WikiEN-l November 2008

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81 participants
62 discussions

speedy deletion failing to "do no harm"
by Charlotte Webb 08 Nov '08

08 Nov '08

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incide… Interesting complaint. A former article subject threatens legal action based on the canned (and very poorly worded) edit summary in the deletion log "doesn't indicate importance or significance of a real person". —C.W.

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FT and the Wikipedia strat
by michael west 07 Nov '08

07 Nov '08

this is a cut and paste from the London Financial Times on Thursday Morning: Either buy the newspaper or work in a company that does :-( Looking to Wikipedia for answers By Thomas Malone Published: November 5 2008 14:43 | Last updated: November 6 2008 20:09 To understand how large-scale work was organised during the past 100 years, the best models were traditional hierarchical organisations such as General Motors, IBM, and Wal-Mart. But to understand how large-scale work will be organised in the future, we need to look at newer examples such as Wikipedia, eBay, and Google. [image: Prof. Thomas W. Malone] In Wikipedia, for instance, thousands of people from across the globe have collectively created a large and surprisingly high-quality intellectual product – the world's largest encyclopaedia – and have done so with almost no centralised control. Anyone who wants to can change almost anything, and decisions about what changes are kept are made by a loose consensus of those who care. Wikipedia is a remarkable organisational invention that illustrates how new forms of communication, such as the internet, are making it possible to organise work in new and innovative ways. Of course, new ways of organising work are not desirable everywhere. In many cases, traditional hierarchies are still needed to capture economies of scale or to control risks. But in an increasing number of cases, we can have the economic benefits of large organisations without giving up the human benefits of small ones – freedom, flexibility, motivation and creativity. Escape the net - use your feet<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e1de7344-aa80-11dd-897c-000077b07658.html> New forms of wireless and desk-less working sound great but isn't it just easier to deal productively with someone when they sit next to you, says Stefan Stern These human benefits can provide decisive competitive advantages in knowledge-based and innovation-driven work. During the coming decades, we can expect to see such ideas in operation in more and more parts of the economy. These new practices have various names: radical decentralisation, crowd-sourcing, peer production, and wikinomics. But the phrase I find most useful is "collective intelligence". In our work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Collective Intelligence, this phrase has inspired us to ask the provocative question: "*How can people and computers be connected so that – collectively – they act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before?*" What if we could have any number of people and computers connected to, for instance, care for patients in a hospital? Or design cars. Or sell retail products. We might that find the best way to do a task that today is done by five full-time people would be to use one part-time employee and a host of freelance contractors each working for a few minutes a day. One important type of collective intelligence is "crowd intelligence", where anyone who wants to can contribute. Sometimes, as in the case of Wikipedia or video sharing website YouTube, people contribute their work for free because they get other benefits such as enjoyment, recognition, or opportunities to socialise with others. In other cases, such as online retailer eBay, people get paid to do so. Anyone can become an eBay seller and most of the key decisions about product mix, pricing, and advertising are made not by managers at eBay, but by the collective intelligence of the eBay sellers themselves. A few years ago, eBay managers were surprised to find members successfully selling automobiles on the site, so they added additional support for this product line. Sometimes, crowd intelligence can even operate inside the boundaries of a single company. Google, Microsoft, and Best Buy have all used internal "prediction markets" to tap the collective intelligence of people throughout their organisations. In these prediction markets, people buy and sell "shares" of predictions about future events such as revenue levels. If their predictions are correct, they are rewarded (either with real money or with points). Microsoft has used prediction markets to estimate completion dates for internal products. When it launched one of the first of these markets, the share price for a product scheduled to be finished three months later declined within minutes to a price indicating only a 1.2 per cent probability it would be completed on time. The managers in charge of the project had thought it was on schedule, but when they saw these results they investigated further and found problems. The product was eventually released three months late. Here was a case where knowledge about the project's problems was available inside an organisation but it took a prediction market to bring it to the attention of people who could do something about it. Another important type of collective intelligence is "cyber-human intelligence", where computers do not just connect people to each other, they provide their own "intelligence" as well. Google harvests the intelligence of millions of people who create web pages and link them to each other, but its sophisticated algorithms also rank the pages based on how many links exist to a given page. Electronically connected forms of crowd intelligence and large-scale forms of cyber-human intelligence have never before existed. Yet these examples are just the beginning, and it is very likely that innovative organisations will discover more ways to radically change existing industries or create new ones. These changes will not happen overnight, but the rate of change is accelerating and business people a hundred years from now may find the pervasive corporate hierarchies of today as quaint as we find the feudal farming system of an earlier era. *Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence* Copyright <http://www.ft.com/servicestools/help/copyright> The Financial Times Limited 2008

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Worst. Survey. Ever.
by Steve Summit 07 Nov '08

