Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and
everybody uses it.
— Freeman Dyson, "How We Know"
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-know/>
*The New York Review of Books*, 10 March 2011.
(Discussing recent UK survey results.) We're trusted slightly more than
the BBC. Now, that's a little scary, and probably inappropriate. ... *We*
all know it's flawed. *We* all know we don't do as good a job as we wish we
could do ... People trusted *Encyclopedia Britannica* - I think it was,
like - 20 points ahead of us.
— Jimmy Wales, "State of the Wiki"
<http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/sunday2014>
Wikimania speech, 10 August 2014.
The Wikimedia Foundation vision: Imagine a world in which every single
human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our
commitment.
But "knowledge" of something implies confidence in its accuracy. While
Wikipedia is untrustworthy, it is purveying something other than knowledge.
This is a problem for the foundation, since it is failing to realise its
vision - and for humankind, who deserves an encyclopaedia it can trust.
It is also a critical, existential vulnerability for Wikipedia. Google is
factoring trustworthiness into its ranking algorithm. It has already
stopped using Wikipedia's medical articles in its "knowledge graph".
Rightly. Soon we'll see Wikipedia's medical content (rightly) demoted from
(often) the top search result to 5th or 10th - or oblivion (rightly) on
page two.
The recently released State of the Wikimedia Foundation 2015 Call to Action
[3] lists a set of objectives. One of the items under the heading "*Focus
on knowledge & community"* is "Improve our measures of community health and
content quality, and fund effective community and content initiatives.
The quality parameter that most needs measuring and improving is
reliability/trustworthiness - if we take the survival of Wikipedia as an
important goal. Will the Foundation be *funding any staff positions* whose
purpose is to measure the quality of the encyclopedia and nurture strategic
initiatives specifically aimed at making Wikipedia an encyclopedia people
can trust?
Five years ago the Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan [4] resolved to
measure and measurably improve the quality of our offering, and no
resources were allocated and it did not happen.
1. Hal Hodson 28 February 2015 "Google wants to rank websites based on
facts not links"
<http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-web…>
*New
Scientist*
2. Hal Hodson 20 August 2014 "Google's fact-checking bots build vast
knowledge bank"
<http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329832.700-googles-factchecking-bot…>
*New
Scientist*
3.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Found…
4.
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summa…
Anthony Cole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole>
1) Yes the source code is available. User:Eran has posted it here
https://github.com/valhallasw/plagiabot
2) This bot ONLY works on new edits within a couple of hours of them
occurring. This reducing the number of false positives. It DOES NOT look at
old edits.
3) This requires human follow up and common sense. One needs to make sure
that a) the source is not PD/CCBYSA b) that it is not wiki text that has
been moved around c) that the authors of both are not the same, etc
4) True positive rate is around 50% which is from my perspective good /
useful. This bot has flagged a lot of copyright issues would have been
missed otherwise.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
The new and improved version of the copy and detection bot that we at [[WP:
MED]] have been using for nearly a year [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EranBot/Copyright here] is nearly ready
to be expanded to other topic areas.
It can be found here [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EranBot/Copyright/rc]. If you install
the common.js code it will give you buttons to click to indicate follow up
of concerns. Additionally one can sort the edits in question by
WikiProject. We are working to set up auto-archiving such that once
concerns are dealt with they will be removed from the main list.
We also want to have automatic compilation of data such as the frequency of
true positives and false positives generated by the bot. A blacklist of
sites that are know mirrors of Wikipedia is here [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EranBot/Copyright/Blacklist]. As this
list is improved / expanded the accuracy of the bot will improve. Many
thanks to [[User:ערן]] for his amazing work.
The bot also has the potential to work in other languages.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
Hi all,
Today the Wikimedia Foundation published a report on its activities in
calendar year 2014.
This State of the Wikimedia Foundation
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation.p…>
report
provides a snapshot view of the Foundation’s major initiatives and
considerations during that period. It also offers a baseline assessment of
key efforts made by internal Foundation departments, with an emphasis on
data-based results, project impact, challenges, and how our work supports
our mission.
