Dan Garry wrote:
> Reaching out to [Google] is the easiest and quickest way to get
> these kinds of issues fixed....
Google is a whole lot better than Altavista was back when their
snippets were taken from title and meta tags or the first words
on the page, but there have been some issues that they've not
been as responsive on as we might have hoped.
Should the Foundation organize its liaison with Google? Does
Google have staff who are assigned to resolving issues with
Wikipedia? Should the Foundation publish a directory by topic
area of the people to ask when there seems to be a problem
that Google could help solve? Presumably those could be
different people for different kinds of issues, and maybe would
sometimes be Foundation and sometimes Google personnel.
Is it fair to ask, in the interest of transparency, when Google
approaches the Foundation about an issue which could involve
the community, or when the Foundation reaches out to Google
on issues which might impact the community, that some
non-Foundation representative member(s) of the community
be notified about the issue and the ongoing work to fix it?
Best regards,
Jim
Dear all,
On behalf of the Affiliations Committee, I am pleased to announce the
recognition of a new Wikimedia User Group: WikiToLearn User Group [1].
They are dedicated to make the content present on WikiToLearn easily
accessible from the different Wikimedia projects and make the them more
interoperable, focusing on the collaboration.
Please, let's welcome the new member of the family of affiliates :-)
1: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiToLearn_User_Group
--
"*Jülüjain wane mmakat* ein kapülain tü alijunakalirua jee wayuukanairua
junain ekerolaa alümüin supüshuwayale etijaanaka. Ayatashi waya junain."
Carlos M. Colina
Socio, A.C. Wikimedia Venezuela | RIF J-40129321-2 |
www.wikimedia.org.ve <http://wikimedia.org.ve>
Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Affiliations Committee
Phone: +972-52-4869915
Twitter: @maor_x
El logotipo y el nombre de Wikimedia, Wikimedia Venezuela, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Incubator, Wiktionary y otros proyectos relacionados son marcas registradas usadas bajo permiso expreso de su titular, la Fundación Wikimedia, Inc., una organización sin fines de lucro. Otros nombres y marcas pertenecen a sus respectivos propietarios.
Asociación Civil Wikimedia Venezuela (Wikimedia Venezuela) | RIF.: J-40129321-2 | Los Teques, Estado Miranda. Venezuela
Hi all,
We are pleased to announce that Wikimedia Israel received a grant from an
Israeli Charitable Foundation to replicate its successful program of
working with gifted students on the Hebrew Wikipedia, and expand it to
gifted Arabic speaking students in Israel to edit Arabic Wikipedia.
We're excited by the opportunity to support work in more languages spoken
in Israel, as well as expand our reach to new audiences.
In preparation for this grant, Wikimedia Israel team has performed some
exploratory work in an Arabic speaking school in Israel for the past year,
and translated the instructional materials to Arabic. This great work has
been carried on by Shay Katz and Dror Kamir (respectively), and we want to
take this opportunity to thank them. Last but not least, we want to thank
Michal who made it through some pretty stressful deadlines for writing and
submitting the request.
On behalf of the WMIL Board,
Ido Ivri,
Board Secretary
Wikimedia Israel
Tulu Wikipedia <https://tcy.wikipedia.org/> has finally gone live after being in the Incubator for nine long years. Tulu is spoken by nearly 2 million speakers in the Mangaluru, Udupi and other South West regions of the Indian state of Karnataka and in some places in the state of Kerala. 198 editors have contributed so far to make this happen. The project has started seeing more activity since 2014 when the first ever community meetup was organised in April , 2014. St. Aloysius College and St. Agnes College, two educational institutions in Mangaluru, India have done a commendable job in institutionalizing education programs and several outreach programs for their students. CIS-A2K congratulates everyone who have helped grow this project, the language committee and other friends in the global communities who have supported and guided in working towards the approval of the project. We will continue to support the community to the best of our abilities and introduce them to other friends in the movement so that they can learn the best practices for community building, designing and running outreach and education programs and several other Wikimedia activities.
Best!
Subhashish Panigrahi
Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge
Centre for Internet and Society
@subhapa / https://cis-india.org
Many thanks to all those who nominated themselves for the four vacancies on
the FDC; we have an exceptional slate of candidates this round, of diverse
backgrounds and experiences.
