Pursuant to prior discussions about the need for a research
policy on Wikipedia, WikiProject Research is drafting a
policy regarding the recruitment of Wikipedia users to
participate in studies.
At this time, we have a proposed policy, and an accompanying
group that would facilitate recruitment of subjects in much
the same way that the Bot Approvals Group approves bots.
The policy proposal can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research
The Subject Recruitment Approvals Group mentioned in the proposal
is being described at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group
Before we move forward with seeking approval from the Wikipedia
community, we would like additional input about the proposal,
and would welcome additional help improving it.
Also, please consider participating in WikiProject Research at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Research
--
Bryan Song
GroupLens Research
University of Minnesota
The Wikimania call for papers and scholarship application call is out. Happy New Year, all! -Jodi
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Harel Cain <harel.cain(a)gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 2:01 AM
Subject: [Wikimania-l] Wikimania 2011 registration and scholarship application to begin on January 1st!
To: "Wikimania general list (open subscription)" <wikimania-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear Wikimaniacs,
We are pleased to announce the opening, on January 1st 0:00 UTC, of the registration period and the scholarship application period for Wikimania 2011, which will be held in Haifa, Israel, on August 4th to 7th, 2011.
== Registration ==
Those who register early will enjoy considerable discounts in both registration and accommodation fees, so be sure to register as early as possible.
* Full information about registration, including fees and registration periods: http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration
* Our registration website: http://wmreg.wikimedia.org.il/
== Scholarship application ==
If you require a scholarship to attend Wikimania 2011, you can apply for one until the end of January 2011. This year, there will be partial scholarships to cover travel costs up to USD 300, in addition to full scholarships.
* Full information about scholarships: http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships
* Our scholarship application website: http://wmschols.wikimedia.org.il/
== Call for Papers ==
The Call for Papers for the conference has been available for a while now. You are welcome to submit workshop, seminar, tutorial, panel, and presentation proposals.
* The Call for Papers: http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Papers
== Translators required ==
You are welcome to help translate as much of our conference wiki into as many languages as possible, using the regular {{Other languages}} and {{Translation}} templates.
If you are interested in translating the registration website into additional languages, please contact us at wikimania-registration(a)wikimedia.org.
== Got any questions? ==
You can contact us in any of the ways listed on http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Contact.
If you have questions that might interest others, please post them on http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Information_Desk.
Please excuse us if the registration or scholarship application websites are temporarily unavailable due to maintenance.
Wishing you all a happy 2011 and looking forward to hosting you in Haifa,
Harel Cain
on behalf of the entire Wikimania 2011 local team
_______________________________________________
Wikimania-l mailing list
Wikimania-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
On Thursday, December 16, 2010, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
> I have the first 10K edits up reconstructed in their various pages at:
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/~reagle/wp-redux/
I fixed some of the encoding issues. The DB dump contained different encodings. So, the encoding of each diff in the dump is independently now guessed using Python's CharDet (Universal Encoding Detector) library.
So now you can read up on the few "accented" topics in the early Wikipedia including: Göteborg, Köpenhamn, and Křbenhavn. (Nothing very exciting.) But it means articles, such as ASCII, are much improved as well. Interestingly, the ASCII page isn't about ASCII itself so much, but as to how to type non-ascii characters in the early Wikipedia.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/~reagle/wp-redux/ASCII/983670583.html
hi wiki researchers,
i'm currently writing a piece that covers some of the 2002 spanish
fork of wikipedia. in particular, i'm trying to find out a little more
about what kind of figure edgar enyedy was and his exact role in the
fork.
from the archives i can see that he was very much the voice of the
fork, but i haven't found much about how active he was before the fork
and whether or not it was him that actually set up the new fork.
for example, was he an (unofficial) community leader? did he have
technical expertise?
any help, including contact information, would be much appreciated.
best
Nate Tkacz
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Twitter: http://twitter.com/__nate__
Research Page: http://nathanieltkacz.net
Current project: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/about-2/
Hi everyone,
Last week, some researchers from Cal-IT (UCSD) [1] and the Persuasive
Technology Lab (Stanford) [2] visited the Wikimedia Foundation. A brief
summary of their visit is posted on the Strategy Wiki Village Pump:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Village_pump/en#Researchers_from_UCSD_an…
As I mention in the post, the goal of their visit was to see if there
are any areas of mutual interest between the researchers and WMF/WMF
projects. The Cal-IT and Persuasive Tech folks will be developing a
list of potential projects, so please contribute to the thread if you're
interested.
Howie
[1] http://www.calit2.net/
[2] http://captology.stanford.edu/
On Tuesday, December 14, 2010, Tim Starling wrote:
> I didn't want to believe that those revisions had been lost forever,
> and I even opened the UseMod source code and stared forlornly at the
> unlink() call. What I (and Brion before) missed is that UseMod appends
> a record of every change made to two files, called diff_log and rclog.
