A handful of students in a class I teach hadn't realized that the Wikipedia
was 1) user written, 2) editable, or 3) discussable. They never even tried
the tabs at the top, so a student put the question to me in class today:
how many of those that access a page access its discussion page? On
#wikipedia folks noted that such a feature is possible with Wikimedia but
disabled and any such statistics are hard to get since there's so much and
can hurt performance if enabled.
Any other thoughts?
SJ:
> With a brief discussion about preserving privacy in aggregate data,
> randomizing test and control samples, and a tweak to allow web forms
> on pages that are aware of your wikipedia userid, we could have a
> simple projects-wide survey completed within a month. Let's make this
> a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to
> optimize future iterations.
>
> The latest discussions on meta are here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey
>
SJ, great to hear you welcome the survey. After Wikimania 2005 the project
fell idle,
because I had too many other WM obligations and a not so good winter
healthwise.
Wikimania 2006 gave the project new elan and now someone else will code it.
Status:
Technical design has started but needs some more work:
I'll make a mockup input script for the form generator.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey/Implementation
Programming will start in a reasonable time frame, see Kevin's earlier post.
I'm not so sure this takes only one month :(
Major issues:
1 Authentication
Best after single login is active, in a few weeks time?
2 Anonimisation of results
May need some more thinking, this is sensitive matter
We had a heated debate about this in Frankfurt, we'll probably get into
this further
when we have a proof of concept, and more people show up to give feedback.
3 Translation issues
A Mediawiki wide survey needs to be held in many languages to reduce bias
where opinions are asked.
4 Results should be script-processable, e.g. no free format feedback.
Thus all answers should be on a numeric scale or predefined
(e.g. country numbers instead of country names in all esoteric languages
that no script can handle)
Because of 3 a survey form needs to be built dynamically.
No English/German/Japanese/etc texts intermingled with PHP script.
That would be a maintenance nightmare.
Depending on how much time the programmer can spend on the project, we could
probably show an alpha version about 4 weeks after he starts.
Then start major discussion on final questions (this will work better when
people see a alpha version to play with),
and finally freeze questions and invite translators.
I would be happy if we did a major survey in November/December.
Please don't ask for quick hacks. I know all this sounds like an invitation
for some self-proclaimed code magician to make something barely functional
in a weekend, pronounce the job done and then leave the 'dirty details'
(usually 80% of what needs to be done) for others to clean up. I'd rather
see to it that the first version is usable and a good platform for future
reuse and extension.
Erik Zachte :)
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2006/id20061107_359889.htm?…
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently launched a
$50 million, five-year initiative to investigate how and why young
people—who have been bathed in bits and bytes since birth—use the Web,
computer games, cell phones, and other gadgets to learn, play, and
communicate.
...
To nourish this nascent field, the MacArthur Foundation will give $10
million in grants to individuals and organizations to work on projects
that stimulate research in digital media or explore new approaches to
educational innovation.
The remaining $40 million will be put towards fulfilling the broader
aim of connecting researchers, educators, youth, and practitioners in
different disciplines (and across sectors). A digital knowledge hub is
already in the works, so that teachers from around the world can
compare, contrast, and share research, tools, and findings through
open-source software and online forums.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
DISCLAIMER: Unless otherwise stated, all views or opinions expressed
in this message are solely my own and do not represent an official
position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
Cormac:
> Regarding the General User Survey, I'm not sure of what the status of
> technical considerations is. [...]
> I think the _major_ other non-technical
> detail which needs to be worked out is the issue of sampling - how are
> we to ensure that this survey really does represent the "state of the
> wiki" (as was the motivation to do so)? How are we to ensure that we
> target newbies as well as seasoned wiki-editors?
No tech progress. Kevin told us a while ago his programmer needed to finish
other assignments first, which apparantly takes more time than foreseen,
which on itself is business as usual in IT projects.
The questionaire asks how long respondent has been around and how active he
or she is. Probably more long term participants will be interested in taking
the time to answer the questions, but if enough people participate separate
results can be published for subgroups.
Erik Zachte
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good day. I am Mike Tian-Jian Jiang (
http://www.linkedin.com/in/barabbas ), a team member of wikimania 2007.
I'm trying to arrange Hacking Days currently, here's some rough plan
that needs your precious suggestions.
We would like to invite experts like you to provide speech and to
encourage hackers involving MediaWiki/Wikimedia
development.
Please let me know if you have any advise to these outlines. For
academic professionals, we will also hold a
Conference for oral and poster paper presentations.
Also please forward this mail to whom may be interested in.
Thank you very much!
Sincerely,
Mike
Hacking Days Agenda plan:
* Wikimania 2006:
o http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Days
(Schedule MindMap is missing......)
o http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Days_Extras
* Wikimania 2005
o http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2005_hacking_days or
o http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2005:Hacking_Days
* MediaWiki API Introduction：as web 2.0 trend...
o Query API
o http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/API
o Python Bot Framework
* MediaWiki API application contest：a contest likes Google and
Yahoo!'s, tries to attract hackers.
o Wikipedia Gadget
o Wikipedia Yahoo! Widget
* MediaWiki enhancement
o Wikiwyg
+ Ingy's AJAX version
+ Flash version
o Collaboration editing/versioning
o Site searching (Is there any plan to make Lucene available
for other languages besides English?)
o Improving Simplified-Traditional Chinese conversion
o Audio/Video processing/streaming
o Community: from "Talk" page to forum/bbs with more a
flexible reputation system.
o Spam/Captcha
* MediaWiki system administration
o Large scale data processing; please refers to
+ http://radar.oreilly.com/tag/database
<http://docs.google.com/%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20http://blog.i…>
+ http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html
<http://docs.google.com/%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20http://labs.g…>
o Load balancing
o "The great wall" problem
* Wikipedia content applications
o (Crosslingual) search: especially for
translation/transliteration of named entities from Wikimedia
contents.
o (Crosslingual) question-answering: CLEF 2006 already has a
pilot task WiQA.
Dear Mr. Starling,
I am very sorry about that, seems my information was out-of-dated. It is
pretty good to know that Wikipedia sites applied Lucene, then it will be
more feasible to further applications of cross-lingual information
retrieval.
Best Regards,
Mike
2006/10/31, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>:
>
> Tian-Jian "Barabbas" Jiang@Gmail wrote:
> > o Site searching (Is there any plan to make Lucene available
> > for other languages besides English?)
>
> It already is.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
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