Just a little note to say that we've managed to get the wiki loves stats tool to include Wiki Loves Folklore: https://wikiloves.toolforge.org/folklore
There may be some tweaks required for precision but we certainly have regularly updated stats for all the 2023 participants now, which you can find here: https://wikiloves.toolforge.org/folklore/2023
Thanks to everyone who contributed to make this possible.[1] (especially Jean-Frédéric!)
Toni
___________________________
Dr Toni Sant
Wikimedia Community Malta
Email: toni.sant(a)wikimalta.org
Web: http://www.wikimalta.org
[1] See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T313588
Hello everyone,
Today, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) ordered that access
to Wikipedia be suspended in Pakistan. We are urging the Pakistan
government to restore access to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects immediately
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/02/03/wikimedia-foundation-urges-…>
.
This action denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to
the world's largest, free online knowledge repository. If it continues, it
will also deny the world the perspective of the people of Pakistan and the
benefit of their knowledge, history, and culture.
The Wikimedia Foundation received a notification from the Pakistan
Telecommunication Authority on February 1, 2023, stating “the services of
Wikipedia have been degraded for 48 hours” for failure to remove content
from the site deemed “unlawful” by the government. The notification further
mentioned that a block of Wikipedia could follow, if the Foundation did not
comply with the takedown orders. As of Friday February 3, our internal
traffic reports indicate that Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects are no
longer accessible to users in Pakistan.
The Wikimedia Foundation is already examining various avenues and
investigating how we can help restore access, while staying true to our
values of verifiability, neutrality, and freedom of information.
We are also prepared to support any members of the Wikimedia communities
who are impacted. If you or someone you know is contacted by the Pakistani
government in reference to the block, please contact us at
legal(a)wikimedia.org. If you or someone you know is in immediate physical
danger in reference to the block, please contact emergency(a)wikimedia.org
right away. We are actively working to reach out to community leaders in
the area.
For over twenty years, our movement has supported knowledge as a
fundamental human right. In defense of this right, we have opposed a
growing number of threats that would interfere with the ability of people
to access and contribute to free knowledge. We know that many of you will
want to take action or speak out against the block. For now, please
continue to do what is needed to remain safe. We will keep you updated on
any new developments, actions we are taking, and ways which you can help
return access to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in Pakistan.
Thank you,
Stephen
--
Stephen LaPorte (he/him/his)
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
*NOTICE: As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and ethical
reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community
members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more
on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*
Hi,
I think the Wikimedia community is generally well-positioned to create
high-quality training data for machine learning models. So, improving the
crowdsourcing of wikidata and structured data is essential for making this
easy-to-use curated training data. So, the focus should be on making data
to be more widely used and using existing open-source NLP/NLU models from
organizations such as universitios, EleutherAI, Facebook etc rather than
developing new models from scratch by ourselves.
The bottleneck of utilizing these is the need for more human skills, which
can be addressed through documentation and examples demonstrating how to
use machine learning tools in real-life use cases such as image
classification, description/summary generation or automated error testing.
It would be essential also to develop ML tools that can be run on commodity
hardware, such as GPUs:s with 24GB RAM currently, for broader
accessibility. These could run on people's computers, home labs, and
hacklabs. It would also direct our development in the direction of less
resource-intensive ML tools.
Br,
-- Kimmo Virtanen, Zache
On Sat, Feb 4, 2023 at 1:16 PM Kimmo Virtanen <kimmo.virtanen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think the Wikimedia community is generally well-positioned to create
> high-quality training data for machine learning models. So, improving the
> crowdsourcing of wikidata and structured data is essential for making this
> easy-to-use curated training data. So, the focus should be on making data
> to be more widely used and using existing open-source NLP/NLU models from
> organizations such as universitios, EleutherAI, Facebook etc rather than
> developing new models from scratch by ourselves.
>
> The bottleneck of utilizing these is the need for more human skills, which
> can be addressed through documentation and examples demonstrating how to
> use machine learning tools in real-life use cases such as image
> classification, description/summary generation or automated error testing.
> It would be essential also to develop ML tools that can be run on commodity
> hardware, such as GPUs:s with 24GB RAM currently, for broader
> accessibility. These could run on people's computers, home labs, and
> hacklabs. It would also direct our development in the direction of less
> resource-intensive ML tools.
>
> Br,
> -- Kimmo Virtanen, Zache
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 4, 2023 at 12:23 PM Christophe Henner <
> christophe.henner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On the product side, NLP based AI biggest concern to me is that it would
>> drastically decrease traffic to our websites/apps. Which means less new
>> editors ans less donations.
>>
>> So first from a strictly positioning perspective, we have here a major
>> change that needs to be managed.
>>
>> And to be honest, it will come faster than we think. We are
>> perfectionists, I can assure you, most companies would be happy to launch a
>> search product with a 80% confidence in answers quality.
>>
>> From a financial perspective, large industrial investment like this are
>> usually a pool of money you can draw from in x years. You can expect they
>> did not draw all of it yet.
>>
>> Second, GPT 3 and ChatGPT are far from being the most expensive products
>> they have. On top of people you need:
>> * datasets
>> * people to tag the dataset
>> * people to correct the algo
>> * computing power
>>
>> I simplify here, but we already have the capacity to muster some of that,
>> which drastically lowers our costs :)
>>
>> I would not discard the option of the movement doing it so easily. That
>> being said, it would mean a new project with the need of substantial
>> ressources.
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Feb 4, 2023, at 9:30 AM, Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski(a)hotmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> ?
