A quick follow up to the signpost article of a couple of weeks ago
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-08-26/In_fo…>We
now have the August figures
<https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm>, and August has
continued what we might reasonably start calling the new trend. The English
Wikipedia has more editors with 100 or more live edits in mainspace than
for any August since 2010. Across all Wikipedias combined the figures are
up almost as steeply with a near 10% increase on August 2014, though this
doesn't quite get us back to 2012 levels.
We aren't out of the woods yet as other metrics are still declining, for
example both new accounts and editors making 5 or more saves are both down
across Wikipedia generally when comparing August 2015 with 2014.
But it's nice to have one metric be positive.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
Greetings!
First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who voted for Wikidata in
the first phase or the "Land of Ideas" competition. With your support,
we made it into the Top 10. \o/
Now it's time for the second phase: We have to be number one to
finally win the Public's Choice Award.
So please vote again and help us spread the word! Voting is open until
15 September, and you can repeat your vote daily (!). It's easy:
1. Go to the voting page: http://hauptvoting.welt.de/mainvoting/list
2. Click the yellow button under the Wikidata entry
3. Type in your email address and tick the box to agree to the voting rules.
4. You will receive a link via email. Click the link within 24 hours.
5. BONUS: Watch the video, where every finalist presents themselves in
15 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFXsPTNdMEI (in German,
but Wikidata is right at the beginning ;))
Thanks everyone!
Nicole
--
Nicole Ebber
Vorstandsreferentin Internationale Beziehungen
Adviser to the ED, International Relations
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.
V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts
Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig
anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
_______________________________________________
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WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
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Forwarding this to wikimedia-l as it doesn't seem to be very technical in
nature, but definitely seems worthy of discussion.
MZMcBride
Danny Horn wrote:
>For a while now, the Collaboration team has been working on Flow, the
>structured discussion system. I want to let you know about some changes in
>that long-term plan.
>
>While initial announcements about Flow said that it would be a universal
>replacement for talk pages, the features that were ultimately built into
>Flow were specifically forum-style group discussion tools. But article and
>project talk pages are used for a number of important and complex
>processes that those tools aren't able to handle, making Flow unsuitable
>for deployment on those kinds of pages.
>
>To better address the needs of our core contributors, we're now focusing
>our strategy on the curation, collaboration, and admin processes that take
>place on a variety of pages. Many of these processes use complex
>workarounds -- templates, categories, transclusions, and lots of
>instructions -- that turn blank wikitext talk pages into structured
>workflows. There are gadgets and user scripts on the larger wikis to help
>with some of these workflows, but these tools aren't standardized or
>universally available.
>
>As these workflows grow in complexity, they become more difficult for the
>next generation of editors to learn and use. This has increased the
>workload on the people who maintain those systems today. Complex workflows
>are also difficult to adapt to other languages, because a wiki with
>thousands of articles may not need the kind of complexity that comes with
>managing a wiki with millions of articles. We've talked about this kind of
>structured workflow support at Wikimania, in user research sessions, and
>on wikis. It's an important area that needs a lot of discussion,
>exploration, and work.
>
>Starting in October, Flow will not be in active development, as we shift
>the team's focus to these other priorities. We'll be helping core
>contributors reduce the stress of an ever-growing workload, and helping
>the next generation of contributors participate in those processes.
>Further development on these projects will be driven by the needs
>expressed by wiki communities.
>
>Flow will be maintained and supported, and communities that are excited
>about Flow discussions will be able to use it. There are places where the
>discussion features are working well, with communities that are
>enthusiastic about them: on user talk pages, help pages, and forum/village
>pump-style discussion spaces. By the end of September, we'll have an
>opt-in Beta feature available to communities that want it, allowing users
>to enable Flow on their own user talk pages.
>
>I'm sure people will want to know more about these projects, and we're
>looking forward to those conversations. We'll be reaching out for lots of
>input and feedback over the coming months.