07 Nov '08

Anybody know where on-wiki the current survey is being discussed? I've got a thing or two to say. (Message I just sent to info(a)wikipediastudy.org appended.) * * * From: Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:16:41 -0400 To: info(a)wikipediastudy.org Subject: your survey has problems I just completed the survey at http://survey47.wikipediastudy.org/ survey.php. I'm sorry to be harsh and blunt. It's terrible. You can't use my results accurately -- they're wrong. I doubt you can use anyone's results accurately. This survey could only be completed accurately by someone: * with nothing to do / too much time on their hands * who never makes mistakes * who can anticipate future questions before they're asked * who can be bothered to search for his country and language (several times) in strictly-alphabetical lists of every single country and language in the world * who knows the 2-character ISO code for the languages he knows, even when they're not obvious (e.g. DE for German) * who knows the 3-character ISO code for the currency he uses The survey told me I couldn't use my browser's Back and Forward buttons, but had to use its own. That's rude. The survey then failed to provide Back buttons on all pages. That's incompetent. The survey then asked me questions like "How many hours do you spend contributing to Wikipedia, per week?", followed by "How many hours to you spend administering Wikipedia?", followed by "How many hours do you spend supporting Wikipedia in technical ways?" And that ended up being profoundly insulting. Here's why. The administrative and technical work I do on Wikipedia feels like "contributions" to me, so (not knowing the next questions were coming up) I included those hours in my first answer. And the technical work I do feels like "administration", so (not knowing the next question was coming up) I included that in my second answer. Therefore, if (as I suspect) you're assuming those three categories are disjoint, and since my major contributions lately have all been technical, I've inadvertently overstated my overall contributions in this survey by a factor of three. And those particular survey pages were among those without Back buttons, so I couldn't fix my mistake. Do you know how incredibly frustrating that is, to have wanted to spend time contributing to a survey, to know I've contributed false information, and to not be able to fix it? Also, the survey took *way* too long. And there was no information given up-front about how long it might take. The progress bar in the upper right-hand corner was a clue and a nice touch, but it came too late. The survey also took too long in relationship to the impression of the data likely to be gleaned from it. Short, tightly-focused surveys give the surveyee the impression that some well-thought-out, concise questions are being addressed by the surveyer. Long, scattershot surveys give the impression that the surveyers aren't quite sure what they're looking for, are trying to ask everything they can think of, and are imagining that they'll mine the data later for interesting results later. But, with poorly-defined surveys, that task often ends up being difficult or impossible. So I'm left begrudging the time I spent filling out the survey, because it feels like the ratio of time investment (by me) to useful information which can be gleaned (by you) is not good. The survey asked me to specify things like "approximate number of articles edited" and "percentage of time spent translating" using drop-down selection boxes -- and with an increment of 1 between the available choices! That's just silly. (I dreaded how long I was going to have to scroll down to find my article edit count -- 1196 -- and was both relieved and annoyed to discover that, after 500 entries, the drop-down list ended with "more than 500".) The survey's categories were too-bluntly taken from existing lists. For example, the list I had to choose my employment from was apparently taken from one of those dreadful Department of Commerce categorizations, that I have just as much trouble finding my job in when I fill out my tax forms. At the very end, the survey asked if I wanted to submit my results, or fix any mistakes. But the provided way to fix mistakes was to use the Back button -- perhaps several dozen times -- which I wouldn't have felt like doing even if the chain of Back buttons were complete. The survey was clearly designed by someone who was thinking about the data they wanted to collect, and in a scattershot way. The survey was clearly not designed with the person completing it in mind. The survey was clearly not designed or vetted by anyone who knew anything about designing good surveys. I probably had more complaints to list, but I shouldn't waste as much time on this letter as I already wasted taking the survey, so I'll stop here. Bottom line: Please use the results of this survey with extreme care, if at all. The results are going to be heavily, heavily biased by the inadvertent selection criteria involved in the survey's hostility towards its participants. If you conduct a survey like this again, please find someone to assist in the process who knows something about real-world survey work.

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Donation campaign story on Slashdot firehose
by David Gerard 07 Nov '08

07 Nov '08

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=1710461 Please click up! Also, if you don't like that writeup, feel free to submit one yourself. - d.

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Donation banner in edit window
by Elias Friedman 06 Nov '08

06 Nov '08

Where did this new donation banner in the edit window come from? It's friggin' huge! I'm not sure I like it- it's kind of distracting. Maybe I can get used to it, though... -- Elias Friedman A.S., EMT-P ⚕ elipongo(a)gmail.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elipongo

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fundraising Banner
by Sam Korn 06 Nov '08

06 Nov '08

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com> wrote: > At 23:22 +0000 5/11/08, Thomas Dalton wrote: >>2008/11/5 Giacomo M-Z <solebaciato(a)googlemail.com>: >>> obviously has money to spare - what more point would you like? >> >>1) That was 2 years ago, what relevance does it have now? >>2) We use Freenode a lot, it makes sense to support them. It wasn't >>just giving money away randomly because they had more than they knew >>what to do with. > > My guess is that some people who might donate in the future would not > donate (at all) unless they felt that their money would go to the > Foundation only. It is a given that the Foundation donated 5,000 USD > to a third party, and hence might choose to repeat that donation or a > similar donation in the future. It is, of course, a no-brainer that the Foundation should be able to support other organisations if it supports its mission. I'm not going to get into the debate about whether this particular donation is reasonable, but to say that donations to third parties are wrong per se is, I think, wrong-headed. The real question is about whether the donation supports, directly or indirectly, the Foundation's mission. -- Sam PGP public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sam_Korn/public_key

