I apologize for the spam, but I promise this is my last public call
for help. :-) We now have 41 people lined up either as translators or
reviewers. I will start distributing the spreadsheets tomorrow. Of the
big languages, it would be good to have additional
translators/reviewers especially in Russian, Spanish, Italian, Swedish
and Japanese. (We have all these languages covered in theory, but only
one person assigned to each of them.) But, help in any language will
be needed -- we can divvy up relatively easily where it makes sense.
This will be the first large scale, multilingual survey of our readers
& contributors. It's serious and important stuff. If you can, please
help. Instructions here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_Survey_Translation
Thanks!
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
All -
I would appreciate help with the following announcement. As with the
previous announcement, I'd like it to be sent to as many language
mailing lists & village pumps as possible. My plan is to send the
English language announcement on Wednesday, June 4, at 11:00 UTC to
foundation-l and all multilingual and English language project mailing
lists. I would need your help to send it to other lists, languages &
places.
Announcement follows.
Thanks for any & all help,
Erik
Subject: Important: New edit patrolling features available
As of today, the "FlaggedRevs" extension is available to any wiki
community that wishes to use it. FlaggedRevs is a tool for patrolling
changes, identifying high quality article versions, and changing the
default version shown to unregistered users. It's highly configurable.
As such, we're making it available in two configurations:
1) A minimally intrusive "patrolling" configuration;
2) Custom configurations per your request.
== Who needs this feature and where can I see it? ==
Larger wiki communities will probably benefit more from the use of
this feature than smaller ones. If you have problems keeping vandalism
in check, and/or want to experiment with new ways to identify high
quality content, you should look into this functionality.
You can see an English language demo installation of the feature at:
http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/
The feature is in production use on the German Wikipedia:
http://de.wikipedia.org/
The German Wikipedia uses a custom configuration where the most recent
vandalism-patrolled version, if any, is shown to unregistered users.
You can track the progress of their use of the patrolling feature
here:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~aka/cgi-bin/reviewcnt.cgi?lang=english
== Patrolling Configuration ==
In the Patrolling Configuration, any user who has been registered for
more than 21 days and has made at least 150 edits will be
automatically given the permission to patrol changes for vandalism.
Only changes made by users who are not permitted to patrol changes
need to be patrolled.
In addition, sysops will be given the permission to flag versions of
"featured articles" in accordance with existing nomination processes.
(In other words, this gives you the ability to identify specific
_versions_ of an article as "featured", rather than the article as a
whole.) Finally, sysops will be permitted to define on a per-page
basis that changes need to be patrolled before being visible to
unregistered readers. This is an alternative to semi-protection; it
doesn't make sense to use both on a given page.
The use of these features is subject to policies that your wiki
community will need to develop. They should be used carefully until
such a policy is in place.
To activate the patrolling configuration,
1) File a request on http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ of type
"enhancement", component "site request". You may need to create a
BugZilla account to do this.
2) Title your request "Enable FlaggedRevs Patrolling Configuration on
(my project name)".
3) Post a link to your BugZilla request to your project's "Village
pump" and mailing list, if available.
If there are no objections on the BugZilla page, the request will be
considered valid after 7 days. (It may still take a while longer to
process it.)
== Custom Configurations ==
The FlaggedRevs extension is highly flexible in its configuration. We
are willing to accommodate custom requests. Since some configurations
of FlaggedRevs could be considered highly disruptive, the requirements
are somewhat higher.
1) Read about the configuration options at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs
and experiment with the live demo at:
http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/
2) Create a page in the "Project:" namespace (e.g. "Wikipedia:",
"Wikibooks:") of your wiki community describing the configuration you
want to use.
3) Create a BugZilla request as above, titled "Enable FlaggedRevs
custom configuration on (my project name)" pointing to the proposal
page you have created. Provide an English translation of all relevant
information if possible - or we may not be able to help you.
4) Post a link to your proposal and to the BugZilla request to the
various relevant channels of your wiki community, e.g. "village pump",
mailing list.
If there are no objections within 14 days, your request will be
considered valid. If there are objections, please try building
consensus. If necessary, you can also resort to a poll (a very large
majority, at least two thirds, is generally necessary).
Note that custom configurations will take longer to process, and might
sit in the technical support queue for several weeks.
Our developers will _only_ look at the information attached to the
BugZilla request, so please make sure that everything relevant is at
least linked from there.
== Translators needed ==
The user interface of the FlaggedRevs extension needs to be translated
into as many languages as possible. The extension can be localized
using http://translatewiki.net/ - please follow the instructions there
to become a translator.
== User interface developers needed ==
If you are a PHP developer with JavaScript/CSS experience, your help
in improving the user interface experience (by improving the CSS or
adding AJAX features) would be appreciated. Just check out a fresh
copy of the MediaWiki code and the FlaggedRevs code and get started:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversionhttp://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs
If you need committer access to our version control system, please
e-mail <commitaccess at wikimedia dot org>, attaching your SSH key and
desired username as per the above link.
As per my previous request, we're still looking for translators for
the first general survey of Wikipedia users and contributors. It is my
belief that this is a tremendously important project, as it will net
tons of useful data about who our audience and contributors are. From
very basic questions like gender and profession, it looks at
motivations, expectations and activities. Data like this is critical
for planning outreach events targeting specific audiences, for making
technical improvements, for developing policies, for improving
multilingual cooperation, and so forth.
And, if we do not have a translation in your language, we will not be
able to get data from contributors in your language. So, please help.
:-)
So far we have translators for:
* Polish
* Serbian
* German
* Persian
* a French reviewer
Even for those languages, more reviewers would be helpful, but I'm
thinking that we can do a lot better. :-)
Please e-mail me offlist (erik at wikimedia dot org) if you can
provide a translation into another language. (Please also state your
level of comfort in both English and the language you want to
translate to.) The total text is about 25,000 characters, and we'll
try to eliminate anything we can get from existing data sources before
sending out the translation spreadsheet.
Thanks!
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
All -
as per our earlier announcement:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/UNU_survey_agreement
In collaboration with a research group at UNU Merit, we're about to
launch the first survey of Wikipedia readers & contributors. We're
limiting the publication of the questionnaire right now to avoid
introducing early distortions, since you are also research subjects.
:-) We've solicited feedback from a group of testers on the
questionnaire; separately, we need to translate the survey questions &
answers into as many languages as possible. The overall amount of text
to be translated is about 25,000 characters.
This is a key project to study our contributors & our audience. The
more languages we can translate to, the better. :-)
If you are willing to translate from English into another language, please:
1) E-mail me offlist.
2) Let me know:
* the language(s) you speak
* the proficiency (native; very good; good; etc.)
3) We'll add you to the pool of translators as needed.
I am maintaining an internal assignment spreadsheet. We will try to
pair up translators & translation reviewers for each language. You'll
receive the questions in OpenOffice and Excel format - use whichever
suits you best.
The goal is to complete translations within the next two weeks. :-)
Your help is very much welcome & needed.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate