More love from our readers for you. Enjoy!
i feel like i have a new brain bolted on. that's the internet in general,
but a few of the gears in there are labeled 'wikipedia'
It beautiful how you can get authentic information on almost everything in
one place.. you guyz are doing a great job
I read a lot of scifi when I was a kid and always dreamed of something like
Wikipedia. Of course, I thought a computer would cover the whole wall so
maybe the dream wasn't exactly prescient.
In a world where 99% of people waste their life on Facebook its great to
have a destination where you can go and learn something.
I also get a great kick out of seeing some hamster-brained celebrity crow
about how inaccurate Wikipedia is because she hasn't bothered to learn how
to use it. "If you don't know how to drive stick shift, don't complain
about the poor machine design."
As with all tireless volunteers, all ya'll inspire me and make me want to
contribute more to my community (read: my city, my state, my country, my
world)
Years ago, I would have to listen to my husband and sister-in-law argue
about who was right ALL THE TIME. Now, they just pull out their phones, and
Wikipedia has all the answers. The bickering has come to an end. Halleluiah!
I cannot remember a day in the last 5 years when I haven't opened a
Wikipedia page at least once.
Thank you! I'm a med student and use your site daily.
There is simply NO REASON to be ignorant about ANYTHING. I've always felt
that, but Wikipedia has made it nearly criminally lazy to be so.
Game changer. No other way to say it. There was a life before Wikipedia,
but it was not nearly as enlightened!!!
I think it is one of mankind's greatest achievements. No joke.
I am old enough to remember encyclopedias. This is lots better.
I use wikipedia every day. I now use it with Siri. I would like it
permanently wired into my brain.
I was a professional technical/scientific translator (German, French,
Spanish to English) and constantly needed information on all sorts of
things in different language. You can pick up a lot by comparing the German
and English articles.
makes my 8 yr old daughter smarter, enriches her, makes her more curious,
more empowered, more relevant to the community, and helps shape her
relationship to technology, seek truth, and develop a deeper understanding
of the world and her day to day life.
<3
Elegant searches for truth nourishes the soul.
We tour cross country and our iPhones read us the Wiki entries on the
histories, demographics and economies of the cities we visit! It's like an
endless podcast of fascination and learning!
I've always found Wikipedia useful but now, sort of out-of-the blue, I'm
helping raise a 14 year old. Do you have any idea how many questions daily
whether homework-related or life-related that adds up to? No, neither do I,
but it's a lot and it's great to be able to have a knowledge resource
against which I can grade my own answers!
Brilliant quick reference source to back up ludicrous arguments!
don't need a brain anymore, I got Wikipedia.
As a father of two school age children, I do not always have the answers to
help them with their homework.........but Wikipedia usually does !!
Your editors are supremely good. Your online concept has rendered the
venerable encyclopedia extinct. You guys are doing a great job - for
humanity. I'm jealous .....
Thanks to Wikipedia, I'm a master of all subjects as long as I have an
active internet connection.
Best thing that ever happened to me since the internet
--
Megan Hernandez
Director of Online Fundraising
Wikimedia Foundation
Just wanted to share this article, because it makes me so happy!
Erik's one of our earliest contributors and *we've* all depended on
his work for years, but it's mostly invisible to the world beyond
Wikimedia. It makes me really happy to see him get some external
recognition :-)
Thanks,
Sue
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Jay Walsh" <jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 27 Dec 2013 12:20
Subject: [Wmfcc-l] [press] Erik Z in Wired
To: "Communications Committee" <wmfcc-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/erik-zachte-wikistats/
Meet the Stats Master Making Sense of Wikipedia’s Massive Data Trove
BY ASHIK SIDDIQUE
12.27.13
9:30 AM
Erik Zachte. Photo: Lane Hartwell/Wikimedia Foundation
There are websites, and then there’s Wikipedia. The internet behemoth
boasts 30 million articles written in more than 285 languages, tweaked
by 70,000 active editors and viewed by 530 million visitors worldwide
each month. As mountains of information go, it’s Everest. Teasing out
trends from the open source encyclopedia’s archives is a task few
would even attempt. Yet Erik Zachte did just that.
Zachte used his statistical intuition to create “Wikistats,” an online
statistics package that’s more than a trove of charts and graphs for
data geeks. It’s the most direct measure yet of Wikipedia’s success in
achieving its central objective: making the sum of all human knowledge
available to everyone everywhere.
“When I discovered Wikipedia I felt thrilled from the outset,” says
Zachte, who was working as an IT guy at KLM Airlines in the early days
of the Wiki revolution. Not content simply to edit articles, he joined
the mailing lists in which a fervid network of volunteers debated how
to increase the site’s functionality. As Wikipedia exploded in
popularity, power users complained there was no consistent way to
measure its growth in article count from the beginning.
“In 2003 there was already an online page counter if I remember
correctly, but not much else,” says Zachte. He realized it was
possible to extract far more descriptive data from historical metadata
in Wikipedia’s massive database dumps, copies of all raw content that
available to anyone in XML format.
