Wikimedia-l August 2009

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160 participants
115 discussions

[Foundation-l] Leaked UK Ordnance Survey report on freeing map data
by David Gerard 22 Aug '09

22 Aug '09

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/New_Digital_Master_Map_for_Great_Britian:_Confide… This is a survey that they didn't want made public, about the costs and benefits of releasing map data. They've clearly fiddled the cost numbers. Now to try to get accountability for the clear fiddles. - d.

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[Foundation-l] $500, 000 operational support from Hewlett Foundation
by Erik Moeller 22 Aug '09

22 Aug '09

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has decided to generously support us with $500,000 in operational funding. More information in the press release: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Hewlwett_Fdn_grant_Augus… This is not a project-based grant like the Stanton and Ford initiatives, but designed to advance the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation as a whole. We're very grateful to Hewlett for their support! :-) It comes out of Hewlett's Open Educational Resources initiative, which is an acknowledgment that Wikimedia is an important part of the OER movement. Big thanks to Sara Crouse for her work on the proposal that led to this grant. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] Donation Button Delay
by Rand Montoya 21 Aug '09

21 Aug '09

Wikimedians-- Sadly, due to some technical and planning issues, we are postponing the implementation and testing of the re-designed donation button until after Wikimania. While we had hoped to conduct the test starting Monday, we're just not perfectly happy with the implementation and testing process yet. The new time line can be seen here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade Thanks. -Rand -- Rand Montoya Head of Community Giving Wikimedia Foundation www.wikimedia.org Email: rand(a)wikimedia.org Phone: 415.839.6885 x615 Fax: 415.882.0495 Cell: 510.685.7030 “At some future time, I hope to have something witty, intelligent, or funny in this space.”

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Re: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
by Gregory Kohs 21 Aug '09

21 Aug '09

While the time and effort that went into Robert Rohde's analysis is certainly extensive, the outcomes are based on so many flawed assumptions about the nature of vandalism and vandalism reversion, publicize at one's peril the key "finding" of a 0.4% vandalism rate. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_McCain&diff=169808394&oldid=… 11 hours Reverted with no tags. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_Cantwell&diff=prev&oldid=16… 46 days Reverted with note: "Undid revision 160400298 by 75.133.82.218" By the way, there was a two-minute vandalism in the interim, so in many cases, just because an analyst finds a "recent and short" incident, he or she may be completely missing a longer-term incident. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ted_Stevens&diff=prev&oldid=17085… There goes your "rvv" theory. In this case, "rvv" was a flag for even more preposterous vandalism. The notion that these are lightly-watched or lightly-edited articles is a bit difficult to swallow, since they are the biographical articles about three United States senators. These articles were analyzed by an independent team of volunteers, and we found that the 100 senatorial articles were in deliberate disrepair about 6.8% of the time, which would vastly differ from Rohde's analysis. Certainly, one could argue that articles about political figures may be vandalized more often, but one might also counter that argument with the assumption that "more eyes" ought to be watching these articles and repairing them. More detail here: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Wikipedia_Vandalism_Study Admittedly, there were some minor flaws with our study's methodology, too. These are reviewed on the Discussion page. But, as with Rohde's assessment, if anything, we may have underrepresented the problem at 6.8%. I remain unimpressed with Wikipedia's accuracy rate, and I am bewildered why "flagged revisions" have not been implemented yet. Greg

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wiki-research-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
by phoebe ayers 21 Aug '09

21 Aug '09

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Reid Priedhorsky <reid(a)umn.edu> Date: Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 9:58 AM Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org On 08/20/2009 11:34 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: > On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 6:06 AM, Robert Rohde<rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote: > [snip] >> When one downloads a dump file, what percentage of the pages are >> actually in a vandalized state? > > Although you don't actually answer that question, you answer a > different question: > > [snip] >> approximations: I considered that "vandalism" is that thing which >> gets reverted, and that "reverts" are those edits tagged with "revert, >> rv, undo, undid, etc." in the edit summary line. Obviously, not all >> vandalism is cleanly reverted, and not all reverts are cleanly tagged. > > Which is interesting too, but part of the problem with calling this a > measure of vandalism is that it isn't really, and we don't really have > a good handle on how solid an approximation it is beyond gut feelings > and arm-waving. We looked into this a couple of years ago and came up with a similar number (though I won't quote it because I don't quite remember what it was), though we estimated the probability that a viewer would encounter a damaged article rather than how many articles were currently damaged. We used the term "damaged" instead of "vandalized" for essentially the reasons you mention (though I confess I didn't fully read your whole letter). Priedhorsky et al., GROUP 2007. Reid ----- I'm forwarding Reid's message from Wikiresearch-l to Foundation-l because, for those interested, it's worth noting that their group looked into this question & published a paper in 2007. Here's the link: http://www.grouplens.org/node/113 -- phoebe