>> With respect to cloud computing costs, these being a significant
>> component of the costs to train and operate modern AI systems, as a
>> non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation might be interested in
>> the National Research Cloud (NRC) policy proposal:
>> https://hai.stanford.edu/policy/national-research-cloud .
>>
>> "Artificial intelligence requires vast amounts of computing power, data,
>> and expertise to train and deploy the massive machine learning models
>> behind the most advanced research. But access is increasingly out of reach
>> for most colleges and universities. A National Research Cloud (NRC) would
>> provide academic and *non-profit researchers* with the compute power and
>> government datasets needed for education and research. By democratizing
>> access and equity for all colleges and universities, an NRC has the
>> potential not only to unleash a string of advancements in AI, but to help
>> ensure the U.S. maintains its leadership and competitiveness on the global
>> stage.
>>
>> "Throughout 2020, Stanford HAI led efforts with 22 top computer science
>> universities along with a bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers
>> proposing legislation to bring the NRC to fruition. On January 1, 2021, the
>> U.S. Congress authorized the National AI Research Resource Task Force Act
>> as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021.
>> This law requires that a federal task force be established to study and
>> provide an implementation pathway to create world-class computational
>> resources and robust government datasets for researchers across the country
>> in the form of a National Research Cloud. The task force will issue a final
>> report to the President and Congress next year.
>>
>> "The promise of an NRC is to democratize AI research, education, and
>> innovation, making it accessible to all colleges and universities across
>> the country. Without a National Research Cloud, all but the most elite
>> universities risk losing the ability to conduct meaningful AI research and
>> to adequately educate the next generation of AI researchers."
>>
>> See also: [1][2]
>>
>> [1]
>> https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/01/24/national-artificial…
>> [2]
>> https://www.ai.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/NAIRR-TF-Final-Report-2023.pdf
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>
>> *Sent:* Saturday, February 4, 2023 1:59 AM
>> *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>> *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Chat GPT
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 3, 2023 at 9:47 PM Gerg? Tisza <gtisza(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Just to give a sense of scale: OpenAI started with a $1 billion donation,
>> got another $1B as investment, and is now getting a larger investment from
>> Microsoft (undisclosed but rumored to be $10B). Assuming they spent most of
>> their previous funding, which seems likely, their operational costs are in
>> the ballpark of $300 million per year. The idea that the WMF could just
>> choose to create conversational software of a similar quality if it wanted
>> seems detached from reality to me.
>>
>>
>> Without spending billions on LLM development to aim for a
>> conversational chatbot trying to pass a Turing test, we could definitely
>> try to catch up to the state of the art in search results. Our search
>> currently does a pretty bad job (in terms of recall especially). Today's
>> featured article in English is the Hot Chip album "Made in the Dark", and
>> if I enter anything but the exact article title the typeahead results are
>> woefully incomplete or wrong. If I ask an actual question, good luck.
>>
>> Google is feeling vulnerable to OpenAI here in part because everyone can
>> see that their results are often full of low quality junk created for SEO,
>> while ChatGPT just gives a concise answer right there.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menu_(2022_film) is one of the top
>> viewed English articles. If I search "The Menu reviews" the Google results
>> are noisy and not so great. ChatGPT actually gives you nothing relevant
>> because it doesn't know anything from 2022. If we could just manage to
>> display the three sentence snippet of our article about the critical
>> response section of the article, it would be awesome. It's too bad that the
>> whole "knowledge engine" debacle poisoned the well when it comes to a
>> Wikipedia search engine, because we could definitely do a lot to learn from
>> what people like about ChatGPT and apply to Wikipedia search.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
>> at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
>> Public archives at
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
>> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
>> at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
>> Public archives at
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
>> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
>> at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
>> Public archives at
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
>> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
>
Hello Everyone,
Today, in Lagos, Nigeria, a community of volunteer editors would be coming
together to exchange resources, increase capacity and contribute to the
general sum of knowledge available on open source through identified
Wikimedia projects on topics that relate to African music and sounds - The
Afrosounds Project.
Our commitment is to continuously recruit, train and increase capacity of
volunteer editors towards bridging the knowledge gap as it concerns sharing
information and correcting bias and misinformation to the global audience
on content about sounds and music in Africa, covering topics, discussion
and content from traditional elements of music to modern and contemporary
concepts of sounds and its knowledge as it concerns Africa.
If this resonates with your interest and you would like to participate in
this meetup/training virtually, please join us via the call link provided
below:
The Afrosounds Meet-Up 2.0
Saturday, February 4 · 12:00pm – 2:00pm (GMT +1)
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/mgq-otzx-ogt
P.S: The time has been adjusted from 10AM (GMT +1) to 12PM (GMT +1) for
virtual participants to join. Activities between 10am - 11am would be for
physical participants.
Apologies for the disturbance in timing.
We would love to interact with you and learn how we can advance the
contribution of African music knowledge to the free encyclopedia and its
sister projects.
Please, register here
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeP1qD84JxpZSYvXU1okvnnaYxERaBmIcM…>to
be a part of the community and enroll in the outreach dashboard here
<https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Afrosounds/Afrosounds_Meet-Up…>
to join the contest campaign towards promoting the contribution of
knowledge, prizes to be won.
Looking forward to interacting with you.
Cheers.
The Afrosounds Team.
Dear all
Wikimedia UK has just published our Strategic Report for the financial year
2021/22. Excitingly, this is our first fully digital format, which we hope
brings to life the breadth of Wikimedia UK’s activities and impact.
You can find the report directly here
<https://2022strategicreport.wikimedia.org.uk/> or on our website
<https://wikimedia.org.uk/> under Strategic Report.
Best wishes
Lucy
--
Lucy Crompton-Reid (she/her)
Chief Executive