Thanks, MZMcBride.
This is a really cool feature, which seems helpful for a wide range of different uses.
Kudos to Madman, Krenair and everyone who made this possible!
Fabrice
On Oct 23, 2012, at 5:00 AM, wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Send Wikimedia-l mailing list submissions to
> wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
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> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Wikimedia-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Info action (MZMcBride)
> 2. Re: Info action (Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation)
> 3. Re: Info action (Risker)
> 4. Re: Info action (Richard Symonds)
> 5. Re: Info action (David Gerard)
> 6. Re: Info action (Andy Mabbett)
> 7. Re: Info action (Thomas Morton)
> 8. Re: Info action (Przykuta)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:41:21 -0400
> From: MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
> Message-ID: <CCAB35C1.1DDF4%z(a)mzmcbride.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
> Hi.
>
> This is just a heads-up that you'll start seeing a "Page information" link
> in the sidebar (under "Toolbox") in the coming days on Wikimedia wikis. It
> is deployed now to a few wikis already. This "Page information" link leads
> to a newly reimplemented info action:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=info
>
> Many, many years ago, the info action was added to MediaWiki, but due to
> performance issues, it was quickly disabled by default and was mostly
> forgotten about. This year, with the wonderful help of Madman, Krenair, and
> others, we have reimplemented the info action to provide an information
> dashboard of sorts about a particular page title to users.
>
> This dashboard includes a variety of metadata about the page, including the
> page's protection status, length, default categorization sort key, internal
> page ID, templates used on the page, and more. The content is somewhat
> dynamic: for some pages it will omit certain irrelevant fields and for some
> users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such as the
> number of page watchers) will be displayed. This will slowly allow for the
> deprecation of outside tools that currently provide information of this
> nature.
>
> The hope is that this action will evolve over time to become a valuable
> resource for users. If you can think of data points that are missing from
> the current action's output or have other ideas to improve the info action
> (it desperately needs a little design love), please feel free to e-mail this
> list or file a bug at <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/>.
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:59:49 +0000
> From: "Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation"
> <pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
> Message-ID:
> <17143532-1350943191-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-602246200-(a)b1.c9.bise6.blackberry>
>
> Content-Type: text/plain
>
> Now that's just cool...
> -----------------------
> Philippe Beaudette
> Director, Community Advocacy
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc
>
>
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com>
> Sender: wikimedia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:41:21
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List<wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
>
> Hi.
>
> This is just a heads-up that you'll start seeing a "Page information" link
> in the sidebar (under "Toolbox") in the coming days on Wikimedia wikis. It
> is deployed now to a few wikis already. This "Page information" link leads
> to a newly reimplemented info action:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=info
>
> Many, many years ago, the info action was added to MediaWiki, but due to
> performance issues, it was quickly disabled by default and was mostly
> forgotten about. This year, with the wonderful help of Madman, Krenair, and
> others, we have reimplemented the info action to provide an information
> dashboard of sorts about a particular page title to users.
>
> This dashboard includes a variety of metadata about the page, including the
> page's protection status, length, default categorization sort key, internal
> page ID, templates used on the page, and more. The content is somewhat
> dynamic: for some pages it will omit certain irrelevant fields and for some
> users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such as the
> number of page watchers) will be displayed. This will slowly allow for the
> deprecation of outside tools that currently provide information of this
> nature.
>
> The hope is that this action will evolve over time to become a valuable
> resource for users. If you can think of data points that are missing from
> the current action's output or have other ideas to improve the info action
> (it desperately needs a little design love), please feel free to e-mail this
> list or file a bug at <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/>.
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:04:21 -0400
> From: Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com>
> To: pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Mailing List
> <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
> Message-ID:
> <CAPXs8yRHEX9Umj6tzTjHATCJDtmLuM55Oi7jojSEGa9p00OL2g(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Concur with Philippe. Thanks for letting us know about this.
>
> Risker
>
> On 22 October 2012 17:59, Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation <
> pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Now that's just cool...
>> -----------------------
>> Philippe Beaudette
>> Director, Community Advocacy
>> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc
>>
>>
>> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com>
>> Sender: wikimedia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:41:21
>> To: Wikimedia Mailing List<wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
>>
>> Hi.
