Hi Pine, These are great pointers to existing practices on enwiki, some of which I've been looking for and/or missed, thanks! Cheers, Morten On 19 April 2017 at 22:35, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Yes I totally agree that "importance is a relative metric rather than absolute." I also agree that incoming links and pageviews are not accurate measurements of "importance" for all of the reasons you mention. However, we are still a project that is actively exploring the universe of knowledge, and leaning heavily on academia and other established sources we must "boldly go where no man has gone before" (and please feel free to insert "white, euro-centric" before the man part). So do you have any suggestions what we could measure going forward that would cough up some interesting stats to monitor? Pagewatching is useful , but problematic because these are only assigned at page-creation, while some marginal editor interest might be expanded to whole categories (speaking as someone who has thousands of pages watchlisted on multiple projects). I like your thoughts about looking for key articles such as those used as the "article as the "main" article for a category or as the title of a navbox ". I am looking for similar usages of paintings as a way to find popular painters or paintings rather than just those paintings which have articles written about them (which are often written for totally random reasons such as theft/sale/wikiproject). On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 5:39 AM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I think you are reading my comments too negatively. I’m not saying to ignore pageviews or incoming links. I’m saying that a naïve look at their stats may not be as useful as some of the variations I mention. I think it is worth looking at pageviews relative to those articles in the same WikiProject. I think it is worth looking at inbound links but to consider two groups, those coming from the same WikiProject(s) and from other WikiProjects. I think the position of the incoming links within their source articles is also significant, either first sentence, first para, whole of lede, or absolute/relative position of the link in the article (e.g. 2000 bytes from start, or 40% from start). The big difference between machine-assessment of article quality and article importance is that quality is a metric on the article but importance is a metric on the topic. Also, my informal observation is that article quality does improve and degrade over time and hence is much more dynamic than topic importance, which seems to me to be much more stable. So I think there is less scope for dramatically improving the situation by being able to determine topic importance than the benefits likely to be achieved from automated quality assessment, but there may be benefit if there are heuristics to spot the relatively few articles which do need importance re-assessed due to “current events”. In which case “editor activity” may be a metric, particularly “editor activity” on the lede para or other more critical areas of the article. I am not too worried about 22nd century. I think we should look more at the next decade. Who would have predicted the demise of Usenet? It seemed pretty sexy at the time, etc. Wikipedia, like many things, will pass. It’s not to say it will pass into oblivion but it may morph into something very different to what it is today. Being CC-BY-SA improves the chances that any successor can build on it, but maybe we should put into WMF’s constitution, “if WMF shuts down, we release the contents of the projects as CC0” (to increase the likelihood that the content has a future). Having had to shut down a number of research institutes when the funding ran out, I know the utter stupidity occurs when they retain a skeleton of staff to “sell off all our valuable IP” which every closing-down institution seems to wants to do and the result is that the IP gets wasted because it isn’t sold or it’s sold to one of those companies who buy IP for tuppence on the off-chance they can potentially engage in patent litigation (or other IP litigation) downstream. We waste so much IP with this kind of “make a buck” thinking. <end of rant> Kerry From: Jane Darnell [mailto:jane023@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, 26 April 2017 5:51 PM To: kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com; Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Project exploring automated classification of article importance Yes I totally agree that "importance is a relative metric rather than absolute." I also agree that incoming links and pageviews are not accurate measurements of "importance" for all of the reasons you mention. However, we are still a project that is actively exploring the universe of knowledge, and leaning heavily on academia and other established sources we must "boldly go where no man has gone before" (and please feel free to insert "white, euro-centric" before the man part). So do you have any suggestions what we could measure going forward that would cough up some interesting stats to monitor? Pagewatching is useful , but problematic because these are only assigned at page-creation, while some marginal editor interest might be expanded to whole categories (speaking as someone who has thousands of pages watchlisted on multiple projects). I like your thoughts about looking for key articles such as those used as the "article as the "main" article for a category or as the title of a navbox ". I am looking for similar usages of paintings as a way to find popular painters or paintings rather than just those paintings which have articles written about them (which are often written for totally random reasons such as theft/sale/wikiproject). On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 5:39 AM, Kerry Raymond &lt;kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com <mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com> > wrote: Just a few musings on the issue of Importance and how to research it ... I agree it is intuitive that importance is likely to be linked to pageviews and inbound links but, as the preliminary experiment showed, it's probably not that simple. Pageviews tells us something about importance to readers of Wikipedia, while inbound links tells us something about importance to writers of Wikipedia, and I suspect that writers are not a proxy for readers as the editor surveys suggest that Wikipedia writers are not typical of broader society on at least two variables: gender and level of education (might be others, I can't remember). But I think importance is a relative metric rather than absolute. I think by taking the mean value of importance across a number of WikiProjects in the preliminary experiment may have lost something because it tried (through averaging) to look at importance "generally". I would suspect conducting an experiment considering only the importance ratings wrt to a single WikiProject would be more likely to show correlation with pageviews (wrt to other articles in that same WikiProject) and inbound links. And I think there are two kinds of inbound links to be considered, those coming from other articles within the same WikiProject and those coming from outside that Wikiproject. I suspect different insights will be obtained by looking at both types of inbound links separately rather than treating them as an aggregate. I note also that WikiProjects are not entirely independent of one another but have relationships between them. For example, The WikiProject Australian Roads describes itself as an "intersection" (ha ha!) of WikiProject Highways and WikiProject Australia, so I expect that we would find greater correlation in importance between related WikiProjects than between unrelated WikiProjects. When thinking about readers and pageviews, I think we have to ask ourselves is there a difference between popularity and importance. Or whether popularity *is* importance. I sense that, as a group of educated people, those of us reading this research mailing list probably do think there is a difference. Certainly if there is no difference, then this research can stop now -- just judge importance by pageviews. Let's assume a difference then. When looking at pageviews of an article, they are not always consistent over time. Here are the pageviews for Drottninggatan https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org <https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-90&pages=Drottninggatan> &platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-90&pages=Drottninggatan Why so interesting on 8 April? A terrorist attack occurred there. This spike in pageviews occurs all the time when some topic is in the news (even peripherally as in this case where it is not the article about the terrorist attack but about the street in which it occurred). Did the street become more "important"? I think it became more interesting but not more important. So I think we do have to be careful to understand that pageviews probably reflect interest rather than importance. I note that The Chainsmokers (a music group with a number of songs in the current USA music charts) gets many more Wikipedia article pageviews than the Wikipedia article on Pasteurization but The Chainsmokers are not rated as being of high importance by the relevant WikiProjects while Pasteurization is very important in WikiProject Food and Drink. Since pasteurisation prevents a lot of deaths, I think we might agree that in the real world pasteurisation is more important than a music group regardless of what pageviews tell us. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org <https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-90&pages=The_Chainsmokers|Pasteurization> &platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-90&pages=The_Chainsmokers|Pasteurization Of course it is matters for Wikipedia's success that our *popular* articles are of high quality, but I think we have be cautious about pageviews being a proxy for importance. When we look at Wikipedia writers' decisions in tagging the importance of articles to WikiProjects, what do we find? As we know, project tags are often placed on new articles (and often not subsequently reviewed). So while I find that quality tags are often out-of-date, the importance seems to be pretty accurate even on a new stub articles. This is because it is the importance of the *topic* that is being assessed which is independent of the Wikipedia article itself. Provided the article is clear enough about what it is about and why it matters (which is the traditional content of that first paragraph or two and failing to provide it will likely result in speedy deletion of the new article), assessment of the topic's importance can be made even at new stub level. This tells us that importance for Wikipedia writers is determined by something outside of Wikipedia (probably their real-world knowledge of that topic space -- one assumes that project taggers are quite interested in the topic space of that project). While article quality hopefully improves over time, I would be surprised if article importance greatly changed over time. Obviously there are counter-examples. I am guessing Donald Trump's article may have grown in importance over time but that's probably because his lede para changed. Adding President of the USA into the lede paragraph makes him much more important than he was before in the real world and internal to Wikipedia he has acquired an inbound link from the presumably high-importance President of the USA article. So I think it might be interesting to study those articles whose importance does change over time to see if there are any strong correlations with what is happening to the article inside Wikipedia. I think it is this set of importance-changing articles may be where we really learn what Wikipedia article characteristics are strongly correlated to "importance" given that importance itself appears to be pretty stable for most articles. Although not stated explicitly, I imagine we believe that generally