As you may know, we launched the Article Feedback tool a few weeks
ago as part of the Public Policy Initiative. (See
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/22/article-feedback-pilot-goes-live/
and
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/FAQs
for information about our motivation for building this tool.) The
feature has been well received, with over 12,000 ratings submitted since
the feature was launched on Sep 22. We've also received positive
feedback from users, which is encouraging. Please see
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Early_Da…
for some data from the project.
To increase our understanding of the value of these types of ratings,
we'd like to find out whether the ratings (in aggregate or segmented)
reflect actual changes in the quality of an article.
The first part of this is to identify articles that are being worked on
as part of the Public Policy Initiative and map the ratings against the
revision history. Additionally, we want to observe ratings on a set of
selected articles that are likely to undergo substantial revision in the
near future.
While the 2010 United States mid-term elections are behind us, there are
many other types of articles that may fit the bill (e.g., upcoming
movies, other elections, etc.). Right now we're targeting approximately
50 articles:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Addition…
We'd appreciate your additions and thoughts regarding articles that
would make good test cases. And if you'd like to be part of the Article
Feedback workgroup, please sign up on here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Workgroup
Howie
Hi there,
I am working on a suggested set of guidelines for improving the poor
quality of the kosovo geographical articles while avoiding edit wars.
I wrote up a summary here and would appreciate any comments and support.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mdupont#Naming_and_status_of_Kosovo_…
Basically my points are :
0. There is no point in trying to rename the funny characters in the
serbian named articles, but we can hope to improve the quality in
general.
1. we need to make sure the english language articles are useful for
English speaking people dealing with albanian and serbian names.
2. we need to get rid of the POV forking of the Districts of Kosovo in
Serbia. We dont need parallel articles describing the same
administrative structures.
3. I need an agreement from the serbian wikipedia team that they will
not continue to remove the albanian names from the articles, we need
to encourage more local kosovar editors and I have been recruiting
many of them.
thanks,
mike
--
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania
flossk.orgflossal.org
Hi everyone,
Today at 18:00 UTC will be IRC Office Hours with the Wikimedia
Foundation's Executive Director, Sue Gardner. As usual it will take
place in #wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net. You can find links to
time conversions and a guide to accessing IRC at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
Reflecting on the past few chat sessions, we've noticed that the most
productive (in terms of most questions answered, most participants etc.)
have been the ones with a little bit of prep work on the topic. The
recent fundraising session, Sue's on Pending Changes, and interviews
with new Wikimedia staff have all been extremely helpful.
That's why we'd like to try something a little different for Sue's
Office Hours today.
We're going to devote the first 30 minutes for a structured topic
discussion. During that 30 minutes attendees can write their questions
on the Meta page mentioned above, and simultaneously !vote on/discuss
the proposed questions. The 3-6 top questions will be answered during
the second half of the hour. This way we actually answer the questions
that interest the attendees, rather than miss really valuable questions
and discussion.
We hope you'll try this experiment with us. We're trying to find some
balance between a free-flowing discussion and some structure that allows
deeper conversation about topics important to Wikimedia.
Thanks,
--
Steven Walling
Wikimedia Foundation Fellow
(wikimediafoundation.org)
Josh Fruhlinger and Conor Lastowka have been collecting "hilariously bad
prose culled from Wikipedia and other wikis":
http://citationneeded.tumblr.com/
--
Utkarshraj Atmaram
Hi again everyone!
A quick reminder that the fundraising team will be having IRC office
hours today, Friday November 5th, at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT, 18:00 EDT
23:00 CET) in the #wikimedia-office channel of the Freenode IRC network.
If you are interested in what we have been doing recently I encourage
you to take a look at the Meta fundraising portal at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010> or join us on IRC in
the #wikimedia-fundraising channel at any time.
If you do not have an IRC client, there are two ways you can come join
the chat using a web browser: First, using the Wikizine chat gateway at
http://chatwikizine.memebot.com/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi. Type a nickname,
select irc.freenode.net from the top menu and #wikimedia-office from the
following menu, then login to join.
Or, you can access Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/ ,
typing in the nickname of your choice and choosing #wikimedia-office as
the channel. You may be prompted to click through a security warning,
which you can click to accept.
Please feel free to forward and translate this email to any list I may
have missed and I hope to see everyone there!
--
James Alexander
Associate Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
I've noticed a very much slower rate of loading of images for several
days now. It's affecting the work I can do. Is this a general
experience, or is it perhaps my ISP?
Charles
A memo to Wikimedia community, friends, staff, and other stakeholders.
On Monday, November 15, we will launch the 2010 annual fundraising drive for the Wikimedia Foundation. As you know, our funding model relies on the support of our friends and community members. Our average donation is about $25, and we have received more than 500,000 donations in the lifetime of the foundation. This year, we have to raise $16,000,000. That’s our biggest target yet, but it’s still only a tiny fraction of what the other top-ten websites spend on their operations. It’s critical that we reach our goal to maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep Wikipedia and its sister sites running smoothly.
We are a community that does great things, and does them routinely. As we begin to bring this year's fundraiser to a close, we will launch our 10th Anniversary year! It's hard to believe, isn't it? What would the world be like, if the wiki hadn't launched? If we hadn't jumped in to grow it? If we hadn't financially supported it? The world would be a far different -- and far more sad -- place, I think. This 10th anniversary year provides an opportunity for reflection and introspection, but it also provides a chance to refocus: to plan, to build, to grow. We've just completed the strategic planning initiative, and emerged with a cohesive, defined plan for the future growth and development of the Foundation, the projects, and the movement. Now is the time.