>>
>> This is just a heads-up that you'll start seeing a "Page information" link
>> in the sidebar (under "Toolbox") in the coming days on Wikimedia wikis. It
>> is deployed now to a few wikis already. This "Page information" link leads
>> to a newly reimplemented info action:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=info
>>
>> Many, many years ago, the info action was added to MediaWiki, but due to
>> performance issues, it was quickly disabled by default and was mostly
>> forgotten about. This year, with the wonderful help of Madman, Krenair, and
>> others, we have reimplemented the info action to provide an information
>> dashboard of sorts about a particular page title to users.
>>
>> This dashboard includes a variety of metadata about the page, including the
>> page's protection status, length, default categorization sort key, internal
>> page ID, templates used on the page, and more. The content is somewhat
>> dynamic: for some pages it will omit certain irrelevant fields and for some
>> users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such as the
>> number of page watchers) will be displayed. This will slowly allow for the
>> deprecation of outside tools that currently provide information of this
>> nature.
>>
>> The hope is that this action will evolve over time to become a valuable
>> resource for users. If you can think of data points that are missing from
>> the current action's output or have other ideas to improve the info action
>> (it desperately needs a little design love), please feel free to e-mail
>> this
>> list or file a bug at <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/>.
>>
>> MZMcBride
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list
>> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list
>> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:59:50 +0100
> From: Richard Symonds <richard.symonds(a)wikimedia.org.uk>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
> Message-ID:
> <CACHSVDwCSOc2v-jGHbPmccVKTPnHtbyrp8wzgtrgGfy5UonJFg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> MZMcBride,
>
> This looks fantastic, and very useful! I'm not sure how related this is,
> but is there any way the page can also pull up page views? Or would that be
> a problem? My understanding is that page views puts too much load on the
> servers, so it may well be unworkable...
>
> It's also be useful to be able to see how many editors, authors etc there
> were in the past 24 hours - again, I'm not sure if this is doable, but I
> thought I'd throw it out there!
>
>
> Richard Symonds/Chase me ladies
>
>
> On 22 October 2012 22:41, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi.
>>
>> This is just a heads-up that you'll start seeing a "Page information" link
>> in the sidebar (under "Toolbox") in the coming days on Wikimedia wikis. It
>> is deployed now to a few wikis already. This "Page information" link leads
>> to a newly reimplemented info action:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=info
>>
>> Many, many years ago, the info action was added to MediaWiki, but due to
>> performance issues, it was quickly disabled by default and was mostly
>> forgotten about. This year, with the wonderful help of Madman, Krenair, and
>> others, we have reimplemented the info action to provide an information
>> dashboard of sorts about a particular page title to users.
>>
>> This dashboard includes a variety of metadata about the page, including the
>> page's protection status, length, default categorization sort key, internal
>> page ID, templates used on the page, and more. The content is somewhat
>> dynamic: for some pages it will omit certain irrelevant fields and for some
>> users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such as the
>> number of page watchers) will be displayed. This will slowly allow for the
>> deprecation of outside tools that currently provide information of this
>> nature.
>>
>> The hope is that this action will evolve over time to become a valuable
>> resource for users. If you can think of data points that are missing from
>> the current action's output or have other ideas to improve the info action
>> (it desperately needs a little design love), please feel free to e-mail
>> this
>> list or file a bug at <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/>.
>>
>> MZMcBride
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list
>> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:15:25 +0100
> From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
> Message-ID:
> <CAJ0tu1GMc+-Yd4ow_fjX_kjSNV=0pwjMoGuSOXDjdwbvL+Gxeg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 23 October 2012 10:59, Richard Symonds
> <richard.symonds(a)wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
>
>> This looks fantastic, and very useful! I'm not sure how related this is,
>> but is there any way the page can also pull up page views? Or would that be
>> a problem? My understanding is that page views puts too much load on the
>> servers, so it may well be unworkable...
>
>
> History pages on en:wp already have a link to stats.grok.se, shouldn't
> be hard to put such a link here as well.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:29:34 +0100
> From: Andy Mabbett <andy(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
> Message-ID:
> <CABiXOE=f45wOC2NpmLctk2P8e4iP7PeM+FNZHfvqe2N8Z2P6Hg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 22 October 2012 22:41, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>
>> This is just a heads-up that you'll start seeing a "Page information" link
>> in the sidebar (under "Toolbox") in the coming days on Wikimedia wikis.