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Fundraising Banner
by Erik Moeller 06 Nov '08

06 Nov '08

Hello all, I would appreciate it if you could copy this message to the relevant pages on en.wp. First: Does Wikimedia have a funding crisis, does it need to ask people for money? The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization, and the vast majority of its funding comes from fundraising and grants. It operates more than 300 servers which keep Wikipedia alive, the associated hosting and bandwidth, and the staff needed to support it. Its annual expenses for the current fiscal year amount to approximately $6 million. We have already raised $2 million of that, which leaves us with a gap of $4 million which we need to raise through donations small and large. If we fail to meet our budgeted revenue goals during and past this fundraiser, we will eventually have to lay off staff and reduce our capacity planning for servers and bandwidth, both of which will directly affect your experience of Wikipedia. If you feel, for example, that developers are often slow to respond to requests, well, imagine how much worse it will be if we have to lay off some of them. If you feel that editing is often slow, imagine how much worse it will be if we cannot pay for additional servers or needed software improvements. As you know, the world is in economic crisis. At this point in time, we do not know what the impact of this economic crisis will be on the Wikimedia Foundation. We need to meet our targets to continue to operate Wikipedia. I realize that having a banner on the site you read and/or edit every day is not convenient. We plan to create a smaller (plaintext) version of the banner for signed in users. But we do not plan to reduce the banner size of the standard banner, at least not until we have a better idea of what the online fundraiser revenue will be for this year. We are doing some systematic A/B testing of different banners with different messages, and as we learn more, we will iterate the banners further. We do need to raise the funds to operate Wikipedia, so that you can continue to use it, both as a reader and a contributor. Rather than invite antagonism, I want to invite your collaboration in refining and developing the banners. We are open to community suggestions here -- please feel free to post mock-ups on Meta Wiki at this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2008/design_drafts However, if we feel (or measure) that a banner will significantly reduce the number of donations received, we will not use it. So if your primary goal is to make the banner smaller or less "obtrusive", rather than making it more effective or at least retaining its current level of effectiveness, I don't think we'll come up with something that can replace the current banners. Please let's remember that the Wikimedia Foundation exists to support this project's continued existence, and the Wikimedia movement internationally. This means we need to create awareness for the fact that we need to raise money, just like any other charity. This fundraising drive will run until January 15. Until then, I ask for your patience and cooperation in making it work. Please feel free to contact me: erik(at)wikimedia(dot)org. Thanks, Erik Möller 22:10, 5 November 2008 (UTC) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Re: [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki <head> quirks in alternate skins
by Harry Willis 06 Nov '08

06 Nov '08

Thanks for the advice, Tim. I thought about raising the bug when I noticed it, but thought no harm in asking first... it seems odd that no script devs who use those JS libraries (ajax.js, etc.) have ever checked for skin cross-compatibility before! - H Tim Starling [tstarling(a)wikimedia.org] wrote: > Use bugzilla: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ > > -- Tim Starling

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MediaWiki <head> quirks in alternate skins
by Harry Willis 06 Nov '08

06 Nov '08

This is undoubtedly entirely the wrong list to be posting to, but I imagine that there will be at least one or two people who know what's going on, or who have experienced a similar phenomenon. Checking for cross-skin compatibility on a script which utilises MediaWiki's AJAX functions in ajax.js, I was surprised to see that the scripts were throwing errors due to the functions not being defined, despite the fact that ajax.js was definitely being run. Turns out that in Monobook, the user script (User:<x>/monobook.js) is the very last element of the document head, whereas in other skins it is called *before* the newer "sexier" MediaWiki JS scripts (ajax.js, ajaxwatch.js, mwsuggest.js, centralnotice.js), not allowing use of the functionality of those scripts without a contrived workaround. I apologise if I've made that incredibly unclear, but here's how it looks: an excerpt from the source of a page viewed in Classic rather than Monobook. <script type="text/javascript" src="/skins-1.5/common/wikibits.js?182"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/w/index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js&usesk in=standard"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/w/index.php?title=User:Haza-w.debug/standard.js&action=raw&ct ype=text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/skins-1.5/common/ajax.js?182"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/skins-1.5/common/ajaxwatch.js?182"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/skins-1.5/common/mwsuggest.js?182"></script> Compare with Monobook, where the site and user JS scripts are only called right at the end of the document head: <script type="text/javascript" src="/w/index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js&usesk in=monobook"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/w/index.php?title=User:Haza-w.debug/monobook.js&action=raw&ct ype=text/javascript"></script> </head> Does anyone know why this occurs, and how I could go about getting the discontinuity addressed? - H

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Stupid (but easy) question re:OTRS
by Rob 06 Nov '08

06 Nov '08

Can someone give me an email address to forward a user complaint to OTRS? Thanks.

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WikiEN-l November 2008