Several organizations, including pension companies, have been
withdrawing their investments that may indirectly support Russia's war
in Ukraine. Similarly there have been several news reports of
directors stepping down from companies where their personal interests
and or past history is now seen to be in conflict with the ethical
values of the organisation they represent.
Has the board of the Wikimedia Foundation or the board of the
Endowment Fund asked for a governance review for their connections of
people (including trustees and advisers), received donations, outgoing
funding or investment funds that may even indirectly or
unintentionally support the actions of the Russian government?
As an example, the founder of Cendana Capital, a global venture
capital company, is an adviser for the Endowment Fund, but I can not
find a specific governance report for Cendana Capital for financial
interests connected Russia. Being "global", it's hard to imagine there
is none or has never been any.
References
https://wikimediaendowment.org/#advisory-boardhttps://wikimediafoundation.org/role/boardhttps://www.cendanacapital.comhttps://www.funds-europe.com/news/blackrock-suspends-purchase-of-russian-se…https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/13/mps-pension-fund-drops-rus…
Lane
Hello, all.
I’m writing to update you all on an emerging human rights concern related
to the invasion of Ukraine. We are concerned that an effort is being made
to identify Wikipedia editors whose activities are seen as opposing the
Russian narrative of the war.
I wanted to let you know that we are aware, we are monitoring, and we are
acting in various ways already. While we cannot discuss the details for the
safety of all involved, over a year ago, we hired a Human Rights Lead
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Team> with experience in
individual safety to help us with such situations. This includes
partnerships with allied organizations experienced in human rights
interventions as well as connecting with appropriate community groups and
functionaries to provide safety support. We care about the safety of
Wikimedians, and I know that you do, too. We have heard as much from many
of you directly.
I want to take this opportunity to raise your awareness of the need to
protect yourselves and each other online. It’s such a cliche that I’m
almost hesitant to write it, but in this world, sharing information is
sometimes a radical act. Because of this, we ask you all to please be aware
of what information you share about yourself on Wikimedia platforms and how
your Wikimedia activities can be connected to your personal identity. Some
Wikimedians have chosen to operate transparently. Others have chosen to
operate under pseudonyms. Whatever path you’ve chosen, there are best
practices for your personal protection. Some guidance has been gathered
here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voices_under_Threat
At the same time as I share these recommendations, I want to firmly assert
that all who try to get people vital information in times of crisis -
whether Wikimedian or otherwise - should be celebrated. At the core of our
movement is the belief that knowledge belongs to everyone, and the
Foundation is firmly against efforts by anyone to stand in the way of the
flow of verifiable information in whatever forum it is shared. I believe,
as is the way with all Wikimedians, that the path to a better world is to
ensure people everywhere have access to knowledge, and that we, as
collective societies, should provide them the tools to assess the accuracy
of the information they encounter. Censorship is not the solution.
If you have information to share about this situation or about other
potential threats of persecution to the safety of Wikimedia volunteers due
to their good faith contributions to the projects, please share with
talktohumanrights(a)wikimedia.org. The team is quite busy and may not be able
to respond to all communications because of that, but they do read them,
and your emails do matter.
I wish the best for all of you who read this and for all seekers of
information and sharers of information in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and
beyond. We will share updates of the situation here as we are able within
the framework of prioritizing people’s safety. In the meantime, I’d like to
take the opportunity to highlight the efforts of some Wikimedians related
to the invasion of Ukraine
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine>.
Warm regards,
Maggie
--
Maggie Dennis
She/her/hers
Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Chers Wikimédiens,
Le rapport annuel du groupe d'utilisateurs Wikimedia Guinée Conakry (
*WCUG-GIN*), couvrant la période du 1er novembre 2020 au 25 novembre 2021,
est disponible sur Meta.
Wikimedia Community User Group Guinée Conakry/Report2021
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Guin%C3%A9e_…>
Au cours de cette année, dès janvier, nous avons puis réunir toute la
communauté francophone pour célébrer les 20 ans de Wikipédia pendant 3
jours en Guinée avec des sessions en ligne dont deux pays invités
physiquement en Guinée et le regroupement de toutes les antennes de
l’intérieur du pays à Conakry pour cette occasion.
Nous avons reçu notre lettre de reconnaissance officiel par le ministère de
l'Administration du territoire de la Guinée, la couverture du
territoire nationale
avec au moins trois jours de formations par régions naturel du pays.
Cette année, nous avons été solliciter beaucoup plus avec des partenariats
non officiel d'abord mais stratégique notamment avec la Fondation Orange
Guinée, la maison d’édition Harmattan Guinée et des institutions
d'enseignement supérieur dans le cadre des sensibilisations sur notre
mouvement, ce qui constitue une étape cruciale pour notre communauté.