>
> This sounds like a really useful feature.
>
>> for some users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such
>> as the number of page watchers) will be displayed.
>
> Why is this for admins only?
>
> --
> Andy Mabbett
> @pigsonthewing
> http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:45:49 +0100
> From: Thomas Morton <morton.thomas(a)googlemail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
> Message-ID:
> <CAKO2H7-bqH1=1F-W-X_UkPqr9PABMdZpTvGb3=zYonDrac=Pug(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 23 October 2012 11:29, Andy Mabbett <andy(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 22 October 2012 22:41, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>>
>>> This is just a heads-up that you'll start seeing a "Page information"
>> link
>>> in the sidebar (under "Toolbox") in the coming days on Wikimedia wikis.
>>
>> This sounds like a really useful feature.
>>
>>> for some users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such
>>> as the number of page watchers) will be displayed.
>>
>> Why is this for admins only?
>>
>
> For the same reason Special:UnwatchedPages is Admin-only I presume :) to
> avoid people using this feature to identify unwatched pages to vandalise.
>
> Tom
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:53:42 +0200
> From: Przykuta <przykuta(a)o2.pl>
> To:
> =?UTF-8?Q?Wikimedia_Mailing_List?=<wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Info action
> Message-ID: <5f8d6a27.532d54d6.50867736.bc0b8(a)o2.pl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
>>>> for some users (such as administrators), certain additional fields (such
>>>> as the number of page watchers) will be displayed.
>>>
>>> Why is this for admins only?
>>>
>>
>> For the same reason Special:UnwatchedPages is Admin-only I presume :) to
>> avoid people using this feature to identify unwatched pages to vandalise.
>>
>> Tom
>
>
> This tool is not only for admins:
>
> http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/watcher/?db=enwiki_p&titles=Main_Page
>
> ;)
>
> But it works, if number of watchers > 30
>
> Przykuta
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
>
> End of Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 103, Issue 50
> ********************************************
A letter in support of the Community Fellowship program from past,
current, and prospective Fellows,
The WMF has expanded profoundly over the past decade, and especially
in the last few years. Recently initiatives to streamline and focus
the WMF have been undertaken; while these efforts are worthy in spirit
and necessary at some level, one useful if not vital program has been
caught in that process: The Community Fellowship program. We would
like to express our strong support of this valuable and important
program.
The Fellowship program is first and foremost a community-based
program. It selects editors to work on projects -- those which are
novel and have yet to be tried, those that have been tried but have
not been rigorously developed or tested, and those otherwise that need
financial, technical and institutional backing to succeed. It
represents a direct line of support from the WMF to
community-organized, community-driven, and community-maintained
projects.
We strongly believe that the Fellowship program is a great way to jump
start many projects cheaply, efficiently, and with low-risk. Most
importantly, because Fellowship projects are community-organized,
there is high potential for their broad community support.
We recognize that the Wikimedia Foundation’s allocation of funding
must reflect the priorities of the Foundation’s annual and strategic
plans, and we understand that the future of the Fellowship program is
at risk under the justification that it does not fit within those
plans.
The Fellowship program of course has a cost, but it is one we believe
is well justified by its impact. The following reasons explain why we
think the program is a worthwhile asset to the WMF and one that will
ultimately help it succeed in its strategic goals:
1) The program has a track record of producing successful projects,
with promising upcoming efforts that would be interrupted by a loss of
funding. Most recently a new-editor community called the Teahouse was
developed directly through the Fellowship program. The Teahouse, as
well as other projects have targeted goals which often match up with
those identified by the Foundation as urgent, such as new editor
engagement and editor retention. Other projects besides the Teahouse
have worked on improving our dispute resolution processes, our small
language wiki development, improving the usability of help
documentation, and facilitating cross-wiki translation efforts.
GLAM/Wikipedian-in-Residence positions were pioneered under the
Fellowship program as were studies in long term editor trends through
Wikimedia Summer of Research. (See the full list of past projects).
