Sorry for the delay, our operations manager wasn't subscribed and we think
the email got held up in moderation.
Just an FYI that we are running a short fundraising test right now on
EnWikipedia (one test in the US one test in the rest of the world minus some
chapter countries). They went up anonymous only at 17:00 UTC (10:00 Pacific)
and will come down in about 30 minutes at 18:00 UTC.
James Alexander
--
James Alexander
Community Fellow
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
I just wanted to announce that this Thursday the 16th at 18:00 UTC, there
will be an IRC office hours concerning the article feedback tool which is
currently in experimental partial deployment on English Wikipedia.[1]
I'll be moderating mainly for Erik Möller, but hopefully we'll be joined by
most of the Foundation staff who've contributed to this feature.
Just to clarify, we want to stick to two general topics:
1. The strategic goals the feature aims to address. In other words, its
purpose.
2. Plans for developing and deploying it further.
If you have bugs to report or specific design feedback, as always Bugzilla
and MediaWiki.org are respectively the best places to discuss those two
things. For the office hours we'd like to stick to a broader explanation of
the feature and its future.
As always documentation for IRC office hours is on Meta.[3]
Thanks,
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
1. Feature documentation:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback<http://www.mediaiwiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback>
2. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
It turns out that if you're the encyclopedia that everyone actually
reads, the mountain will come to you: people will go to some effort to
get their field properly documented.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/academics-in-new-move-begin-to-work-…
This is, of course, no reason to be complacent. But it does give us
something to reach out with - "look at these other fields that have
benefited!", similar to the approach we take with GLAMs.
- d.
Spotted by Michael Peel.
- d.
PR Week:
http://www.prweek.com/uk/channel/CityandCorporate/article/1074122/fixer-cle…
'Fixer' cleans Wikipedia entries for senior business figures
David Singleton, prweek.com, 09 June 2011, 9:30am
A string of senior business figures have had their Wikipedia entries
burnished by an anonymous 'reputation cleanser,' believed to be a
senior figure in the PR industry.
The London-based fixer has changed entries for Carphone Warehouse
co-founder David Ross, Von Essen Group chairman Andrew Davis, British
property developer David Rowland and billionaire Saudi tycoon Maan
Al-Sanea.
The fixer has also made numerous changes to the entry for the 19th
Earl of Derby who has been in a long-running battle with campaigners
over his plans to build over greenfield land in Newmarket.
An investigation by PRWeek found that a total of 42 changes to various
Wikipedia pages were made from the same London IP address between
April 2009 and June 2011. In most cases, negative or controversial
details were erased from the entries. On other occasions, positive
information was added.
PRWeek’s investigations suggest that the changes were made by a senior
PR professional who is well-known in industry circles. The individual
in question failed to respond to calls and emails.
The entry for Carphone Warehouse boss Ross was altered to remove
controversial details about his personal life, while the entry for
property developer Rowland was changed to portray his decision to move
to France for tax purposes in a more positive light.
On Lord Derby’s entry, opposition to his plans to develop land near
Newmarket was downgraded from ‘considerable’ to ‘some’. This contrasts
with The Daily Telegraph’s assertion in December 2009 that Lord Derby
had ‘earned the opprobrium of the racing establishment with plans to
build up to 1,200 new homes on part of his estate’.
Meanwhile, the entry for Al-Sanea was altered to remove details of a
clash with Saudi Arabia’s central bank and the entry for his Saad
Group conglomerate was also doctored.
The idea of PR people editing Wikipedia entries has long been
extremely controversial. In 2007 Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
threatened to ban PR agencies from contributing to the site because of
a conflict of interest.
CIPR social media guidelines suggest that PROs work with a Wikipedia
editor to have the information corrected rather than to do it
unilaterally.
Portland partner Mark Flanagan, a former head of digital in Downing
Street, said: ‘I actually think it’s fine to neutralise Wikipedia
entries and correct factual inaccuracies but turning someone’s entry
into pure spin is unacceptable. It is also vital to respect the rules
of Wikipedia and make sure changes are submitted to the community for
their approval.’
Wolfstar Consultancy managing director Stuart Bruce said: ' It’s not
always a case of unethical practice when people do things like this,
quite often it’s simply ignorance and not taking the time to find out
the right thing to do.
'A PR person should always ask themselves not just is this right, but
will it appear to most people to be right. And most people would say
that a PR person is not a neutral source and therefore shouldn’t be
editing Wikipedia pages.’