less important articles tend to link to more important articles but more important articles don't link to less important articles. And hence in-bound links are likely to matter in assessing importance and that in-bound links from "important" articles are more valuable than in-bound links from less important articles (which creates something of a bootstrapping problem) similar to the issue to Google's PageRank algorithms. But I think we do have some information that Google doesn't have. The average webpage does not have a lede paragraph that situates the topic relative to other topics; a Wikipedia article does. If I have to choose to define Thing X in terms of Thing Y, it tends to suggest that Y is more important than X. If Y also defines itself in terms of X, then it tends to suggest they are equivalent in importance at some way. Indeed I suspect when we get to the VERY IMPORTANT topics we will see this kind of circular definition (e.g. you see circular definitions in Wikipedia around Philosophy and Knowledge). Aside, if you have never done this before, try this experiment. Choose a random article (left hand tool bar in Desktop Wikipedia), then click the first link in the article that matters (i.e. ignore links hatnotes or links inside parentheses). Repeat this first link clicking and sooner or later you will reach articles like Knowledge and Philosophy, which all sit inside circular definition groups. If we look at the Donald Trump article, his first sentence contains only two links, one to List of Presidents of the USA and the other to President of the USA. If we look at the those two articles, we find that both of them mention Donald Trump in their lede paras (although not as early as the first sentence) and before mentions of any other US President elsewhere in the article. Which is consistent with what we know about the real world, the role of the President is more important than its officeholders and that the current officeholder has more importance than a past officeholder. So topic importance does seems to be skewed towards the "present day". So I suspect the links in the lede paras are of greater relevance to the assessment of importance than links further down in the article which will be more likely relate to details of a topic and may include examples and counter-examples (this is a way in which high importance article may mention much lower importance articles). However, we do have to be a little bit careful here because of the MoS practice of not linking very common terms. For example, an Australian article will often refer to Australia in the lede para but it will almost certainly not be linked to the Australia article (and any attempt to add such a link will likely see it removed with an edit summary that mentions [[WP:Overlinking]]) whereas there is no problem if you link to an Australian state article, e.g. New South Wales. So we might find that some very important topics that often appear in ledes might get fewer links that you might expect because of the MoS policies on overlinking, which may be problem when working with inbound links. It may be that for "very common topics" the presence of the article title (or its synonyms) in the lede may have to be considered as if it were an in-bound link for statistical research purposes. Given all of the above, perhaps the most interesting group of articles to study in Wikipedia are those articles whose manually-assessed importance has changed over the life of the article AND which were NOT current topics in the lifetime of Wikipedia (given the influence of "current" on importance). But having said that, I wonder if that group of articles actually exists. Recently a newish Australian contributor expressed disappointment that all the new articles they had created were tagged (by others) as of Low Importance. My instinctive reply was "that's normal, I think of the thousands of articles I have started only a couple even rated as Mid importance, this is because the really important articles were all started long ago precisely because they were important". I suspect topics that are very important (for reasons other than being short-lived importance due in being "current" in the lifetime of Wikipedia) will generally show up as having started early in Wikipedia's life and that those that become more/less important over time will be largely linked to becoming or ceasing to be "current" topics). E.g. article Pasteurization started in May 2001 saying nothing more than " Pasteurization is the process of killing off bacteria in milk by quickly heating it to a near boiling temperature, then quickly cooling it again before the taste and other desirable properties are affected. The process was named after its inventor, French scientist Louis Pasteur. See also dairy products." The links in this very first version are still present in its lede paragraph today, suggesting our understanding of "non-current" topics is stable and hence initial importance determinations can probably be accurately made. For Pasteurization the Talk page shows it was not project-tagged until 2007 when it was assigned High Importance as its first assessment. I suspect we will find that initial manual assessment of article importance will be pretty accurate for most articles. And I suspect if we plot initial importance assessments against time of assessment, we will find the higher importance articles commenced life on Wikipedia earlier than the lower importance articles. If I am correct, then there isn't a lot of value in machine-assessment of importance of topics because it relates to factors external to Wikipedia and often does not change over time and therefore can often be correctly assessed manually even on new stub articles (and any unassessed articles can probably be rated as Low Importance as statistically that's almost certainly going to be correct). If a topic becomes more important due to "current" events, then invariably that article will be updated by many people and one of them will sooner or later manually adjust its importance. What