These projects are of great value and exist in areas that the
community had or has not made sufficient advances in on its own.
In the works are projects to create a sense of community around the
sorely lacking female demographic, to build a game which would ease
new editors through the maze of skills needed to be effective, a
Wikipedia Library initiative which would outfit our most experienced
editors with access to high quality resources through a single sign-on
portal, and a Badges experiment to employ a proven approach to
recognizing, motivating, and rewarding the efforts of our users.
Without the Community Fellowship program, those efforts may stall or
collapse.
2) The Fellowship program's core strength is as a laboratory of agile,
community-driven creativity and innovation. The program has nurtured
projects that require more investment and organization than the
community alone can support, but that innovate in areas of importance
to both the community and the Foundation. The Fellowship program has
the asset of targeted flexibility and cost-effective implementation.
Fellowship projects require few if any development resources,
substantially reducing their burden on the Foundation. Through its
varied portfolio of projects the Fellowship program can address any
number of key goals, and do so in a lightweight but meaningful way.
3) The Fellowship program is committed to demonstrating results and
making data-driven recommendations that help meet Foundation targets.
Fellowship research projects have set and maintained a high standard
for reporting results and making actionable recommendations. The
Teahouse pilot reports and metrics reports, the dispute resolution
survey results, and the template A/B testing projects are excellent
examples of this commitment to transparency and accountability. The
Foundation has benefitted from these data: results from fellowship
projects have been featured at Wikimania. Deputy Director Eric
Moeller’s presentation on supporting Wikiprojects drew extensively on
Fellowship project findings, and E3’s template testing presentation
was based substantially on Fellowship research. Fellowship research
has been a frequent feature on the Wikimedia blog, and has generated
good press for the Foundation.
4) The Fellowship program been instrumental to our understanding of
the editor decline, and how to stop it. Fellowship projects have
yielded many valuable & actionable insights into the editor decline:
such as the negative impact of the gradual increase in newcomer
warnings and newcomer reverts, and the recent decline in participation
in community processes by newer groups of editors. Fellowship
research has also refuted several prominent decline theories, such as
the theory that the quality of new editors has decreased over time, or
that the workload of vandal fighters has increased. In short,
Fellowship research allows Wikimedia to prioritize promising work and
make decisions about which decline theories to address based on actual
data, rather than anecdotes, accepted wisdom, or intuition.
5) The Fellowship program builds good will between the WMF and the
community by spotlighting and bootstrapping community-driven
initiatives. Fellowships are devised by community members, endorsed
by community members, implemented with community involvement--and the
community reaps the benefits of those initiatives. The Foundation
gets to play the vital role of supporting projects that otherwise may
have floundered, sat idle, or been ignored completely. The community
appreciates this and recognizes the Foundation’s pivotal part in
making these projects happen. Also, not continuing the program would
mean not just removing funding from the recipients of Fellowships and
their projects, but also losing the community infrastructure and
networks that have been developed as a result. The Foundation is the
keystone to continuing this progress.
6) The Fellowship program gives the Wikimedia Foundation one of the
only channels to directly fund individual editors. And not just any
editors but some of the most active, engaged, driven, and enthusiastic
editors Wikipedia has. Funding those editors directly enables them to
devote a degree of focus and commitment to Wikipedia that they might
not otherwise be able to balance while meeting other constraints in
their lives. The Foundation has become a recipient of a great amount
of donations, but much of that financial support is unavailable to
individual editors. There is not yet a grant-making process which
doesn't run through Chapters. The Fellowship program is one lifeline
to those editors, and it is a good one.
7) The Fellowship program provides a pipeline of trusted and
knowledgeable editors to contribute to the Foundation's efforts. Many
of those editors would be ideal candidates for positions within the
Foundation, and the Fellowship program is a great way to identify,
enlist, and onboard those individuals. Maryana Pinchuck and Steven
Walling were Fellows, as were Liam Wyatt, Lennart Guldbrandsson,
Stuart Geiger, Diederik van Liere, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Melanie
Kill, Aaron Halfaker, Achal Prabhala, Jonathan Morgan, and James
Alexander. While being a training ground for future Foundation
staffers, advisors, or researchers is not the stated purpose of the
Fellowship program, it is nonetheless a positive side-effect.