>
>Danny Horn
>Collaboration team, PM
[x-posted announcement]
Hello,
The next office hour of the Wikimedia Language Engineering team is
scheduled for next Wednesday, September 16th at 15:00 UTC. Like our last
office hour, this time also we are hosting it as an online discussion over
Hangout/Youtube with a simultaneous IRC conversation. Due to the limitation
of Google Hangouts, only a limited number of slots are available. Hence, do
let us know (on the event page
<https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/c1c0msurhua7enopsu3q8l42j3s>) if you
would like to participate on the Hangout. The IRC channel #wikimedia-office
and the Q&A channel for the youtube broadcast will be open for interactions
during the session.
Our last online round-table session was held in June 2015. You can watch
the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbXyHmpZJGE
Please read below for the event details and do let us know if you have any
questions.
Thank you
Runa
== Details ==
# Event: Wikimedia Language Engineering office hour session
# When: September 16th, 2015 (Wednesday) at 15:00 UTC (check local time
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20150916T1500)
# Where: https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/c1c0msurhua7enopsu3q8l42j3s and
on IRC #wikimedia-office (Freenode)
# Agenda: Content Translation updates and Q & A
--
Language Engineering Manager
Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello everyone.
Sorry for the long mail but we wanted to explain the situation for
Wikimedia Italia.
The conversation is going on and it's better to clear some important
points.
In the second week of August Wikimedia Italia has been contacted by
Kalliope Tsouroupidou and later by Jessica Robell, who explained that the
Wikimedia Foundation was planning to have a fundraising campaign in Italy
in September.
We have been surprised by that, since Wiki Loves Monuments is well-known to
run in September, and it has been like that for years.
Moreover, there has been a similar clash in 2014: we discussed for several
days, and in the end we reached a compromise, and the FR banners went live
just for the last days.
It was not perfect, but we had WLM banners for almost all September.
This year the clash is on the whole month of September. Given the history,
and the very fact that Wikimedia Italia has planned WLM and written so in
the FDC application, we feel that WMIT has not been negligible in matters of
communication.
We are not *happy* with the situation,
the very existence of the clash, the fact that all this appeared in the
middle of August, while we were all on holiday and just few weeks before
the beginning of WLM.
We just decided not to pick up a fight, as we believe in constructive
conversation and negotiation.
The agreement we reached is very painful for WMIT and WLM: it's just better
than not having the banners at all, or to have them for just a few days in
the middle of September.
Conversations with the FR team has been firm, but polite: this does not
mean that we are happy about what is happening.
Moreover, we will have to discuss with FDC to renegotiate expected results
for WLM in 2015.
Having the fundraising campaign in September in Italy has a clear negative
impact on Wiki Loves Monuments, the largest project of Wikimedia Italia.
This will not only likely reduce the number of participants and uploaded
pictures, but will also put us in a difficult position in front of our
sponsors and partners, including 200+ municipalities, 100+ cultural
institutions, and some major partners, like FIAF (the Federation of Italian
photographers' associations), ICOM (the International Council of Museums),
the Toscana Foto Festival (a major photo festival), Touring Club Italiano
(the largest Italian touristic association), and others. WMIT spends
thousands of euros in WLM each year - not because we waste money, but
because we have higher stakes.
This year, we will have in the Italian Jury international renowned
photographers like (prabably: yet to be confirmed) Steve McCurry (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_McCurry) and Franco Fontana (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Fontana).
This year, in June, we were received by several politicians from the
Italian Parliament for an official meeting regarding the law we are fighting
as WMIT.
Because of the specific challenges we face, WLM in Italy goes beyond being
a photographic competition and is also an opportunity to create
relationships and advocate for the freedom of taking pictures of monuments.
Italy does not have "freedom of panorama".
Worst, Italy does not have freedom of panorama for any kind of monuments,
even if copyright has expired.
We need to ask for permission to make pictures of monuments. For. Every.
Monument.
We have to create lists of monuments to be photographed. There is no
official list of monuments in Italy.
There is *extensive* documentation here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Italian_cultural_heritage_on_the_Wikimedia_…
This is very important to know to put in perspective WLM Italy stats:
http://stats.wikilovesmonuments.cl/italy. As an example, it is the reason
why we have so many participants who contribute for few pics each. In 2014
alone, we had 1038 uploaders, but we were only 6th in terms of number of
photos.
The global fundraising is essential to our movement.
It funds Wikipedia operations, software development, the Wikimedia
Foundation, many chapters and affiliates, and, of course, also Wiki Loves
Monuments (even tough in Italy it is primarily funded from other sources).
