Hoi,
I  agree when it is the only thing I said. 

Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them and several times) and I always hear "good idea, should be easy, we ill look into it and we get back to you". But as I said, your reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:
Gerard.  Did you file the feature request?  If not, you are ranting at the wrong mailing list.  

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
Despair is a personal emotion. What makes you think that despair is an attack on a person? It is not. Oliver, I despair about what the Research list has become and, I will explain why.

What I despair about is the overwhelming amount of Wikipedia related noise. Noise because it feels to me like the same subjects are covered in endless similar ways. I despair because when something new happens OUTSIDE of this, the English Wikipedia it is completely ignored.

Much of what I hear feels like noise because it lacks practical relevance. Research, statistics could show "What are people looking for most in Wikipedia but cannot find". We do not have that because of no reason I can think of and, it has been promised often enough for years now. The Swedish Wikipedia finds that their bot generated articles has rejuvenated their Wikipedia but the research community is quiet about it.. Ignores it ? Wikidata has statistics [1] its data has a real meaning about Wikipedia, about Wikidata and about the sum of all information AVAILABLE to us. 

The consequence of all this self promotion is that there is no attention for anything else.. Yes, we know there is a gender disparity but what about people with a mental health problem.. We have way more people editing who are "enriched" with a diagnosis than is average. What do our projects mean for them, does it help them with their self awareness, does it help them recover, is our community aware of it and how does it cope or fail to cope. What practical steps can we take to make these valuable contributors more secure, less anxious?

Researching the same things over and over does not help us understand WIkipedia, our "other projects", our communities. It does not help us achieve our aim; it is "share in the sum of all knowledge", we do not even share all the knowledge that is available to us. Why not? How can we do this?

Jane knows the tool that provides a selection of Wikipedias with search results from Wikidata. It works, Ori looked at it from a performance point of view. NOTHING NEEDS TO BE DONE TO IMPLEMENT IT. It does not happen. A research question would be "Why".

The statistics for Wikidata are not up to date because the dumps are faulty. It is not clear, obvious that it is of real concern to the people responisble. However this data IS used to run specific bots based on what the numbers show. The numbers matter, the statistics matter they have a real demonstrable impact.

What I am looking for is relevance and I find only research for more fine grained explanations not for solutions. It is why I despair, it is because it feels so much like a colossal waste of time when you consider that researching subjects with a different objective would help us forward so much. 

Maybe my expectations are unrealistic and people doing research are just another incrowd doing their own thing.
Thanks,
       GerardM




On 28 October 2014 00:15, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:
If it's that trivial to implement, implement it.

That's a very compressed way of saying; I think it's fine for us to disagree on this list. But, really? Pine's email made you "despair"? It, by inference, made you conclude he doesn't accept new things? You find the absence of a feature actively irrational?

It's okay for Pine's vision to be different from yours, or mine, or Aaron's, or anyone else's. Wikimedia's ethos is not built on any one person's vision: it is built on the sum of all of our hopes (in an ideal universe). It's not a one-in, one-out system where ideas must be harshly and actively countered so that yours can take primacy.

So let's try and stay non-hyperbolic and civil on this list, please. As a heuristic; if even /you/ feel a need to write an apology for your email into an email, don't hit send.

On 27 October 2014 17:14, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
I read your mail again. It makes me despair.

Wikimedia research is NOT about Wikipedia, not exclusively. When I read what is an inspiration to you I find all the reasons why Wikipedians do not accept anything new. Why we still do not have a search that also returns information on what is NOT in that particular Wikipedia. It is only one example out of many. It is however so easy to implement, it defies logic that it has not happened on all Wikipedias. It is just one example that demonstrates that we do not even share the sum of all information that is available to us.

...

Sorry,
      GerardM

On 20 October 2014 08:23, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Both of the presentations at the October Wikimedia Research Showcase were fascinating and I encourage everyone to watch them [1]. I would like to continue to discuss the themes from the showcase about Wikipedia's adaptability, viability, and diversity.

Aaron's discussion about Wikipedia's ongoing internal adaptations, and the slowing of those adaptations, reminded me of this statement from MIT Technology Review in 2013 (and I recommend reading the whole article [2]):

"The main source of those problems (with Wikipedia) is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase partipcipation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage."

I would like to contrast that vision of Wikipedia with the vision presented by User:CatherineMunro (formatting tweaks by me), which I re-read when I need encouragement:

"THIS IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
One gateway
to the wide garden of knowledge,
where lies
The deep rock of our past,
in which we must delve
The well of our future,
The clear water
we must leave untainted
for those who come after us,
The fertile earth,
in which truth may grow
in bright places,
tended by many hands,
And the broad fall of sunshine,
warming our first steps
toward knowing
how much we do not know."

How can we align ouselves less with the former vision and more with the latter? [3]

I hope that we can continue to discuss these themes on the Research mailing list. Please contribute your thoughts and questions there.

Regards,

Pine

[1] youtube.com/watch?v=-We4GZbH3Iw

[2] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/

[3] Lest this at first seem to be impossible, I will borrow and tweak a quote from from George Bernard Shaw and later used by John F. Kennedy: "Some people see things as they are and say, 'Why?' Let us dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'"


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Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation

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