8) The Fellowship program partners with and complements other WMF
initiatives. The fellowship program enhances programs such as Editor
Engagement Experiments by experimenting with community features rather
than just interface features. Creating new spaces for new editors to
find help and build community, identifying pain-points in existing
community processes by surveying editors, and organizing cross-wiki
translation efforts are excellent ways of improving the editor
experience on Wikipedia. Fellowship projects have also benefitted
existing WMF initiatives by providing necessary services: for
instance, the Teahouse has served the needs of students enrolled in
Global Education programs that do not have access to Classroom
Ambassadors. The impact of the Fellowship program scales and exceeds
the scope of the individual projects to numerous other forums and
facets of the community.
For these reasons, we urge the Wikimedia Foundation to reevaluate the
worth of the Community Fellowship program and to continue it in its
original or a similar capacity. The Fellowship program is an
impactful, flexible laboratory of creativity which connects the
Foundation and the community's best and most passionate editors.
Having it has been a huge gain, and losing it would be a significant
loss.
Sincerely,
* Anya Shyrokova User:Anyashy, prospective Fellow
* Jake Orlowitz User:Ocaasi, prospective Fellow
* Jon Harald Søby User:Jon Harald Søby, former Community Fellow
* Jonathan Morgan User:Jtmorgan, former Research Fellow
* Liam Wyatt User:Wittylama, former Cultural Partnerships Fellow
* R. Stuart Geiger User:Staeiou, former Wikimedia Research Fellow
* Peter Coombe User:The wub, Community Fellow
* Steven Zhang User:Steven Zhang, Community Fellow
* Tanvir Rahman User:Tanvir Rahman, Community Fellow
*A letter in support of the Community Fellowship program, from past,
current, and prospective Fellows:*
*
The WMF has expanded profoundly over the past decade, and especially in the
last few years. Recently initiatives to streamline and focus the WMF have
been undertaken; while these efforts are worthy in spirit and necessary at
some level, one useful if not vital program has been caught in that
process: The Community Fellowship
program<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships>.
We would like to express our strong support of this valuable and important
program.
The Fellowship program is first and foremost a community-based program. It
selects editors to work on projects -- those which are novel and have yet
to be tried, those that have been tried but have not been rigorously
developed or tested, and those otherwise that need financial, technical and
institutional backing to succeed. It represents a direct line of support
from the WMF to community-organized, community-driven, and
community-maintained projects.
We strongly believe that the Fellowship program is a great way to jump
start many projects cheaply, efficiently, and with low-risk. Most
importantly, because Fellowship projects are community-organized, there is
high potential for their broad community support.
We recognize that the Wikimedia Foundation’s allocation of funding must
reflect the priorities of the Foundation’s annual and strategic plans, and
we understand that the future of the Fellowship program is at risk under
the justification that it does not fit within those plans.
The Fellowship program of course has a cost, but it is one we believe is
well justified by its impact. The following reasons explain why we think
the program is a worthwhile asset to the WMF and one that will ultimately
help it succeed in its strategic goals:
1) The program has a track record of producing successful projects, with
promising upcoming efforts that would be interrupted by a loss of
funding. Most
recently a new-editor community called the
Teahouse<http://enwp.org/WP:TEAHOUSE> was
developed directly through the Fellowship program. The Teahouse, as well
as other projects have targeted goals which often match up with those
identified by the Foundation as urgent, such as new editor engagement and
editor retention. Other projects besides the Teahouse have worked on
improving our dispute
resolution<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute%20Resolution%20Improvement%2…>processes,
our small language wiki development, improving the usability of help
documentation<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_Project/Community_fellowship>,
and facilitating cross-wiki translation efforts.
GLAM/Wikipedian-in-Residence positions were pioneered under the Fellowship
program as were studies in long term editor trends through Wikimedia Summer
of Research. (See the full list of past
projects<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Fellows>).
These projects are of great value and exist in areas that the community
had or has not made sufficient advances in on its own.
In the works are projects to create a sense of community around the sorely
lacking female demographic, to build a game which would ease new editors
through the maze of skills needed to be effective, a Wikipedia Library
initiative which would outfit our most experienced editors with access to
high quality resources through a single sign-on portal, and a Badges
experiment to employ a proven approach to recognizing, motivating, and
rewarding the efforts of our users. Without the Community Fellowship
program, those efforts may stall or collapse.
