Wikimedia District of Columbia is pleased to announce the hiring of our
first employee. Ariel Cetrone has joined WMDC as our Institutional
Partnerships Manager, where she will plan and facilitate events with our
many institutional partners, including cultural, academic, and professional
organizations. Her work will help expand our outreach role in DC and
surrounding states and maximize the effectiveness of our volunteer time and
energy. A native of Philadelphia, Cetrone is a graduate of George
Washington University and Drexel University. She previously worked for
Historic RittenhouseTown, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization and
historic site, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Yes, I wonder if the extension for content translation should be turned
off. Not because it is really bad, but because it allows creating
translations that isn't quite good enough, and those translations creates
fierce internal fighting between contributors.
Some people use CT, and makes fairly good translations. Some are even
excellent, especially some of those based on machine translations through
the Apertium engine. Some are done manually and are usually fairly good,
but those done with the Yandex engine are usually very poor. Sometimes it
seems like the Yandex engine produce so many weird constructs that the
translators simply gives up, but sometimes it also seems like the most
common errors simply passes through. I guess people simply gets used to see
those errors and does not view them as "errors" anymore.
Brute force solution; turn the ContentTranslation off. Really stupid
solution. The next solution; turn the Yandex engine off. That would solve a
part of the problem. Kind of lousy solution though.
What about adding a language model that warns when the language constructs
gets to weird? It is like a "test" for the translation. The CT is used for
creating a translation, but the language model is used for verifying if the
translation is good enough. If it does not validate against the language
model it should simply not be published to the main name space. It will
still be possible to create a draft, but then the user is completely aware
that the translation isn't good enough.
Such a language model should be available as a test for any article, as it
can be used as a quality measure for the article. It is really a quantity
measure for the well-spokenness of the article, but that isn't quite so
intuitive.
The measure could simply be to color code the language constructs after how
common they are, with background color for common constructs in white and
really awful constructs in yellow.
It could also use hints from other measurements, like readability,
confusion and perplexity. Perhaps even such things as punctuation and
markup.
I believe users will get the idea pretty fast; only publish texts that are
"white". It is a bit like tests for developers; they don't publish code
that goes "red".
Hi everyone!
I'm very happy to announce that the Affiliations Committee has recognized the
Commons Photographers User Group [1] as a Wikimedia User Group. The group
is an international cooperative of photography enthusiasts who publish
their images under free licenses, with the goal of transcribing the world
visually and having others benefit from their work through Wikipedia and
other projects.
Please join me in congratulating the members of this new user group!
Regards,
Kirill Lokshin
Chair, Affiliations Committee
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_Photographers_User_Group
Hey,
FYI - sad news from Turkish.
*Regards,Itzik Edri*
Chairperson, Wikimedia Israel
+972-54-5878078 | 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!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Itzik - Wikimedia Israel <itzik(a)wikimedia.org.il>
Date: Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 11:42 AM
Subject: [PRESS] Turkish authorities block Wikipedia
To: Communications Committee <wmfcc-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39754909
Reuters just published that a 15 minutes ago, so it will be soon all over
the news.
---
*Turkey has blocked all access inside the country to the online
encyclopaedia Wikipedia, one of the world's most popular websites.*
It was not initially clear why the ban had been imposed.
The Turkey Blocks group said the site was inaccessible from 08:00 (05:00
GMT) by order of the Turkish authorities.
People in the capital Istanbul were unable to access any Wikipedia pages
without using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
"After technical analysis and legal consideration based on the Law Nr.
5651, an administrative measure has been taken for this website," Turkey's
Information and Communication Technologies Authority was quoted as saying.
No reason was given.
Turkey Blocks and Turkish media, including the Hurriyet Daily News, said
the provisional order would need to be backed by a full court ruling in the
next few days.
Social media was in uproar as news of the ban emerged, with some users
speculating that it might be a bid to suppress criticism on President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan's Wikipedia page.
Mr Erdogan narrowly won a controversial 16 April referendum on increasing
his powers, but the issue has deeply divided the country.
Turkey has temporarily blocked popular social media sites including
Facebook and Twitter in the past, especially in the wake of mass protests
or terror attacks.
The government has previously denied censoring the internet, blaming
outages on spikes in usage after major events.
*Regards,Itzik Edri*
Chairperson, Wikimedia Israel
+972-54-5878078 <+972%2054-587-8078> | 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!