He started crunching numbers and quickly became famous among fellow
Wikiholics for developing Wikistats. The site’s monthly reports filled
a valuable niche for descriptive metrics in the Wiki community, with
measures like article count, number of editors, and edits per article
that serve as proxy indicators of Wiki quality. Impressed by Zachte’s
stat-fu, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation that supports the
Wikipedia infrastructure made him its data analyst in 2008.
Since then, Zachte’s figures – all of which are open source and in the
public domain – have revealed ongoing challenges to the organization’s
growth, as well as noteworthy trends.
Wikistats data made it clear that a core of Wikipedians does an
outsize portion of the editing. As of October, 4.7 million people have
contributed to the English language Wikipedia, but just over 26,000
people have made more than 1,000 edits. In fact, that relatively small
group of people has made 73 percent of all edits. While a small core
of very active editors has remained stable, a larger pool of active
editors (those making at least five edits monthly) in all Wikipedia
language editions peaked at 90,000 in 2007 and has dropped since. As
of October, the count stands at 70,000.
That has some worried that a shrinking community indicates declining
quality and concerted efforts within the Wikimedia Foundation to boost
editor engagement, which the organization considers one of the
foremost indicators of Wikipedia’s success. In 2009, the organization
launched an ambitious five-year strategic plan to drastically increase
language and content diversity by encouraging internet users in the
“Global South” – particularly the developing regions of Africa, Asia,
the Middle East, and Latin America – to contribute. Wikistats metrics
gauge its progress each month.
“Many projects exist within WMF to influence editor influx and
retention,” says Zachte, “but in the end Wikistats gives the final
count: Are we on the right track?”
The numbers show reason for measured optimism. While the largest and
most densely populated language editions like English, German, French,
and Japanese, have seen the number of active editors level off or even
decline since about 2007, newer editor networks in highly populous
languages like Chinese, Arabic, and Persian continue to grow. In
addition, the global share of page edits is slowly shifting to
populous countries in the southern hemisphere, some of which, like
India and the Philippines, use and edit Wikipedia overwhelmingly in
English.
Zachte’s reports also reveal idiosyncratic patterns of activity in
different languages.
For example, some volunteer coders program bots to create article
stubs in massive bursts, hoping other users will expand the articles
over time. While bots can supplement the work of active editor
networks, Wikistats summaries show that some language editions are
populated almost entirely by bot-created stubs – like the Cebuano and
Waray-Waray Wikipedias, which rocketed to almost one million articles
this year despite tiny editor networks that are unlikely to fill in
those blanks anytime soon.
Zachte’s animation of growth for all Wikipedia language sites, which
measures four aspects of each site: bubbles representing each language
slide across an x-axis indicating their age and up a y-axis measuring
their article count, expanding as their editor networks grow and
changing color as average article size grows. Image: Erik Zachte
The data also provide raw material for striking visualizations, which
Zachte sometimes creates and posts on his blog, Infodisiac and
compiles from other authors on Wikistats.
For years, Zachte was the only staffer working on general metrics
about Wikipedia, but today the Wikimedia Foundation now has many
analysts and engineers crunching data. The organization is preparing
to absorb Zachte’s work into a much more powerful data infrastructure.
“The plan is to take the existing functionality of Wikistats and
modernize it across the board,” says Toby Negrin, Wikimedia’s director
of analytics. “Erik’s work is amazing, but we need to make the data
more accessible and update it faster.”
One recent update is a streamlined Monthly Report Card that tracks
user engagement by language and geographical region, with customizable
graphs measuring factors like unique visitors, page views, and editing
activity over time. Other extensions will capture and analyze all
Wikimedia traffic, and provide metrics for editor engagement projects
like Wikipedia Zero, which gives users in developing countries free
Wikipedia access on their mobile devices.
Zachte embraces the changes. “Most of what I built will be phased out
over the coming years,” he says. “I’m fine with that. All software has
a limited lifespan.”
Until the new infrastructure can take over, Zachte maintains the
scripts that populate Wikistats reports while working from home in
Leiden, the Netherlands. Occasionally, he works on analytic pet
projects. His next idea focuses on measuring content diversity across
different Wikipedia language editions.
“In early years Wikipedia was often characterized as mostly geek
content: physics and sci-fi,” he says. “People don’t do that anymore,
but is our content really balanced now? Do we have similar depth of
content for ballet or folk culture or fashion?”
Most articles in larger Wikipedias are assigned multiple categories –
for example, the English-language entry for Barack Obama lists 45. But
users can assign a single article many different categories, and each
category can have an unlimited number of parent categories. That makes
it difficult to easily compare the number of articles in each category
as an indicator of content diversity.