2) The Fellowship program's core strength is as a laboratory of agile,
community-driven creativity and innovation. The program has nurtured
projects that require more investment and organization than the community
alone can support, but that innovate in areas of importance to both the
community and the Foundation. The Fellowship program has the asset of
targeted flexibility and cost-effective implementation. Fellowship
projects require few if any development resources, substantially reducing
their burden on the Foundation. Through its varied portfolio of projects
the Fellowship program can address any number of key goals, and do so in a
lightweight but meaningful way.
3) The Fellowship program is committed to demonstrating results and making
data-driven recommendations that help meet Foundation targets. Fellowship
research projects have set and maintained a high standard for reporting
results and making actionable recommendations. The Teahouse pilot reports
and metrics reports, the dispute resolution survey results, and the
template A/B testing projects are excellent examples of this commitment to
transparency and accountability. The Foundation has benefitted from these
data: results from fellowship projects have been featured at Wikimania.
Deputy Director Eric Moeller’s presentation on supporting
Wikiprojects<http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/The_purpose-driven_soci…>drew
extensively on Fellowship project findings, and E3’s template
testing presentation<http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Welcome_to_Wikipedia,_n…>was
based substantially on Fellowship research. Fellowship research has
been a frequent<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/27/analysis-of-the-quality-of-newcomers-i…>
feature <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/05/02/neweditorwarnings/> on the
Wikimedia blog, and has generated
good<http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/13/kate_middleton_s_wedding…>
press<http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/18/are-you-a-knowled…>for
the Foundation.
4) The Fellowship program been instrumental to our understanding of the
editor decline, and how to stop it. Fellowship projects have yielded many
valuable & actionable insights into the editor decline: such as the
negative impact of the gradual increase in newcomer
warnings<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Deletion_notifications_to_new_users>and
newcomer
reverts <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:First_edit_session>, and
the recent decline in participation in community processes by newer groups
of editors <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiPride>. Fellowship
research has also refuted several prominent decline
theories<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Decline_Theories_And_Sup…>,
such as the theory that the quality of new
editors<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_quality>has
decreased over time, or that the workload
of vandal fighters<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Vandal_fighter_work_load>has
increased. In short, Fellowship research allows Wikimedia to
prioritize promising work and make decisions about which decline theories
to address based on actual data, rather than anecdotes, accepted wisdom, or
intuition.
5) The Fellowship program builds good will between the WMF and the
community by spotlighting and bootstrapping community-driven
initiatives. Fellowships
are devised by community members, endorsed by community members,
implemented with community involvement--and the community reaps the
benefits of those initiatives. The Foundation gets to play the vital role
of supporting projects that otherwise may have floundered, sat idle, or
been ignored completely. The community appreciates this and recognizes the
Foundation’s pivotal part in making these projects happen. Also, not
continuing the program would mean not just removing funding from the
recipients of Fellowships and their projects, but also losing the community
infrastructure and networks that have been developed as a result. The
Foundation is the keystone to continuing this progress.
6) The Fellowship program gives the Wikimedia Foundation one of the only
channels to directly fund individual editors. And not just any editors but
some of the most active, engaged, driven, and enthusiastic editors
Wikipedia has. Funding those editors directly enables them to devote a
degree of focus and commitment to Wikipedia that they might not otherwise
be able to balance while meeting other constraints in their lives. The
Foundation has become a recipient of a great amount of donations, but much
of that financial support is unavailable to individual editors. There is
not yet a grant-making process which doesn't run through Chapters. The
Fellowship program is one lifeline to those editors, and it is a good one.
7) The Fellowship program provides a pipeline of trusted and knowledgeable
editors to contribute to the Foundation's efforts. Many of those editors
would be ideal candidates for positions within the Foundation, and the
Fellowship program is a great way to identify, enlist, and onboard those
individuals. Maryana Pinchuck and Steven Walling were Fellows, as were
Liam Wyatt, Lennart Guldbrandsson, Stuart Geiger, Diederik van Liere, Giovanni
Luca Ciampaglia, Melanie Kill, Aaron Halfaker, Achal Prabhala, Jonathan
Morgan, and James Alexander. While being a training ground for future
Foundation staffers, advisors, or researchers is not the stated purpose of
the Fellowship program, it is nonetheless a positive side-effect.
