Cheers, Erik
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: [Wikimedia-l] Farewell, Erik! (rupert THURNER)
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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2019 11:21:27 +0100
From: rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: "A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who
has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics."
<analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>, Research into Wikimedia content and
communities <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] [Wikimedia-l] Farewell, Erik!
Message-ID:
<CAJs9aZ_4tVJc3Lbi-kUZbFhNUYGPJeodayqwKUjKnbX4sYP=ZQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
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Many thanks erik and all the best!! One sentence in eriks blog post cited i found
surprising. What type of modesty you guys were talking about?
"At Wikimania London (2014) I talked about how we should err on the side of modesty.
That message never came across. I started to have a discussion on this within WMF but
failed to bring this to fruition. My bad."
On Wed, Feb 6, 2019, 22:18 Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
“[R]ecent revisions of an article can be peeled off to
reveal older
layers, which are still meaningful for historians. Even graffiti
applied by vandals can by its sheer informality convey meaningful
information, just like historians learned a lot from graffiti on walls
of classic Pompei. Likewise view patterns can tell future historians a
lot about what was hot and what wasn’t in our times. Reason why these
raw view data are meant to be preserved for a long time.”
Erik Zachte wrote these lines in a blog post <
https://web.archive.org/web/20171018194720/http://infodisiac.com/blog/
2009/07/michael-jackson/
almost
ten years ago, and I cannot find better words to describe the gift he
gave us. Erik retired
<http://infodisiac.com/back_to_volunteer_mode.htm> this past Friday,
leaving behind an immense legacy. I had the honor to work with him for
several years, and I hosted this morning an intimate, tearful celebration of what Erik
has represented for the Wikimedia movement.
His Wikistats project <https://stats.wikimedia.org/>—with his
signature pale yellow background we've known and loved since the mid
2000s
<https://web.archive.org/web/20060412043240/https://stats.wikimedia.or
g/
—has
been much more than an "analytics
platform". It's been an individual
attempt he initiated, and grew over time, to try and comprehend and
make sense of the largest open collaboration project in human history,
driven by curiosity and by an insatiable desire to serve data to the
communities that most needed it.
Through this project, Erik has created a live record of data
describing the growth and reach of all Wikimedia communities, across
languages and projects, putting multi-lingualism and smaller
communities at the very center of his attention. He coined metrics
such as "active editors" that defined the benchmark for volunteers,
the Wikimedia Foundation, and the academic community to understand
some of the growing pains and editor retention issues <
https://web.archive.org/web/20110608214507/http://infodisiac.com/blog/
2009/12/new-editors-are-joining-english-wikipedia-in-droves/
the movement has faced. He created
countless reports—that predate by
nearly a decade modern visualizations of online attention—to
understand what Wikipedia traffic means in the context of current
events like elections <
https://web.archive.org/web/20160405055621/http://infodisiac.com/blog/
2008/09/sarah-palin/
or public health crises
<
https://web.archive.org/web/20090708011216/http://infodisiac.com/blog/
2009/05/h1n1-flu-or-new-flu-or/
.
He has created countless
<https://twitter.com/Infodisiac/status/1039244151953543169>
visualizations <
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/10/27/new-interactive-visualization-wi
kipedia/
that show the enormous gaps in local
language content and
representation that, as a movement, we face in our efforts to build an
encyclopedia for and about everyone. He has also made extensive use of
pie charts <
https://web.archive.org/web/20141222073751/http://infodisiac.com/blog/
wp-content/uploads/2008/10/piechartscorrected.png
,
which—as friends—we are ready to turn a
blind eye towards.
Most importantly, the data Erik has brougth to life has been cited
over
1,000 times
<
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=stats.wikim…
a.org
in the scholarly literature. If we gave
credit to open data creators
in the same way as we credit authors of scholarly papers, Erik would
be one of the most influential authors in the field, and I don't think
it is much of a stretch to say that the massive trove of data and
metrics Erik has made available had a direct causal role in the birth
and growth of the academic field of Wikimedia research, and more
broadly, scholarship of online collaboration.
Like I said this morning, Erik -- you have been not only an invaluable
colleague and a steward for the movement, but also a very decent human
being, and I am grateful we shared some of this journey together.
Please join me in celebrating Erik on his well-deserved retirement,
read his statement <http://infodisiac.com/back_to_volunteer_mode.htm>
to learn what he's planning to do next, or check this lovely portrait
<https://www.wired.com/2013/12/erik-zachte-wikistats/> Wired published
a while back about "the Stats Master Making Sense of Wikipedia's
Massive Data Trove".
Dario
--
*Dario Taraborelli *Director, Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
research.wikimedia.org •
nitens.org • @readermeter
<http://twitter.com/readermeter>
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