The global fundraising is meant to support the Wikimedia movement: but, for
this very reason, it is a pity to have it clashing to one of the very
activities it is meant to support.
Especially since we are not talking about a 2 hours editathon in a small
library in the middle of nowhere, but about an international competition
who ended up in the Guinnes World Records, bringing thousands of pictures
to the Wikimedia projects.
We understand that fundraising is not an easy job, especially when it is
done on a global level. Yet we feel obliged to use donors money to build
and deliver the best projects we can: firstly out of respect for all the
people who decided to donate their time, their money or their career to the
movement; secondly because a badly executed projects could also have a
negative impact on the next fundraising campaigns.
We are all part of the same movement: the work of the WMF fundraising team
is strictly linked to that of the community. We would like to be confident
that what is happening now won't happen for a third time, and that in the
future we will be able to communicate more effectively and work more
collaboratively.
We really are looking forward a more effective cooperation with WMF and all
other Wikimedia Affiliates: collaboration is the very pillar of all the
Wikimedia movement.
We would like to thank all the people who supported us and gave us opinions
and advices on this mailing list and elsewhere.
We are very proud to be part of such a great community, and we would like
to see it become wider and bigger.
Andrea Zanni
for the board of Wikimedia Italia
Geonames [1] is a database which holds around 9 M entries of
geographical related items from all over the world.
Lsjbot is now generating articles from a subset of it, after several
months of extensive research on its quality, Wikidata relations and
notability issues. While the quality in some regions is substandard (and
these will not be generated) it was seen as very good in most areas. In
the discussion I was intrigued to learn that identical Arabic names
should be transcribed differently depending on its geographic location.
And I was fascinated of the question of notability of wells in the
Bahrain desert (which in the end was excluded, mostly because we knew
too little of that reality)
In this run Lsjbot has extended its functionality even further then when
it generated articles for species. It looks for relevant geographical
items close to the actual one: a lake close by, a mountain and where is
the nearest major town etc.
Macedonia can be taken as one example. Lsjbot generated over 10000
articles (and 5000 disambiguous pages) making it a magnitude more than
what exist in enwp. Also for a well defined type like villages, almost
50% as many has been generated than existing in enwp. One example [2]
where you can see what has been generated (and note the reuse of a
relevant figure existing in frwp). Please compare the corresponding
articles on other languages in this case, many having less information
than the bot generated one.
The generation is still in early stage [3) but has already got the
article count for svwp to pass 2 M today. But it will take many months
more before completed and perhaps more M marks will be passed before it
is through. If you want to give feedback you are welcome to enter it at [4]
Anders
(with all credits for the Lsjbot to be given to Sverker, its owner, I am
just one of the many supporters of him and his bot on svwp)
[1]
http://www.geonames.org/about.html
[2]
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaki_%28ort_i_Makedonien%29
[3]
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:Robotskapade_geografiartiklar
[4]
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndardiskussion:Lsjbot/Projekt_alla_p…
Craig has a good point, but this is a lovely example of two projects planning on very different timescales. The most important countries for a future Wiki Loves Monuments campaign are some of the very countries that fundraising could have had this September, the ones where there has not yet been a WLM but where a group of volunteers will emerge in the next few months. How can one predict where they will be?
WereSpielChequers
> 3
> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2015 13:39:25 +1000
> From: Craig Franklin <cfranklin(a)halonetwork.net>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wiki Loves Monuments] Wiki Loves Monuments
> in Italy largely blocked by WMF fundraising
> Message-ID:
> <CAHF+k3-UcErzjvtgrugOynJ1BBeOTN5v2KdtUt8b=-C6-S_NMw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Firstly, I'm delighted to see that a mutually acceptable compromise has
> been reached here. Well done everyone in coming together with the best
> interests of the entire movement in mind.
>
> If I can make a suggestion though, I'd suggest that the fundraising team
> and the community, particularly the WLM crew, get together *now* and try to
> work out how those campaigns are going to be coordinated so that this
> doesn't happen again next year, while there are still good vibes in the
> air. Something we're all really bad at as a movement, is procrastinating
> on these sort of issues, but if there is a bit of forward planning there's
> no reason that everyone can't have their cake and eat it too.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
>
>