Last December, the Wikimedia Foundation entered into the beginning of a
strategy planning exercise. As we progressed, we found people had differing
familiarities with the work, needs, and concerns of other departments --
the proverbial Blind Men and an Elephant.[1] In response, we began pulling
together information as a baseline reference so we would better understand
each others’ work. This report is the outcome of that research.[2]
Although the information in the report was originally gathered in response
to an internal Foundation need, we planned to make it public as a report
from the very beginning. It is intended to be relatively candid, sharing
insight into where teams feel they have strengths and where they feel there
are development areas.
The report also offers the first look at the Foundation’s internal Call to
Action for 2015
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Found…>.
The Call to Action is a set of actions for the 2015 calendar year to focus
the staff of the Foundation on our core functions. These include improving
the processes by which we do our work, building stronger community
relationships, and exploring new ways to expand free knowledge. Terry, our
new COO <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/03/20/wmf-welcomes-coo/>, will
manage its implementation over the coming year.
Finally, a note: the report is a standalone product designed to aide the
strategy development process, and does not substitute for the Quarterly
Reports, Annual Report, or Annual Plan process. It is scoped only against
the Foundation’s existing workflows in 2014, and not against the work of
the Wikimedia movement overall. We have not committed to making it an
annual exercise.
The full State of the Wikimedia Foundation report is available as a wiki
here
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Found…>
and as a PDF on Wikimedia Commons here
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation.p…>
. You can also find more information in our blog post:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/02/new-wikimedia-foundation-report/.
We hope you find it interesting, and welcome your feedback.
Thanks,
Katherine
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
[2] Thanks to everyone at the Foundation who contributed so much great
information to their various teams sections. And a special thanks to Juliet
Barbara and Heather Walls who wrote and produced the whole thing!
--
Katherine Maher
Chief Communications Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635
+1 (415) 712 4873
kmaher(a)wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________
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Dear movement fellows,
Impact is crucial for our movement, and although metrics will always be
imperfect, we must strive to reinvent ourselves and always come up with new
innovative ways of measuring what we bring to the Wikimedia projects, to
free knowledge, and to human society.
Measuring impact regarding collections of media holds its own challenges
and although we have been focusing on this for a while now, much work still
lies ahead.
We were inspired by the “bytes added” metric, one of the pinnacles of
written content expansion measurement, which goes beyond mere edit count.
The same reasoning holds true for media:a puny upload count cannot come
close to the real awesomeness.
This is why, as we appreciate that size matters, Wikimedia France quality
commitee is proud to introduce its brand new set of metrics: the pixel
count and the quality pixel count − since quality is of firstmost
importance.
You may query the Pixel count metric for your FDC reports as part of our
wm-metrics webapp [1]
Furthermore, an implementation of these new metrics will also ship with our
new new (teasing!) product [2]
As of April 1st 2015 Wikimedia France has supported the upload on Wikimedia
Commons of:
- 1 229 694 933 639 pixels [3]
- among those pixels, 22 407 932 851 are quality pixels (18,223512%) [4]
This is only the beginning: next step is the measurement of cute pixels,
encyclopedic pixels and amazing pixels.
Confident in the relevance of these new indicators, we would be delighted
and honored to see the Pixel count integrated in the Global Metrics.
As always we welcome feedback, hugs and pull requests.
Sincerely,
For the quality committee of Wikimedia France
Caroline, Jean-Fred, Pierre-Selim and Petit Tigre
[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wm-metrics/fdc
[2]
https://github.com/Commonists/MediaCollectionDB/commit/4c2ab42f83e894c9dd31…
[3] http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/2882
[4] http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/2886
--
Pierre-Selim
On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 7:22 AM, Tanweer Morshed <wiki.tanweer(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Welcome to Kourosh! Wikimedians around the world have already been creating
> partnerships under various programs including GLAMs and with universities,
> institutions etc. This is rational from the sense that this new department
> (Strategic Partnerships) would address all these issues along with further
> ways for improvement. Looking forward to Kourosh and his team's endeavors,
> hope they bring meaningful and impact-driven partnerships for Wikimedia
> movement. :)
>
> Tanweer
> Executive member
> Wikimedia Bangladesh
Thank you for the warm welcome messages. I am sincerely thrilled to work
for the Wikimedia Foundation. As an immigrant from Iran and a former
journalist, I deeply appreciate free speech and the free culture movement,
and will vigorously defend them in this position. I'll seek partnerships
that spread the world's knowledge more widely without comprising our
values. Always happy to take community feedback.
Kourosh