Hi everyone,

Thank you for your feedback. It's really appreciated. My responses below, all in one-batch to avoid many emails to the list. Sorry if it's too long in advance.

2015-06-25 16:50 GMT-07:00 Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com>:

This is such a delightful experience. Whoever is working on translation interfaces and translation research this way: very nicely done indeed.

Thank you! It's great to hear that you liked it. There are many things we would like to improve about the algorithm and hearing that you like it makes us more motivated. If you have more specific comments, feel free to leave us a comment on the talk page.

The translation tool is owned by Language Engineering team. You can read more about it here, though I'm guessing you've already seen that. Sorry if it's repetitive.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 12:29 AM, Emmanuel Engelhart <kelson@kiwix.org> wrote:

[...]
I have received this kind of email too. "No",*this is not delightful at all*. This kind of email bores me, like many other Wikipedians (see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Le_Bistro_du_jour#Wikimedia_Foundation_se_lance_dans_le_spam).

AFAIK I don't have asked to received that kind of email, and the definition of what you do is "spamming" (and please don't answer to this by talking about the "opt-out" option, "opt-in" is the respectful way of doing). Can you please stop this immediately?

I'm sorry that you received an email when you don't like to receive one. This is not nice and I apologize for that. The opt-out option is available through the email you have received. We will make sure you do not receive any future research related emails if you unsubscribe. The test on French Wikipedia is over now.

The opt-out/opt-in discussion deserves a dedicated effort considering the needs of everyone involved. I'm committed for improving the communications with users regarding research projects and will do what I can on that front.

FYI, the Wikipedia in French has an article evaluation program (like on Wikipedia in English) based on wikiprojects, so honestly I think they already know pretty well where are the weakness without the help of a robot: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:%C3%89valuation/Index

Thank you for this pointer.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 12:42 AM, Jane Darnell <jane023@gmail.com> wrote:

Interesting viewpoint, Emmanuel! I am always fascinated to know what others think I might be interested in, even if the "other" is just a bot. Like Sam I was delighted, and I might even be prompted to do a translation (though not one of the ones they suggested, but an article which I made myself and is in the same general area). I disagree by the way, that each Wikipedia has to decide on their own what is "encyclopedia worthy" in that language. I think the projects need to start trusting each other more and be open to *aggressive* translation efforts as a way to educate new (multi-lingual) editors, and also to promote a neutral point of view. Let's wikibomb everybody aggressively with translation suggestions!

Jane, thank you for your comment. We're happy that you welcomed receiving such recommendations. For the purposes of this research, we are taking the following approach: we take a more global approach to identify missing content, rank them by their importance, and recommend them to editors. The editor should make the final call whether the recommendation they receive should go to the destination language. Ideally, we want to loop back editors' expertise and feedback to the algorithm, i.e., if you as an editor think a recommendation is not useful in a language, we should be able to collect that information from you, feed it to the algorithm, and let the algorithm learn. This needs to happen down the road (hopefully not too far down) for the algorithm to be able to serve the needs of each language and community.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 1:29 AM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com> wrote:

I still wonder what made a bot think I speak French? Surely, a few minor edits on fr.wp can't be the trigger?
(well, I had two years at school, but I barely remember enough to identify the language...)

I'am copying from here:

We determine which editors are suitable for receiving recommendations for translating from the source to the target language via two methods. The first is scraping the target users' User pages for a Babel template that indicates that they speak the source language. The second is selecting target users who have an account with the same username in the source language, have made at least one edit in both the source and target Wikipedias, have made at least one edit in either language within the last year and have matching email addresses for the two accounts.

Based on the feedback from the test, it is clear that we need to raise the bar on the contributions to source/destination languages for the future steps. We initially had a 100 byte limit in each of the source and destination language in the past year as a bar, but that one somehow didn't get to the code (code issue) and we didn't realize this until we received the feedback. Based on the feedback, we may want to consider even higher bars for choosing editors, one thing we do not want to do is to ignore those with few edits completely. Those may be people who have contributed few times and recommendations can encourage them to contribute more and come back. Any feedback on how we can improve this aspect further is appreciated.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 6:58 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote:

Interesting, I figured I received the mail because of joining translation projects. It seems that it's enough to have made a single edit in both language wikipedias in the last year.

we changed the wording of the page to make it clearer. I think there was a confusion caused by our wording. please read here.

I hope you will do this in both directions for each language pair (both suggestions from FR --> EN and from EN --> FR.)

the way the algorithm makes the final recommendations is language agnostic so we can easily expand them to other language pairs. the goal is to have them for the top 30 languages (to and from), the top 50 if we have enough data to make good enough recommendations. We do hope that the engineering aspect of receiving these recommendations can also move as fast so we can offer the editors the recommendations in a way that works smoothly with their workflow.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 8:32 AM, Jim <trodel@gmail.com> wrote:

I strongly disagree that this is spamming. Like others have mentioned, I was not offended by the email (though I wasn't "delighted") by it either, I think it is a reasonable attempt to encourage editors to put some efforts into languages other than English.

Plus it is easy to unsubscribe from the research mailing list.

Thanks for sharing your point of view and happy to hear we did not bother you by it. As mentioned earlier, I hope that we (all parties involved, not just research) can resolve the email conversation in a way that more people are happier with the outcome.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 9:38 AM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk@gmail.com> wrote:

Spamming - a question what the e-mail function of WP is ment for.
I was very surprised to get the request though my French is limited, I hardly ever edited on fr.WP,

The feedback about limited French language knowledge is a great feedback that we have heard clearly. Thank you for sharing that and sorry that you were chosen. This is something we have already changed in our code to increase the threshold on the way we choose future participants.

and the suggested topics have totally nothing to do with what I do on Wikipedia. So I do think that the mail was not quite appropriate, and it gives me a not so favorable impression about the people or initiative behind.

I'm sorry if the recommendation has disappointed you. As mentioned in the recommendation email, you will be in one of the two groups: those who receive random but still important (with the algorithm's definition of importance) recommendations or those who receive personalized and important recommendations. Since we have not finalized the analysis of the test I cannot look to see which group you were in since that may have impact on the results. I hope this helps us build more trust, and hopefully we can learn much more when the results are out. Thank you for your time.

Thanks again everyone. I will continue monitoring this list. We are also busy with the talk page so you may experience some delay. Apologize in advance if that happens. Just be sure that we will get back to you. :-)

Best,

Leila