8) The Fellowship program partners with and complements other WMF
initiatives. The fellowship program enhances programs such as Editor
Engagement Experiments <http://enwp.org/WP:E3> by experimenting with
community features rather than just interface features. Creating new
spaces for new editors to find help and build community, identifying
pain-points in existing community processes by surveying editors, and
organizing cross-wiki translation efforts are excellent ways of improving
the editor experience on Wikipedia. Fellowship projects have also
benefitted existing WMF initiatives by providing necessary services: for
instance, the Teahouse has served the needs of students enrolled in Global
Education programs<http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program>that
do not have access to Classroom Ambassadors. The impact of the
Fellowship program scales and exceeds the scope of the individual projects
to numerous other forums and facets of the community.
For these reasons, we urge the Wikimedia Foundation to reevaluate the worth
of the Community Fellowship program and to continue it in its original or a
similar capacity. The Fellowship program is an impactful, flexible
laboratory of creativity which connects the Foundation and the community's
best and most passionate editors. Having it has been a huge gain, and
losing it would be a significant loss.
Sincerely,
* Anya Shyrokova User:Anyashy, prospective Fellow
* Jake Orlowitz User:Ocaasi, prospective Fellow
* Jon Harald Søby User:Jon Harald Søby, former Community Fellow
* Jonathan Morgan User:Jtmorgan, former Research Fellow
* Liam Wyatt User:Wittylama, former Cultural Partnerships Fellow
* R. Stuart Geiger User:Staeiou, former Wikimedia Research Fellow
* Peter Coombe User:The wub, Community Fellow
* Steven Zhang User:Steven Zhang, Community Fellow
* Tanvir Rahman User:Tanvir Rahman, Community Fellow*
> Why when we talk about "editor engagement" we think exclusively about new
> editors? How about retaining people, who already made Wikipedia (= the
> product) and keep maintaining it?
Retention of people who have made dozens of edits is about the same as
it's ever been. Retention of people who've made a handful of edits has
declined substantially since 2005, even though new users still show up
at the same rate.
> I believe sister projects are deeply important....
All of them have much more popular alternatives doing the same thing
they do. For example, PeerWise is vastly more popular than
Wikiversity, and is being integrated into thousands of existing
institutions' courses far faster than the
http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz site can keep up with. On the other
hand, the many commercial Commons alternatives are doing fine on their
own. It would be more appropriate to reach out to existing non-profit,
wiki-like organizations such as PeerWise and simply offer them hosting
support than try to pour resources into Wikiversity.
Hi
Sue Gardner started working on this document on Meta a couple of weeks ago
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus The
document outlines some rather big changes in the priority for WMF and
future responsibilities it will agree to keep. I am surprised by how little
attention this is getting from the larger community. There are comments but
mostly from the same individuals on Meta, little to none from some of the
most active voices and the larger English Wikipedia community.
This is the new direction being considered by the WMF, to basically abandon
or cut back on majority of activities from the last few year. Here are some
points-
1) No more Fellowships.
2) No more direct work in the developing markets (aka Global South- India,
Brazil, MENA)
3) No more support for International events, and cutting back on Wikimania
Instead of these, things like Editor engagement, Mobile and FDC/grant
making are being made priorities for WMF in the future. A large majority of
editors have had no interaction with grants and are unlikely to have so
with FDC as well, same with some of the mobile initiatives like Wikipedia
Zero which are limited to certain developing markets. A lot of these
changes will have a lasting impact, its not just relevant to those
interested in governance issues. Some of the implications are - Fellowships
would be removed all together, little to no spending on Hackathons,
possibly GLAM camps and other international events all together, less
spending on Wikimania and scholarships, the work in India and Brazil will
be moved away from WMF completely for a "partner" organization to take over
with a grant from WMF. If you do find some time, please consider taking a
look and commenting on these developments before they are approved.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus
Regards
Theo
The document has some interesting quotes -
"The Wikimedia Foundation is not a think tank or a research institute.