The shortlist of candidates has been posted on meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/No…
In the coming weeks, the Board of Trustees will select four members to the
FDC from the interviewed shortlist. We will announce these appointments by
close of day UTC 2 September 2016.
Best
Dariusz and Guy
Board liaisons, FDC
At Wikimania in Gdansk someone from Google gave an interesting if somewhat
controversial presentation on search improvements this way.
>From my memory of the presentation - it was a few years ago; For several
languages including some Indic ones, I think Bangla and Telegu, Google had
listed the 500 most common search terms that didn't have a Wikipedia
article.
They had then paid some translators to translate articles from English into
those languages.
This had become controversial because it resulted in a number of articles
on Hollywood film stars, and at least one of the editors in those wikis
didn't think that people who spoke his language were interested in
Hollywood filmstars. Also the people writing those articles didn't behave
as if cooperating with the community was part of their remit. One language,
it may have been Bangla, actually blocked the translators.
But logically the less complete a Wikipedia the more likely it is to have
search terms that we could create articles for.
I could even buy the idea that few of the unsuccessful searches on English
have an obvious article.
But for smaller Wikipedias this would be a useful tool to promote growth
and to be more reader focussed.
If the list was only made available as a deleted list so only admins could
read it then that should resolve the issues of some searches being terms we
wouldn't want to publicly list.
WSC
Forwarding to the Wikimedia mailing list, I'm sorry for the lateness!
--
Deb Tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
IRC: debt
Wikimedia Foundation
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Trey Jones <tjones(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 11:58 AM
Subject: Re: [discovery] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Improving search (sort of)
To: A public mailing list about Wikimedia Search and Discovery projects <
discovery(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: James Heilman <jmh649(a)gmail.com>
I decided to look into this as my 10% project last week. It ended up being
a 15% project, but I wanted to finish it up.
I carefully reviewed and categorized the top 100 "unsuccessful" (i.e.,
zero-results) queries from May 2016, and skimmed the top 1,000 from May,
and skimmed and compared the top 100 / 1,000 for June.
The top result (with several variants in the top 100) is a porn site that
has had a wiki page created and deleted several times. Various websites
round out the top 10. Internet personalities and websites dominate the top
100 and several have had pages created and deleted over the years. There's
strong evidence of links being used for some queries—though I didn't try to
track them down. There's plenty of personally identifiable information in
the top 1000 most frequent queries. More than 10% of the queries (by
volume) get good results from the completion suggester or "did you mean"
spelling suggestions, and more than 10% have some results approximately two
months later (i.e., late last week).
Obvious refinements to the search strategy would eliminate so many
high-frequency queries that any useful mining would be down to slogging
through the low-impact long tail.
I don’t think there’s a lot here worth extracting, though others may
disagree. The privacy concerns expressed earlier are genuine, and simple
attempts to filter PII (using patterns, minimum IP counts, etc) are not
guaranteed to be effective.
For lots more details (but no actual queries), see here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Top_Unsuccessful_Sea…
—Trey
Trey Jones
Software Engineer, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:31 AM, Trey Jones <tjones(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Finally, if this is important enough and the task gets prioritized, I'd be
> willing to dive back in and go through the process once and pull out the
> top zero-results queries, this time with basic bot exclusion and IP
> deduplication—which we didn't do early on because we didn't realize what a
> mess the data was. We could process a week or a month of data and
> categorize the top 100 to 500 results in terms of personal info, junk,
> porn, and whatever other categories we want or that bubble up from the
> data, and perhaps publish the non-personal-info part of the list as an
> example, either to persuade ourselves that this is worth pursuing, or as a
> clearer counter to future calls to do so.
> —Trey
>
>>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: "James Heilman" <jmh649(a)gmail.com>
>> Date: Jul 15, 2016 06:33
>> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Improving search (sort of)
>> To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Cc:
>>
>> A while ago I requested a list of the "most frequently searched for terms
>> for which no Wikipedia articles are returned". This would allow the
>> community to than create redirect or new pages as appropriate and help
>> address the "zero results rate" of about 30%.
>>
>> While we are still waiting for this data I have recently come across a
>> list
>> of the most frequently clicked on redlinks on En WP produced by Andrew
>> West
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_redlinks Many of
>> these can be reasonably addressed with a redirect as the issue is often
>> capitals.