Zachte’s idea is that comparing word frequencies within articles to
word frequencies for all named categories in a language (the English
Wikipedia has over 1 million, according to a 2012 estimate) can more
effectively categorize articles, and create profiles of which topics
receive more heavy coverage. He has written a proposal, but it’s still
unclear how it fits into Wikimedia’s current budget. It might just be
a hobby project – or, open source to the end, he concedes that someone
else might as well scoop him.
“Now I have given away the basic concept,” he says. “Someone can base
her thesis on this, and beat me to it, which is fine. Science would
progress faster if it did not thrive on secrecy.”
Another Zachte animation visualizes all Wikipedia edits on a specific
day in July 2011, on a world map in which 369,483 edits in multiple
languages appear as geographically distributed bursts of color in a
sped-up version of real time. Image: Erik Zachte
Tags: Erik Zachte, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia
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Jay Walsh
WikimediaFoundation.orgblog.wikimedia.org
@jansonw
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Hello, friends in the Wikimedia community,
Organizations that receive Annual Plan Grants from the Funds Dissemination
Committee (FDC) have been hard at work this last quarter! If you haven't
yet had a chance to look at some of their most recent reports, do take a
look to get a sense of some of the exciting developments. As always, the
FDC staff has also produced an overview of these reports, including
observations from global-level trends and program updates. [1] We've also
highlighted some of the biggest successes and some ongoing challenges for
these organizations, and included a financial summary of spending to date.
I'm happy to say that the overview report is also available in French [2];
thank you to our amazing translators!
I encourage you to take a look at the overview report. From there, you can
easily find the progress reports from the organizations in depth, or see
their associated Discussion pages for more in-depth appreciation, questions
and suggestions from the FDC staff. You'll find some beautiful photos and
interesting audio and video files, learn about recent work on Wiki Loves
Monuments, celebrate with those completing tenth Wikipedia anniversaries,
review updates on partnerships with GLAM institutions, and learn more about
Wikipedians-in-Residence programs. And much more! You'll also get good
insight into what is working well and how entities are adapting as they
learn about programs or approaches that aren't working as well.
I want to thank all the organizations submitting Annual Plan Grant reports
to the FDC for their hard work over this last quarter. These progress
reports are from both Round 1 and Round 2 2012-2013 and offer us all a
chance to learn from movement organizations. I thank them for capturing and
sharing what they are learning as they go so that we can celebrate and
build on successes and grow together.
Fell free to contact me with questions or comments. And a very Happy New
Year to all!
Katy
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2012-2013_round1/Staff…
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2012-2013_round1/Staff…
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Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
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I don't think this has been sent out yet:
http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikitrends/2013.html
(thanks to Itzik for drawing my attention to it, and Johan for coding it up!)
This is fascinating. It's interesting that some languages (like
English) have lots of results that are likely people trying to get to
other sites (Facebook, Google) but other languages less so.
Happy New Year, everyone!
Phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
We had a good 2013 year for readership statistics, fundraising, website reliability, and many other metrics.
We are continuing to have challenges with our editor population declining. Statistics are at http://reportcard.wmflabs.org. WMF discussed some of the research around these issues a monthly metrics meeting. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2013-07-11.
We have thousands of new accounts registered each month. However we are still losing more active editors than we gain each month. To date WMF and the chapters haven't solved this problem although resources are being spent on it. Projects include Echo, VisualEditor, Snuggle, GettingStarted, and education outreach.
Some discussion of these issues for English Wikipedia is happening at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Editor_Retention#P….
Also check out the book review that is being published in this week's Signpost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Sandbox/Notes#.C5.BBycie_Wirtual…, and the 2010 editor study results https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Editor_Survey_Report_-_….
I hope there will be many and sustained conversations in 2014 about questions such as these:
* What should WMF, Jimmy, chapters and affiliates, and the online communities do differently regarding editor retention in 2014 and beyond?
* What non-technical initiatives should be done to improve editor recruiting and retention?
* How can we make Wikipedia editing be as mainstream as playing mobile games? I would like to see WMF take leadership on this issue and make a big push in 2014-2015 to make mobile editing a popular activity.
* Since negative feedback is a major reason that editors leave, should we review how we revert and warn editors, how we handle content disputes, and how we deal with editors who are uncivil or disruptive?
* How can we be a community that is efficient while being civil and hospitable?
In the next Annual Plan I hope that someone at WMF will be appointed as a point person for promoting all editor engagement initiatives and regularly initiate discussions such as this one.
Closing thought:
"Whatever the weather
We must move
together"
from a Marshall Plan poster, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Marshall_Plan_poster.JPG, seen on the English WikiQuote main page on December 31, 2013.
Happy new year,
Pine
Can nobody stop the URAA Copyright trolls mass deleting perfect fine files
on Commons?
I think it would be the best if _all_ URAA affected files would be kept
until a DMCA take down notice.
But in the case of in the country of origin PD works which are foreign
government works it is needed that the WMF clearly speaks out that such
works could be accepted on Commons even when a written statement of the
foreign government doesn't exist.
See for Canada's crown copyright
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Burlingto…
Klaus Graf
