In a recent thread about improving search, I posted a comment about a
possible hazard of relying on Google to search Wikipedia.[1] I explained
that Google had been displaying a text snippet from an outdated,
disruptive revision of the Gender page.[2] Well, that error has now
resurfaced, and at an editor's suggestion I posted to the Village Pump
about it.[3] The initial response at VP was essentially "not our
problem; go away" which was not exactly encouraging.
I'm sorry but if a major search engine is erroneously telling people
that Wikipedia is stating " There are only 2 genders. Male and Female",
that is a cause of concern for me, and I want to know if or how this
problem can be fixed. As I explained on the talk page and in the Village
Pump, Google's cache of the actual page is up to date; it's just the
snippet that is wrong.
- Pax
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-July/084890.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gender&oldid=722247975
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Google_ret…
--
Pax Ahimsa Gethen | http://funcrunch.org
Hey All
We launched an offline medical version of Wikipedia in Spanish today.
You can download it at Google Play here
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimedes
Have attached a press release we have put together. We continue to see
exponential growth in downloads of the English version.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
Hi Everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, Aug 17,
2016 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 (UTC).
YouTube stream: http://youtu.be/rsFmqYxtt9w
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#Archive>.
This month's showcase includes.
Computational Fact Checking from Knowledge NetworksBy *Giovanni Luca
Ciampaglia <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Junkie.dolphin>*Traditional
fact checking by expert journalists cannot keep up with the enormous volume
of information that is now generated online. Fact checking is often a
tedious and repetitive task and even simple automation opportunities may
result in significant improvements to human fact checkers. In this talk I
will describe how we are trying to approximate the complexities of human
fact checking by exploring a knowledge graph under a properly defined
proximity measure. Framed as a network traversal problem, this approach is
feasible with efficient computational techniques. We evaluate this approach
by examining tens of thousands of claims related to history, entertainment,
geography, and biographical information using the public knowledge graph
extracted from Wikipedia by the DBPedia project, showing that the method
does indeed assign higher confidence to true statements than to false ones.
One advantage of this approach is that, together with a numerical
evaluation, it also provides a sequence of statements that can be easily
inspected by a human fact checker.
Deploying and maintaining AI in a socio-technical system. Lessons
learnedBy *Aaron
Halfaker <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Halfak_(WMF)>*We should
exercise great caution when deploying AI into our social spaces. The
algorithms that make counter-vandalism in Wikipedia orders of magnitude
more efficient also have the potential to perpetuate biases and silence
whole classes of contributors. This presentation will describe the system
efficiency characteristics that make AI so attractive for supporting
quality control activities in Wikipedia. Then, Aaron will tell two stories
of how the algorithms brought new, problematic biases to quality control
processes in Wikipedia and how the Revision Scoring team
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/R:Revision_scoring_as_a_service> learned
about and addressed these issues in ORES
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ORES>, a production-level AI service for
Wikimedia Wikis. He'll also make an overdue call to action toward
leveraging human-review of AIs biases in the practice of AI development.
We look forward to seeing you!
--
Sarah R. Rodlund
Project Coordinator-Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org
חברים יקרים,
מקווה שכולכם שמתם לב לסעיף בעדכון הדו שבועי - ואם לא, בשביל זה האימייל הזה.
החודש קיבלה ויקימדיה ישראל מענק של כ-300,000 ש"ח מקרן פילנטרופית לתקופה של
שנה וחצי לטובת הרחבת פעילות החינוך שלנו לעבודה עם תלמידים דוברי ערבית,
לכתיבת ערכים בוויקיפדיה בערבית.
המענק מגיע לאחר פיילוט שנערך בשנה האחרונה עם תלמידים ומורים בבתי ספר באום
אל פחם ובחורה וכחלק מהכוונה של העמותה להרחיב את היקף הפעילות בחברה הערבית
בישראל.
במסגרת הפרויקט, יורחב צוות העמותה ויגוייס\תגוייס רכז\ת חינוך לפעילות
בערבית. המשרה כבר פורסמה - ואם אתם מכירים אנשים שמתאימים לתפקיד, זה הזמן
להעביר להם את הלינק :)
http://www.wikimedia.org.il/%D7%9C%D7%94%D7%A6%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%A…
עוד במסגרת הפרויקט - העמותה תמשיך לכתוב ולהפיק חומרים בערבית לצורך הפעילות,
ייערכו סדנאות להכשרת מורים, יורחב משמעותית היקף הפעילות בבתי הספר שישתתפו
בפרויקט ופעילויות נוספות.
פה התודה לצוות העמותה ודרור קמיר, על הפעילות המבורכת והמוצלחת כיום שהובילה
(בהצלחה נוספת) לקבלת המענק (ועל כך התודה גם לעידו עברי על הקשר והסיוע).
הפעילות הזו מצטרפת להחלטה של הוועד המנהל לפני מספר חודשים לבחון הוספת חבר
ועד חיצוני נוסף (נוסף על ה-2 כיום, שיזף וקרין) עם דגש שיושם על הפעילות שלו
בחברה הערבית, זאת בכדי להרחיב את המקצועיות והקשרים של הוועד והצוות ולאפשר
לנו לפעול בצורה נכונה ומיטיבית. עידו, כמזכיר הוועד לצד מיכל יגבשו המלצות
למועמדים רלוונטיים ולאחר דיון בוועד, תובא ההמלצה באופן רשמי לחברי העמותה
לאישור, כנדרש בתקנון.
נעלה ונצליח.
*Regards,Itzik Edri*
Chairperson, Wikimedia Israel
+972-(0)-54-5878078 | http://www.wikimedia.org.il
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment!
Hi,
Just a request for an update about C level hiring. My understanding is
that WMF is actively recruiting for a new CTO and hopes to fill that
position within the next month or two. Previously announced next priorities
were HR and Community, in that order. I am wondering how Communications and
Legal fit into the picture, now that those positions need to be filled as
well.
I am also wondering about what can be done to keep C levels after we get
them. Some of them seem to have much longer tenures than others, and having
so many vacancies concurrently is a situation that I think we'd all like to
avoid in the future, particularly the next time that WMF has a new or
interim ED who may need to rely on their Cs for advice much more than
Katherine needs to do so. (I'm not implying that Katherine doesn't listen
or doesn't need advice, just that she's experienced enough that she can do
well in areas where an ED who is new to WMF or the role might struggle.)
Regards,
Pine
Hey All
Today we launched an offline version of Wikipedia's medical content in
Persian. Thank's to the local community, Translators Without Borders,
Wikimedia CH, and my colleagues at Wiki Project Med for bringing this about.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimedfa
More languages coming soon.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
Was the public policy list converted to fully moderated without any discussion?
I wouldn't mind if there was a reasonable amount of time between
sending and moderator decision, but if a list needs to be moderated,
or someone on a list needs to be moderated, then that list or that
person should be informed, respectively.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 3:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Publicpolicy] WMF Transparency Report
To: Publicpolicy Group for Wikimedia <publicpolicy(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Very impressive, Jan!
Were the five requests for content removal based on the right to be
forgotten included in the 243 requests to alter or take down content?
Can you please say what proportion of those involving living people
claiming defamation were discussed by the community e.g. on the
English Wikipedia's WP:BLPN?
Best regards,
Jim
On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 12:37 PM, Jan Gerlach <jgerlach(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Many of you may have already seen it and we are really excited about the
> transparency report that we released earlier this week:
>
> https://transparency.wikimedia.org/
>
> Highlights:
>
> 243 requests to alter or remove content from the projects. None were
> granted.
>
> 13 requests to disclose nonpublic user information. None were granted.
>
> 22 requests under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove
> copyrighted material from the projects. Six were granted.
>
>
> Please find more info about the report in this blogpost.
>
> Best,
> Jan
>
> ==
>
>
> Jan Gerlach
> Public Policy Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
> 149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
> San Francisco, CA 94105
> jgerlach(a)wikimedia.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Publicpolicy mailing list
> Publicpolicy(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/publicpolicy
>
I was friends with Kevin and talked to him often over email. He was a
tireless advocate of addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia and making the
projects less toxic. Besides his significant volunteer work on-wiki, he was
also a moderator of the gendergap mailing list (a difficult and thankless
job). He was always an advocate for those whose voices were not being heard
or those who were afraid to speak up due to fear of being attacked. He ran
for English Wikipedia ArbCom last year, and addressed some of these issues
in his candidate statement: "Our encyclopedia aims to encompass the sum of
all human knowledge - a lofty goal that we cannot possibly accomplish
unless we take steps to ensure that, to borrow from a recent public
comment, we’re sending no demographic into a cultural buzzsaw."
Kevin was one of the countless unsung heroes of our movement, and his
passing is a tragic loss. I hope we can pay tribute to his memory by
continuing to work towards addressing the gender gap and eliminating
harassment on our projects.
Hello. The network Iberocoop has organized a writing contest for the
Olympic and Paralympic Games on Wikimedia. This is a contest in every
language and till the end of the Paralympic Games (18 Sept). There will
be also some special prizes and the artiles can be used for differet
challenges and contest.
All the information about the contest is at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_the_Olympics
Join the contest and enjoy.
--
Santiago Navarro Sanz
Presidente
Wikimedia España
www.wikimedia.es