>>
>> Do anyone know where things are at with respect to producing the list of
>> most search for terms that return nothing?
>>
>> --
>> James Heilman
>> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>>
>
_______________________________________________
discovery mailing list
discovery(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery
Hey All
We have just launched the Arabic version of our offline medical app. It is
all of Arabic Wikipedia's healthcare, pharmaceutical, anatomy, and
sanitation articles.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixcustomwikimedar
Only avaliable for Android at this point in time. Persian coming soon :-)
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
I was glad to see this detailed note of an important gap in search, but it
left me wondering how the board views its role in strategic planning?
TL;DR: top-level prioritization should be done in a more public and
transparent manner, probably with more board input
Historically, it seems like the board has approached the strategic plan as
something to review after the plan is solidified rather than driving the
plan in a meaningful way. There is a bit of evidence that the board is
taking a more active role in planning in the 2016 Governance
recommendations [1], although it looks like it is being sent to the Audit
Committee, which I'm not sure I agree with.
In 2015, when the board opened up for Q&A questions at its noticeboard
[2], some
of the questions were around the board's view of specific issues. The only
board member who mostly responded deferred having any judgment on features
or software issues whatsoever. For example, someone questioned
Superprotect, with the board member responding: "I think that the super
protect feature is something that falls within the domain of our Executive
Director, whom I trust to have good judgment. I would personally never vote
for or against a specific feature of Mediawiki software, unless this is at
the specific request of the Executive Director, it simply is not our job"
...
Features like Visual Editor, Flow, or search improvements are voted on
whenever the budget comes up. It may be dressed up as "Editing" or
"Discovery", but it's basically about a large, long-term feature. And work
on these features is done at the cost of not working other items such as
features requested by editors (see Community Tech) or other stakeholders
(e.g., unclear how line-level employee feedback is rolled up).
When I was on the board of a couple nonprofits, we did relatively detailed
strategic planning. For example, the board decided it was important to
overhaul and modernize our website, and then we monitored progress on its
overhaul by staff over time. It wasn't easy to extract priorities from a
bunch of people with diverse opinions on what was worth doing, and staff
played a huge role in recommending and assembling these opinions into a
reasonably scoped plan which they ultimately executed. But the board took
ownership of the plan because they played a major part in its draft.
Historically, boards were the driver of major plans (see *Governance as
Leadership*, p4 [3]) but as nonprofits grew large, that role is often taken
by executive leadership.
It's up to the board to figure out how it wants to run the organization,
but I hope to see the board taking a stronger, more public role in
planning. Perhaps I just haven't read deeply enough, but the strategic
planning process seems like a black box right now. My hope is that board
members feel comfortable championing causes that they feel are important,
but also take time to champion the causes that are important to other
stakeholders, which can be discovered through well-designed research,
surveys, and anecdotes (like this search observation!). I do recall filling
out a survey on future WMF priorities a few months ago, but I don't recall
feeling altogether satisfied with it.
I feel bad about this wall of text.
Random postscripts:
When I was serving on boards, I read an interesting book called *Governance
as Leadership* which emphasized the somewhat fuzzy concept of "generative
thinking" which allows the board and executive team to partner effectively.
It also puts the history and typical roles that a board plays into context.
It's important to keep marginal cost and return on investment in mind. Even
Google continues to spend an enormous amount on search.
I work as a software developer in downtown San Francisco. A couple of my
friends work at privately-funded startups - ranging from 20 to 70 people -
where the employees literally vote on the company's direction. At my
company, the strategy is set by the executive team, where engineering hours
are allocated to various categories (new products, maintenance, internal
engineering). We do a lot of estimation to allow the product and executive
team to figure out what new features make sense, and a lot of the internal
engineering time goes into devops, refactoring and underlying architectural
improvements.
Sam Altman of Y Combinator noted: "The company will build what the CEO
measures". So if the board has a goal in mind, think carefully about the
metrics. [4]
[1]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_Governance_Recommendations_(Apri…
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard/Arch…
[3]
https://smile.amazon.com/Governance-Leadership-Reframing-Nonprofit-Boards/d…
[4] http://blog.samaltman.com/startup-advice-briefly
On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 1:32 PM, Pax Ahimsa Gethen <
list-wikimedia(a)funcrunch.org> wrote:
> One risk of using Google to search Wikipedia is getting bad results. For
> several weeks, a Google search for "gender" returned a disruptive edit[1]
> that replaced the entire article with " There are only 2 genders. Male and
> Female." That edit, from May of this year, was only live for a few minutes,
> but got cached in Google somehow, resulting in this (mis)information being
> prominently displayed near the top of the search results. Only recently has
> a search on that term begun returning the updated page (which is now
> semi-protected through June 2017 due to excessive vandalism.)