is less likely to happen is re-assessing downwards of Importance when an important "current" topic loses its importance when it is no longer current, e.g. are former American presidents like Barack Obama or George W Bush or further back less important now? These articles will not be updated frequently once the topic is no longer in the news and therefore it is less likely an editor will notice and manually downgrade the importance, so there may be a greater role for machine-assessment in downgrading importance rather than upgrading importance. Another area where there might be a role for machine-assessed importance in regards to POV-pushing where an POV-motivated editor might change the manual-assessment importance of articles to be higher or lower based on their POV (e.g. my political party is Top Importance, other parties are of Low Importance). I suspect that often a page watcher would correct or at least question that kind of re-assessment. However, articles with few active pagewatchers you might get away with POV-pushing the article's importance tag because nobody noticed. In this situation, a machine assessment could be useful in spotting this kind of thing. This suggests that another metric of interest to importance might be number of pagewatchers, although I suspect that pagewatching may relate more to caring about the article than to caring about the topic. And one has to be careful to distinguish active pagewatchers (those who actually do review changes on their watchlists) from those who don't, as that may make a difference (although I am not sure we can really tell which pagewatchers are truly actively reviewing as a "satisfactory review" doesn't leave a trace whereas an "unsatisfactory" review is likely to lead to a relatively soon revert or some other change to the article, the article Talk or the User Talk of reviewed contributor which may be detectable). The other aspect of articles that occurs to me as being possibly linked to importance of the topic would be use of the article as the "main" article for a category or as the title of a navbox (as it suggests that the articles in the category or navbox are in some way subordinate to the main/title article). Similarly for list articles, the "type" of the list is often more important than its instances). Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> ] On Behalf Of Morten Wang Sent: Friday, 21 April 2017 6:04 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Project exploring automated classification of article importance Hi Pine, These are great pointers to existing practices on enwiki, some of which I've been looking for and/or missed, thanks! Cheers, Morten On 19 April 2017 at 22:35, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com <mailto:wiki.pine@gmail.com> > wrote: _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Hoi, I have read the proposal and it leaves me wondering. Also the notion of importance is indeed neither easy nor obvious. I think the question what is most important is irrelevant depending on how you look at it. Subject can be irrelevant when you look at it from a personal perspective, looking at it from a particular perspective and indeed what seems relevant may become irrelevant or relevant over time. When you use metrics there will always be one way or another why it will be found to be problematic. When you consider Wikipedia, the difference it makes with similar resources is that its long tail is so much longer and still it is easy and obvious to show how the English Wikipedia's long tail is not long enough [1]. When you are looking for links and relevance, Wikidata includes data on all Wikipedias and thereby more avenues to establish relevance. Research has been done that shows that when people are suggested to write articles or amend articles, it works best when it is about subjects they care about. What people are interested in was based in the research on past behaviour. What we could do is flip this and ask people. Based on categories, on projects, whatever people do to categorise what is their interest. This will work on a micro level. On a meta level, it may drive cooperation when we enable people to share their interest (at that moment in time). On a macro level data may arrive at Wikidata and this will allow us to seek what articles include specific data (think date of death for instance). On a meta and macro level, we could ask readers what subjects they are missing. This would provide an additional incentive for people to write. For this last suggestion we could measure what people are missing. Anyway, relevance and importance depend on a point of view. When our community is enabled to make a difference, it will help us with our content. As a movement we know that there is enough that we do not properly cover. Advocating these issues and targeting and educating potential communities is where the WMF could play more of a role. Thanks, GerardM [1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2017/04/wikidata-user-stories-sum-of-all… On 26 April 2017 at 13:48, Jonathan Cardy &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

I observe (and am unsurprised) that WikiProject Australia also rates the Pavlova article as High importance, which demonstrates into the Stuart's comments about graphs and subgraphs. If there are relationships between WikiProjects, there is probably some correlation about importance of articles as seen by those projects. As it happens, WikiProject Australia and WikiProject New Zealand are related on Wikipedia only by both being within the category "WikiProject Countries projects" (along with every other national WikiProject), so this is an example where you cannot see the connection between these projects "on-wiki" but anyone who knows anything about the geography, history, and culture of the two countries will understand the close connection (e.g. ANZAC, sheep, pavlova, rugby union) but, as the project tagging will show, we do have our differences, e.g. Whitebait is a High Importance article for NZ but Oz doesn't even tag it (we don't share the NZ passion for these small fish). And perhaps more seriously, our two countries have different indigenous peoples so our project tagging around Maori (NZ) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Oz) articles would usually be quite disjoint. So if there are correlations between project tagging, it may be something exploitable in machine assessment of importance. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Stuart A. Yeates Sent: Friday, 28 April 2017 6:18 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Project exploring automated classification of article importance On em.wiki article importance is relative to some wikiproject. This is encoded in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:WPBannerMeta which appears on 16% of all wikipedia pages via specialisations such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:WikiProject_New_Zealand Within Wikiproject New Zealand, there are articles which we think are very important to us, which we would never argue are even marginally important on a global scale. Take for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlova_(food) For the mathematically inclined, this is a classic case of graph and many subgraphs. cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky On 27 April 2017 at 21:44, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Following up Kerry's comments: far more useful to our encyclopedia building project would not be a global importance assessor, but a assessor of which wikiprojects a page is likely to be of interest to. There are hundreds of thousands of en.wiki pages which are not tagged properly to their wikiprojects and are thus effectively invisible to the community of editors who case about them. This is a classic example of statistical classification, so it shouldn't be too technically difficult... cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky On 28 April 2017 at 12:28, Kerry Raymond &lt;kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Yes, under-categorised and/or under-tagged articles could probably be detected by inbound/outbound link analysis and presented as candidates to the relevant WikiProjects for categorising and tagging. So long as you didn’t deliver up too many false positives, people would probably still deal with the false positives by a best efforts categorisation of tagging or at least pass them off to a more relevant project based on their human intelligence. On a related theme, outgoing link analysis could be used to draw orphan articles to the attention of likely WikiProjects. Kerry From: Stuart A. Yeates [mailto:syeates@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, 28 April 2017 10:59 AM To: kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com; Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Project exploring automated classification of article importance Following up Kerry's comments: far more useful to our encyclopedia building project would not be a global importance assessor, but a assessor of which wikiprojects a page is likely to be of interest to. There are hundreds of thousands of en.wiki pages which are not tagged properly to their wikiprojects and are thus effectively invisible to the community of editors who case about them. This is a classic example of statistical classification, so it shouldn't be too technically difficult... cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky On 28 April 2017 at 12:28, Kerry Raymond &lt;kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com <mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com> > wrote: I observe (and am unsurprised) that WikiProject Australia also rates the Pavlova article as High importance, which demonstrates into the Stuart's comments about graphs and subgraphs. If there are relationships between WikiProjects, there is probably some correlation about importance of articles as seen by those projects. As it happens, WikiProject Australia and WikiProject New Zealand are related on Wikipedia only by both being within the category "WikiProject Countries projects" (along with every other national WikiProject), so this is an example where you cannot see the connection between these projects "on-wiki" but anyone who knows anything about the geography, history, and culture of the two countries will understand the close connection (e.g. ANZAC, sheep, pavlova, rugby union) but, as the project tagging will show, we do have our differences, e.g. Whitebait is a High Importance article for NZ but Oz doesn't even tag it (we don't share the NZ passion for these small fish). And perhaps more seriously, our two countries have different indigenous peoples so our project tagging around Maori (NZ) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Oz) articles would usually be quite disjoint. So if there are correlations between project tagging, it may be something exploitable in machine assessment of importance. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> ] On Behalf Of Stuart A. Yeates Sent: Friday, 28 April 2017 6:18 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Project exploring automated classification of article importance On em.wiki article importance is relative to some wikiproject. This is encoded in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:WPBannerMeta which appears on 16% of all wikipedia pages via specialisations such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:WikiProject_New_Zealand Within Wikiproject New Zealand, there are articles which we think are very important to us, which we would never argue are even marginally important on a global scale. Take for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlova_(food) For the mathematically inclined, this is a classic case of graph and many subgraphs. cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky On 27 April 2017 at 21:44, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com <mailto:gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> > wrote: _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l