So let's get going.
Since August, a team of dedicated staff members and volunteers has worked to develop the fundraiser for this year. We committed early to radical and full disclosure of all the data we had, in keeping with the spirit of the transparent nature of the Wikimedia movement. We quickly identified three major points in the donation process that were "levers" we could pull to optimize the process: banner messaging, banner design, and landing/donation pages.
Banner messaging:
Wikimedia fundraising has always been driven by site notices -- banners -- that run at the top of project websites. We’ve known for years that different banner messages drive different numbers of people to click through and donate. Therefore, this year we began the fundraiser by inviting community members to propose new banner messages for us to test.
Almost 900 people were involved in the creation and discussion of potential banner messages We tested dozens of iterations of banner designs, including both graphical and text, and we will continue to do so.
Many of the new banners did well. Unfortunately, none of them came anywhere near the 3% clickthrough rate of the winning banner from years past: “Please read: a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.”
But we’re going to keep trying. Our research indicates that banner wins because it is simple and direct with no attempt at marketing or manipulation. So we’re going to test, “A personal appeal from Wikimedia editor _____” and later in this memo, I’m going to invite you to be that editor and write an appeal for us to use in the fundraiser.
Banner design:
In our testing this year, we also quickly learned that graphical banners perform almost 100% better than text banners with the same message. Because of this, we will obviously be using more graphic heavy banners than we have in past campaigns.
Landing/donation pages:
Once a user clicks a banner, they land on a page that asks for a donation and provides payment options. We have spent a lot of time and energy optimizing those landing pages. Optimization of donation forms is an art and a science that involves messaging, graphic design, and usability research.
We will have iterated through roughly 40 different designs before landing on the ones that we'll launch with. We are committed to encouraging people to beat us at our own game: we invite chapters and affiliated groups, organizations, and Wikimedians to create their own landing pages that they believe will work better than the ones we're running. If we see some that are exciting, we'll test them, and run the ones that perform best!
In countries where there are Wikimedia chapters, the chapter has the option to create their own landing page to test along side the default. We hope that chapters will beat the default everywhere there is an attempt. In countries where there are no chapters, we’d like active Wikimedians to contact us about doing the same thing.
As we proceed through the campaign, we'll be constantly testing. We'll test messages, banners, and landing pages. We'll also test timing, and font size, and hundreds of other small variations. But we're doing it all with an eye to integrity in data analysis, and an understanding of not only what the data tells us, but what it doesn't tell us. Our decisions are grounded in fact and well reasoned theories: not hunches or educated guesses.
One thing is very different this year, though. Once we hit our goal - and we will hit our goal - rather than immediately removing all banners, we're going to use some of the banner space (with a reduced banner size, frequency, and using targeted appeals) to ask people to contribute - not financially, but with their knowledge. We will target readers, and encourage them to become editors. It seems logical to us that this reader conversion effort should flow naturally from our fundraising campaign: both are forms of contribution. We also believe that it will yield financial payoff in years to come by embedding new people deeply into our community and instilling them with our key values and an understanding of the greater mission.
This is an aggressive campaign. It's an entirely achievable goal, however. The only way to have it work, though, is to have full buy-in from the community. Will you reach out to the people near you (either physically or virtually) and ask them to get involved? Tweet that you donated. Write a blog post about it. Deliver four donations from friends with your own. Help new users who make their first edit as part of the contribution campaign.
Here are some key things to know:
1) On November 15, we will launch the fundraiser.
2) You will begin to see banners consistently on the sites beginning on Friday, November 12 as we do full scale functional testing.
3) This is a "contribution" campaign, celebrating all kinds of contribution.
4) Our numbers are reasonable and attainable, but still a stretch.
5) There will not be success without the full and active engagement of the community.
We've billed this as "the fundraiser you can edit", and it's true. Community volunteers have been deeply embedded in our planning, including in all of our testing. Community suggested messages were requested and tested. We truly think of this as a fundraiser that is co-created by various parts of the community.
There are still ways that you can participate directly, right now. We’re going to test appeal letters from Wikimedia editors. If you think you can write a letter that will beat Jimmy’s, please go to the meta page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/TwoAsks/Write_An_Appeal) and sign up so we know to expect your letter. You can also just send one to me by email: donate(a)wikimedia.org.
I'm honored to be leading the effort this year, and ask you to join with me in making a contribution on the first day of the fundraiser.
If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them. Please tell me what you think by writing to donate(a)wikimedia.org.
Best wishes,
Philippe
PS - for ease of linking, the full text of this memo is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Updates#4_November:_The_Sch…
_______________________
Philippe Beaudette
Head of Reader Relations
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share
in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://donate.wikimedia.org
This is an interesting one, for some value of "interesting". I
suppose I'm posting it because I'm interested in the adverse effects
of a BLP on an immigrant's application.
http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?xmldoc=In%20FCO%2020101102111.xml&docb…
I'm not sure which article is referred to here, and it may have been
deleted by now.
The appeal was in the 5th Circuit, but they concurred with opinion
from the 8th Circuit (Badasa v. Mukasey, 540 F.3d 909, 910-11 (8th
Cir. 2008)) that quotes Wikipedia's own "Overview" in assessing
Wikipedia as an unreliable source (no surprise there).
The text cited in the 8th Circuit ruling appears to be here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia