia's policies surrounding
free software.
It is my view that a good portion of 'the sum of all
knowledge' is currently embodied in software and
programming practice. At the same time, I know
that access to knowledge is often done 'by any
means necessary'.
Given the potential for confusion and even frustration
when rights and responsibilities aren't clear, I think it
would be great if the foundation had some clear policies
about how it will invest in software development.
I note that this year's GNU Hackers Meeting is taking place
very soon; http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/denhaag/ --
Personally I'd love it if future Wikimanias could be
co-located with or otherwise bridged with GNU meetings.
Joe
We've got one new member, Amir Ahroni. He is a linguist, he knows a
couple of languages and he is active in support of smaller Wikipedian
communities.
I am happy to announce that folk from Translatewiki [1] have joined
the Language committee as the Globalization subcommittee [2]. GlobCom
will take care about localization, internationalization and, as
Siebrand likes to say, globalization of MediaWiki and Wikimedia
projects. The fact is, of course, that Translatewiki is already doing
that job and that GlobCom will formalize connection between
Translatewiki and Wikimedia Foundation. Inside of the LangCom, GlobCom
will be in charge for checking localization requirements for creation
of new projects.
[1] - http://translatewiki.net/
[2] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Globalization_subcommittee
Interesting blog post here which is really about the future of
journalism but has implications for Wikipedia too.
"The Federal Trade Commission suggests that copyright law could be
expanded to limit the right of aggregators to republish reported facts
within a specific time period, a change known as a "hot news"
exemption."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/22/google-ftc-proposals-hurt-j…