Nous avons pu mettre à jour des primates de la réserve des monts Nimba avec
des images inédit très rares des chimpanzés de Bossou en collaboration avec
l'institut de recherche environnementale de Bossou
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_de_recherche_environnementale_de_Bos…>
.
Nous tenons à remercier la Wikimedia Fondation, Wikimedia France et
Wikimedia Suisse pour leur soutien et sa confiance dans nos activités. Sans
elles, de nombreux événements n'auraient pas pu avoir lieu.
Vous pouvez lire tous les détails ci-dessous et vous pouvez nous en dire
plus sur vos remarques d'amélioration continue.
Cordialement
*Aboubacar Keita
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Aboubacarkhoraa>*
* Président *
*Adresse: *Yattaya Marché <https://goo.gl/maps/d2iEoh2FQFC98TwB6>*, Ratoma,
Conakry*
*Téléphone** : *+ 224 628 09 71 55 <+224628097155> - 654 30 70 40
*De : *Wikimedia.GIN
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Community_User…>
[image: https://m.facebook.com/wikimediaGN/]
<https://m.facebook.com/wikimediaGN/>
Dear Wikimedian,
#WikiForHumanRights22 is almost here!!!!
Are you a local organizer and looking forward to participating in the
#WikiForHumanRights2022
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:WikiForHumanRights2022>campaign
and not sure what to do? Or, Are you just interested to join the Global
Writing Contest and want to know how? It doesn't matter if you are new to
the campaign, this is open to all.
Join our first #WikiForHumanRights2022 Q&A Clinic. This Q&A Clinic will
provide you with the opportunity to have all your questions answered. It's
going to be very interactive and practical as we want to help you get
started.
-
Date: Friday 11th March 2022
-
Time: 15:00- 16:00 UTC
-
Zoom: https://wikimedia.zoom.us/j/84768463365
From funding to organizing your event,
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:WikiForHumanRights2022> we want
to be sure you have all the needed support as much as possible.
Also, we encourage you to make a date with us on April 14th *2022 *as we
host the virtual launch of the campaign (More details to come)
If you are new to the campaign, you can read more via meta
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights> or join our telegram
group <https://t.me/+k_W9SVMG5K44YjJh> to get direct support. You can also
email us at campaigns(a)wikimedia.org to schedule one on one support.
Best,
Ruby D-Brown
Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed Wednesday, March 16 at
6:30AM PT / 13:30 UTC. Find your local time here:
https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1647437436.
The theme is: Patterns and dynamics of article quality.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5e6S7ac4q4
You can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You can also
watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase.
The Showcase will feature the following talks:
Quality monitoring in Wikipedia - A computational perspectiveBy *Animesh
Mukherjee <https://cse.iitkgp.ac.in/~animeshm/> (Indian Institute of
Technology, Kharagpur)*In this talk, I shall summarize our five-year long
research highlights concerning Wikipedia. In particular, I shall deep dive
into two of our recent works; while the first one attempts to understand
the early indications of which editors would soon go "missing" (aka missing
editors) [1], the second one investigates how the quality of a Wikipedia
article transitions over time and whether computational models could be
built to understand the characteristics of future transitions [2]. In each
case, I will present a suite of key results and the main insights that we
obtained thereof.[1] When expertise gone missing: Uncovering the loss of
prolific contributors in Wikipedia
<https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-91669-5_23>, ICADL
2021 (pdf <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.09979>)[2] Quality Change: norm or
exception? Measurement, Analysis and Detection of Quality Change in
Wikipedia <https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01496>, CSCW 2022 (pdf
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.01496>)
Automatically Labeling Low Quality Content on Wikipedia by Leveraging
Editing BehaviorsBy *Sumit Asthana <http://sumitasthana.xyz/> (University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor)*Wikipedia articles aim to be definitive sources of
encyclopedic content. Yet, only 0.6% of Wikipedia articles have high
quality according to its quality scale due to insufficient number of
Wikipedia editors and enormous number of articles. Supervised Machine
Learning (ML) quality improvement approaches that can automatically
identify and fix content issues rely on manual labels of individual
Wikipedia sentence quality. However, current labeling approaches are
tedious and produce noisy labels. In this talk, I will discuss an automated
labeling approach that identifies the semantic category (e.g., adding
citations, clarifications) of historic Wikipedia edits and uses the
modified sentences prior to the edit as examples that require that semantic
improvement. Highest-rated article sentences are examples that no longer
need semantic improvements. I will discuss the performance of models
training with this labeling approach over models trained with existing
labeling approaches, and also the implications of such a large scale semi
supervised labeling approach in capturing the editing practices of
Wikipedia editors and helping them improve articles faster.Related
paper: Automatically
Labeling Low Quality Content on Wikipedia By Leveraging Patterns in Editing
Behaviors <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3479503>, CSCW 2021 (pdf
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.02252>)
--
Emily Lescak (she / her)
Senior Research Community Officer
The Wikimedia Foundation