Labour digital guru Jag Singh, who headed up digital comms for the No
To AV campaign, said PROs should be careful about such tactics
backfiring: 'Be warned that it will draw more attention to the
activity you're trying to cover up, and your likelihood of being
discovered is even higher.'
_______________________________________________
Wmfcc-l mailing list
Wmfcc-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfcc-l
Hi all,
I wanted to point your attention briefly to a blog post we made live today
on the WMF blog, with some preliminary results from this year's Public
Policy Initiative pilot:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/08/public-policy-initiative-wraps-up-pilo…
The blog contains a chart of the contributions to the article namespace of
the English Wikipedia that our students made -- over the 2010-11 academic
year, they added more than 8.8 million bytes of high-quality content. We're
really excited with the results, and we're looking forward to expanding our
reach even more in the forthcoming academic year. We're hoping to work with
even more classes, universities, countries, and languages.
Our success is due in large part to our amazing corps of Wikipedia
Ambassadors, who help students and professors in class and on-wiki. If
you're interested in mentoring new Wikipedia editors to improve the content,
we'd love to have more Ambassadors to meet the needs of our growing
participant list, or if you know of (or are!) a professor who is interested
in assigning students to contribute to Wikipedia, let us know, or take a
look at the new Education Portal on the Outreach wiki:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/For_educators
Over the next few months, look for more formal research results on the exact
improvement in article quality contributed by our students.
LiAnna
--
LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate - Public Policy Initiative
Wikimedia Foundation
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative
(415) 839-6885 x6649
ldavis(a)wikimedia.org
On BLPN someone asked me what I'd suggest as a change to BLP policy to allow
cutting down the santorum article.
Here's my first attempt:
Avoid victimization
When writing about a person notable only for one or two events, *or
writing about a person who is independently notable but where the
biographical material is so prominent that it can significantly affect
the subject*, including every detail can lead to problems, even when the
material is well-sourced. When in doubt, biographies should be pared
back to a version that is completely sourced, neutral, and on-topic.
This is of particular importance when dealing with individuals whose
notability stems largely or entirely from being victims of another's
actions, *or writing about a topic that is largely or entirely about
the person being a victim of another's actions*. Wikipedia editors must
not act, intentionally or otherwise, in a way that amounts to
participating in or prolonging the victimization.
Additional material indicated by *s.
It seems like the most common objection is that we can't determine who is a
victim (to which my response is that I'm just extending an existing rule and
we seem to have no trouble doing it for the existing rule).
http://schema.org/
An initiative by Google, Yahoo and Bing to make a tag language to make
things more findable in search engines.
Is there anything in this for us? schema.org tags in templates?
Presumably this would require software work too, and require us to
cross levels between software and content, at least a little ...
- d.
A lot of these images are PD, by the way.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gabriel Beecham <gabriel_beecham(a)yahoo.co.uk>
Date: 2 June 2011 11:25
Subject: [Wikimedia IE] National Library of Ireland makes photographs available
To: Wikimedia IE <wikimediaie(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Just a general notice for Ireland-related Wikimedia project
participants: the National Library of Ireland has begun adding content
to the "Commons" section of Flickr.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2011/06/01/welcome-the-national-library-of-irelan…http://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland
-Gabriel Beecham
_______________________________________________
WikimediaIE mailing list
WikimediaIE(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaie
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~lam/papers/lam_group2010_wikipedia-group-decis…
:
> "We also found that there have been two bots (computer programs that edit Wikipedia)—BJBot and Jayden54Bot—that automatically automatically notified article editors about AfD discussions and recruited them to participate per the established policy. These bots performed AfD notifications for several months, and offer us an opportunity to study the effect of recruitment that is purely policy driven. We use a process like one described above to detect successful instances of bot-initiated recruitment: if a recruitment bot edited a user’s talk page, and that user !voted in an AfD within two days, then we consider that user to have been recruited by the bot.
> Using the above processes, we identified 8,464 instances of successful recruiting. Table 2 shows a summary of who did the recruiting, and how their recruits !voted. We see large differences in !voting behavior, which suggests that there is bias in who people choose to recruit. (From these data we cannot tell whether the bias is an intentional effort to influence consensus, or the result of social network homophily [14].) Participants recruited by keep !voters were about four times less likely to support deletion as those recruited by delete !voters. The participants that bots recruited also appear unlikely to support deletion, which reflects the policy bias we observed earlier."
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net