> In these two files is a record of every change made to Wikipedia from
> January 15 to August 17, 2001.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like versions of the articles beyond the first ~10 are automatically recoverable. I wrote a Python script to reconstruct the early WP, but it fails because of apparent weaknesses in "normal diffs", which is what UseMod apparently uses. To reconstruct any particular version in time, I iteratively apply all diffs via `patch` up to that point. It doesn't take long before patch chokes on a diff. In fact, I've discovered there are simple cases in which normal_diff/patch are incapable of round tripping.
I hope someone will eventually prove me wrong, or some log is found that is actually capable of recreating the state. (I wonder what the point of providing a diff_log export is if it isn't useable, and perhaps UseMod folks could speak to that.)
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I
> opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete
> backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August 2001!
>
> This is exciting, because there is lots of article history in here
> which was assumed to be lost forever.
>
> I've long been interested in Wikipedia's history, and I've tried in
> the past to locate such backups. I asked various people who might have
> had one. I had given up hope.
>
> The history of particularly old Wikipedia articles, as seen in the
> present Wikipedia database, is incomplete, due to Usemod's policy of
> deleting old revisions of pages after about a month. The script which
> Brion wrote to import the article histories from UseMod to MediaWiki
> only fetched those revisions which hadn't been purged yet.
>
> I didn't want to believe that those revisions had been lost forever,
> and I even opened the UseMod source code and stared forlornly at the
> unlink() call. What I (and Brion before) missed is that UseMod appends
> a record of every change made to two files, called diff_log and rclog.
> In these two files is a record of every change made to Wikipedia from
> January 15 to August 17, 2001.
>
> I've put the two log files up on the web, at:
>
> http://noc.wikimedia.org/~tstarling/wikipedia-logs-2001-08-17.7z
>
> The 7-zip archive is only 8.4MB -- much more manageable than today's
> backups.
>
> rclog contains IP addresses. The Usemod software made IP addresses of
> logged-in users public, so the people who made these edits had no
> expectation that their IP address would be kept private. That, coupled
> with the passage of time, makes me think that no harm to user privacy
> can come from releasing these files.
>
> -- Tim Starling
AWESOME. This is so cool. I've copied the research list too, since
there's many Wikipedia historians that will be eager to see the older
versions.
I hope we can get them up in a browsable way, like nostalgia.wikipedia.org!
-- phoebe
Hello, my name is Sebastian from AKSW, Uni Leipzig.
I'm currently working on extending the DBpedia Framework software to
convert Wiktionary (all languages) to RDF.
If you are interested please join the mailing list here:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-wiktionary
Below is an announcement, which might be relevant, as it provides new
ways of finding content and creating structure in Wikipedia.
There is a mockup http://aksw.org/Projects/NKE#Mockups on how it could
be integrated into Wikipedia and also a Web demo: http://hanne.aksw.org
Regards,
Sebastian
*****Details Below*****
Dear Colleagues,
over the last year, we have worked on a methodology called Navigational
Knowledge Engineering - in short NKE.
We have amounted a good deal of documents, a web demo (HANNE) , source
code and images, which we publish and link to on this page:
http://aksw.org/Projects/NKE
Summary:
NKE is a light-weight methodology for low-cost knowledge engineering by
a massive user base. Although structured data is becoming widely
available, no other methodology – to the best of our knowledge – is
currently able to scale up and provide light-weight knowledge
engineering for a massive user base. Using NKE, data providers can
publish flat data on the Web without extensively engineering structure
upfront, but rather observe how structure is created on the fly by
interested users, who navigate the knowledge base and at the same time
also benefit from using it. The vision of NKE is to produce ontologies
as a result of users navigating through a system. This way, NKE reduces
the costs for creating expressive knowledge by disguising it as navigation.
We would also like to steer your attention to the Web Demo [2], the
Tutorial slides for the Web demo [3] and two mockups[4], which visualize
how the methodology could be integrated into Wikipedia and Amazon.com .
As we believe that the methodology is quite novel (please tell us in
case you know something similar), we are still discussing all possible
applications and implications. In particular, we are searching for
suggestions, where to integrate and test our methodology next. Please
feel free to contact us.
Regards,
Sebastian Hellmann, Jens Lehmann, Jörg Unbehauen, Claus Stadler and
Markus Strohmaier (TU Graz)
Links:
[1] Main Page: http://aksw.org/Projects/NKE
[2] Web demo: http://hanne.aksw.org
[3] Tutorial slides:
http://svn.aksw.org/papers/2011/WWW_NKE/hanne_tutorial/hanne_tutorial_publi…
[4] Mockups: http://aksw.org/Projects/NKE#Mockups
--
Dipl. Inf. Sebastian Hellmann
Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Homepage: http://bis.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org