We're not an advocacy organization or a lobbyist, and our core mission
isn't to keep the internet free and open. We are not a general educational
non-profit. (We are a website, or set of sites, and everything we do needs
to be understood through that lens.) We don't just reactively "support the
community"—responding to requests from editors and doing what they ask us
to do. Our purpose isn't to provide MediaWiki support for third parties
(but it's in our interest to ensure that a healthy third party ecosystem
develops around MediaWiki). We're not, ourselves, content creators. Our
purpose is not to ensure the chapters grow and develop, nor is it to
support the chapters in their growth and development: rather, chapters are
our partners in supporting editors and other content creators.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not the only fish in the sea of free knowledge;
not everything that needs to be done must be done by the Wikimedia
Foundation, and it's not our job to do work that other individuals or
entities are better positioned or mandated to do, however important that
work may be. When we try to do work that more properly belongs to other
individuals or groups, we imperil our ability to get our own core work
done, and we arguably make it less possible for other entities to do what
they're supposed to be doing."
We really need a plagiarism detection tool so that we can make sure our
sources are not simply "copy and pastes" of older versions of Wikipedia.
Today I was happily improving our article on pneumonia as I have a day off.
I came across a recommendation that baby's should be suction at birth to
decrease their risk of pneumonia with a {{cn}} tag. So I went to Google
books and up came a book that supported it perfectly. And than I noticed
that this book supported the previous and next few sentences as well. It
also supported a number of other sections we had in the article but was
missing our references. The book was selling for $340 a copy. Our articles
have improved a great deal since 2007 and yet school are buying copy edited
version of Wikipedia from 5 years ago. The bit about suctioning babies at
birth is was wrong and I have corrected it. I think we need to get this
news out. Support Wikipedia and use the latest version online!
Further details / discuss are here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine#Can_we_sti…
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
This is wonderful. Eric, as one of the IRC regulars, I suggest that you use #wikimedia-office since I’ve seen it used for WMF office hours in the past, and hosting a meeting in there 1) is easy for regulars to find, and 2) the activity will be visible to users who have their IRC clients set to automatically connect to that channel even if they didn’t get an announcement of a scheduled meeting, and 3) avoids cluttering other channels. Also, if you set up a new channel you will need to make sure that you’ve got sufficient ops in the channel to deal with trolls. If you use #wikimedia-office as I hope you will, you may want to make sure that you have some of the ops for that channel active and available during the meeting.
Thanks for this announcement.
Pine
----
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:28:06 -0700
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Upcoming: WMF metrics/activities meeting -
November 1
Message-ID:
<CAEg6ZHnPaQ69dt2TAaCEcorDRpFKZe2XH3ptLkfwB0Lv1zw9PA(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Hi folks,
I'm pleased to announced that the next WMF metrics and activities
meeting is going to be the first one that'll be live-streamed on
YouTube with an open IRC backchannel.
The meeting will take place November 1, 2012 at 5:30 PM UTC. The IRC
channel is #wikimedia-metrics-meetings [1] on irc.freenode.net.
The current structure of the meeting is:
* Review of key metrics including the monthly report card, but also
specialized reports and analytics
* Review of financials
* Welcoming recent hires
* Brief presentations on recent projects, with a focus on highest
priority initiatives
* Update and Q&A with the Executive Director, if available
Please review https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings
for further information about how to participate.
We'll post IRC logs and the video recording publicly after the meeting.
All best,
Erik
[1] I'm open to just using #wikimedia or another channel if folks
would prefer that, but didn't want to assume that it's OK to hog the
channel :)
--
Erik M?ller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Someone has posted a question about WP:OUTING. We are currently dealing
with a copyright issue ( a textbook has copied liberally from Wikipedia
without proper attribution and the author claiming the work as their own ).
Before we inform the publisher however we need to make sure that the author
of the book is not a Wikipedia editor who wrote the original content and
than released it under a different license. In this instance this was not
the case.
However is the simply fact of attempting to verify that an author is not a
Wikipedian considered WP:OUTING? Not attempting to verify it before
informing the publisher and amazon however would be unethical as we may
harm someones career and need to make sure we are correct. Other peoples
thoughts?
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com