>
> - Pax
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gender&oldid=722247975
>
> --
> Pax Ahimsa Gethen | http://funcrunch.org
>
>
>
> On 7/28/16 5:37 AM, Andrew Lih wrote:
>
>> We recently had a thread in the Wikipedia Weekly Facebook group, where we
>> pretty much concluded the reason why we don’t have word in English for
>> “looked it up in Wikipedia” is because that word is “Googled it.” :)
>>
>>
>> https://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediaweekly/permalink/1050447111669786/
>>
>> -Andrew
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Jimmy Wales <jimmywales(a)wikia-inc.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> First, some context:
>>>
>>> I was in Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention earlier
>>> this week, where I had been invited to speak (in a small side event)
>>> about connectivity and global development. I spoke about our work in
>>> the languages of the developing world, and made a point to say that bad
>>> laws in the developed world which might hurt our work can be damaging
>>> for the development of the Internet in the rest of the world and urged
>>> lawmakers to not just think of various Internet legal questions as being
>>> "Silicon Valley versus Hollywood" but to understand that they impact how
>>> our volunteer community and many other ordinary people online.
>>>
>>> Second, the story:
>>>
>>> The main conference was held in the [[Wells Fargo Center
>>> (Philadelphia)]], an indoor arena where basketball and hockey teams play
>>> normally.
>>>
>>> A journalist friend said to me that he "finally found something that
>>> Wikipedia doesn't have" and he was surprised. What was that, I said?
>>> "The history of Wells Fargo". What?!! Really?!! That seemed impossible
>>> to me. He said we have an article about Wells Fargo that seems to be
>>> mostly about the contemporary bank, and when you search for Wells Fargo
>>> history there's also an article about the Wells Fargo History Museum.
>>>
>>> I popped on my phone and used my own personal preferred method of
>>> finding things in Wikipedia: Google. I typed in "Wells Fargo history"
>>> and sure enough, the first two links are history pages from their
>>> official websites and the third link is Wikipedia - a normal state of
>>> affairs. He started to apologize for raising a false alarm
>>>
>>> I asked him for more details on exactly how he searched, and explained
>>> that I regard it to be very sad if some volunteers spend hundreds of
>>> hours working on an article, painstakingly going over tons of details in
>>> an effort to get it right, and then someone couldn't find it.
>>>
>>> Here's what he did - and I replicated the steps and all was clear.
>>>
>>> Go to http://www.wikipedia.org/
>>>
>>> Make sure the dropdown in the search box is set to 'EN' - which it would
>>> have been for him.
>>>
>>> Start typing 'Wells Fargo history' and watch as the dropdown selections
>>> narrow. You'll have the experience that he had - you'll see the bank
>>> article prominently featured and then various buildings (they have a
>>> habit of sponsoring sports arenas in various US cities) and finally as
>>> you start typing history it focuses in on the History Museum.
>>>
>>> If you don't choose any of those, then hit enter, you'll get to the
>>> search results page. This is the one with a huge box of options at the
>>> top (which will be confusing and frightening to people who aren't
>>> already wikipedians) and then by my count the desired article is 13th on
>>> the page: [[History of Wells Fargo]].
>>>
>>> Now, I strongly suspect this could be fixed by making a redirect from
>>> [[Wells Fargo history]] to [[History of Wells Fargo]].
>>>
>>> Or a more serious fix could be had if the search engine understood that
>>> very very often in English [[X of Y]] can be written [[Y X]]. ([[List
>>> of French monarchs]] becomes [[French monarchs list]], see:
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=french+monarchs+list
>>> where the desired article is in 10th place.
>>>
>>> But my point is not to argue for any specific fix. My point is to
>>> illustrate that there is a real problem with search, that it is
>>> impacting users, and that we should invest in fixing it.
>>>
>>> --Jimbo
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
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--
Ben Creasy
http://bencreasy.com <http://bencreasy.com?t=email>