Dear "cultural partnerships" and "research" mailing lists, (cc-ing the other
members of the taskforce)
As you know the WMF is undertaking a strategic review process. As part of
this there is a specific taskforce to look into "Partnerships and
Alliances". I'm writing to you to ask for your input on this issue. So far we
have identified<http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Alliances_and_Partnerships/We…>6
areas in which the WMF could potentially engage in partnerships but I
am
writing to you to get feedback specifically about "Cultural partnerships"
and "academic partnerships".
On a general level, I would appreciate it if anyone would like to add their
thoughts to the taskforce-specific questions listed here:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Emerging_strategic_priorities/ESP_5…
However, and more specifically, I would very much like to hear about what
kind of *strategic level* plans the WMF should make - in your opinion - in
the areas of Cultural partnerships and in Academic/Education partnerships.
By strategic level I don't mean a specific project you would like to see,
which is what the "call for
proposals<http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals>"
was about, but the *kind* of project you would like to see in the next 5
years. So, rather than "have a masters of Wikipedia studies at Harvard
university" instead you could say "creation of formal recognition of
Wikimedia expertise in partnership with tertiary education sector". See what
I mean?
*So, if you would like to help out in this task, please write your points at
the relevant sub-page of the "Industry Specific
Suggestions<http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Alliances_and_Partnerships#In…>"
for partnerships. *Doesn't matter about the formatting - just throw your
strategic-level suggestions in there. If there's anyone who needs to have a
say on these matters it is the self-selected groups that follow these
mailing lists!
All the best,
Liam Wyatt [[user:witty lama]]
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
Hello!
We have been working on a Java API for reading Wikipedia XML dumps for
sometime and it's now reasonably functional. Check out:
http://code.google.com/p/wikixmlj/
*Features:*
- Easy access to important elements of a Wikipedia page
- Also provides interfaces for Wiki text parsing.
- Memory efficient
- SAX interface for parsing
- Lazy loading of files for DOM
- Callback support with DOM
- Directly operate on compressed wikipedia dumps (gzip/bzip2/native xml
supported)
Best,
Delip
A few of the other attendees of WikiSym and I had a long discussion
about the problems related to interactions between researchers and
Wikipedians. It seems to me that the conclusion we came to is that the
vast majority of the problems could be solved through an organized
effort to build policy and procedures with the Wikipedia community.
I've written up a proposal
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Resear…)
to create a WikiProject to help organize the effort to construct these
policies and procedures for the English Wikipedia.
The proposal is short (2 paragraphs and a few examples). Please have a
look if you have or are planning to interact with Wikipedians during
your research.
Thanks!
Aaron Halfaker
GroupLens Research
University of Minnesota
Given all the bots, both in terms of vandals and in repulsing them, I am not sure the following question even makes sense: but how can we characterize the ratio of productive to unproductive contribution/edits on the English Wikipedia? Has this changed over time? I do have figures from the literature on percentages (and their deltas) for administrator activity, policy edits, time to revert vandalism, etc. The only data point I can find is a single one: the "Bush article had 28,000 revisions, one-third were reverts and, conceivably, another third vandalism" (Spinellis, Louridas 2008).
At WikiSym this year, some of us started a Zotero group for collecting
research papers about Wikipedia. It's intended to serve a purpose
similar to that of the "Wikipedia in academic studies" page[1], but in
Zotero so that it integrates well with the research process. Membership
is currently open to all, and anyone can add resources.
To keep it from being an unbounded collection of everything remotely
wiki-related, there are a few guidelines for what topics are within
scope of this library:
* Wikipedia as a community and social system
* Open collaboration using Wikipedia as a data set or considered system
* Wiki technology focused on or studying Wikimedia projects
Hopefully this will be a useful resource to the Wikipedia research
community.
- Michael
--
Michael Ekstrand <ekstrand(a)cs.umn.edu>
Ph.D student, Computer Science -- University of Minnesota
GroupLens Research: http://www.grouplens.org
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