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[Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
by Robert Rohde 21 Aug '09

21 Aug '09

I am supposed to be taking a wiki-vacation to finish my PhD thesis and find a job for next year. However, this afternoon I decided to take a break and consider an interesting question recently suggested to me by someone else: When one downloads a dump file, what percentage of the pages are actually in a vandalized state? This is equivalent to asking, if one chooses a random page from Wikipedia right now, what is the probability of receiving a vandalized revision? Understanding what fraction of Wikipedia is vandalized at any given instant is obviously of both practical and public relations interest. In addition it bears on the motivation for certain development projects like flagged revisions. So, I decided to generate a rough estimate. For the purposes of making an estimate I used the main namespace of the English Wikipedia and adopted the following operational approximations: I considered that "vandalism" is that thing which gets reverted, and that "reverts" are those edits tagged with "revert, rv, undo, undid, etc." in the edit summary line. Obviously, not all vandalism is cleanly reverted, and not all reverts are cleanly tagged. In addition, some things flagged as reverts aren't really addressing what we would conventionally consider to be vandalism. Such caveats notwithstanding, I have had some reasonable success with using a revert heuristic in the past. With the right keywords one can easily catch the standardized comments created by admin rollback, the undo function, the revert bots, various editing tools, and commonly used phrases like "rv", "rvv", etc. It won't be perfect, but it is a quick way of getting an automated estimate. I would usually expect the answer I get in this way to be correct within an order of magnitude, and perhaps within a factor of a few, though it is still just a crude estimate. I analyzed the edit history up to the mid-June dump for a sample 29,999 main namespace pages (sampling from everything in main including redirects). This included 1,333,829 edits, from which I identified 102,926 episodes of reverted "vandalism". As a further approximation, I assumed that whenever a revert occurred, it applied to the immediately preceding edit and any additional consecutive changes by the same editor (this is how admin rollback operates, but is not necessarily true of tools like undo). With those assumptions, I then used the timestamps on my identified intervals of vandalism to figure out how much time each page had spent in a vandalized state. Over the entire history of Wikipedia, this sample of pages was vandalized during 0.28% of its existence. Or, more relevantly, focusing on just this year vandalism was present 0.21% of the time, which suggests that one should expect 0.21% of mainspace pages in any recent enwiki dump will be in a vandalized state (i.e. 1 in 480). (Note that since redirects represent 55% of the main namespace and are rarely vandalized, one could argue that 0.37% [1 in 270] would be a better estimate for the portion of actual articles that are in a vandalized condition at any given moment.) I also took a look at the time distribution of vandalism. Not surprisingly, it has a very long tail. The median time to revert over the entire history is 6.7 minutes, but the mean time to revert is 18.2 hours, and my sample included one revert going back 45 months (though examples of such very long lags also imply the page had gone years without any edits, which would imply an obscure topic that was also almost never visited). In the recent period these factors becomes 5.2 minutes and 14.4 hours for the median and mean respectively. The observation that nearly 50% of reverts are occurring in 5 minutes or less is a testament to the efficient work of recent changes reviewers and watchlists. Unfortunately the 5% of vandalism that persists longer than 35 hours is responsible for 90% of the actual vandalism a visitor is likely to encounter at random. Hence, as one might guess, it is the vandalism that slips through and persists the longest that has the largest practical effect. It is also worth noting that the prevalence figures for February-May of this year are slightly lower than at any time since 2006. There is also a drop in the mean duration of vandalism coupled to a slight increase in the median duration. However, these effects mostly disappear if we limit our considerations to only vandalism events lasting 1 month or shorter. Hence those changes may be in significant part linked to cut-off biasing from longer-term vandalism events that have yet to be identified. The ambiguity in the change from earlier in the year is somewhat surprising as the AbuseFilter was launched in March and was intended to decrease the burden of vandalism. One might speculate that the simple vandalism amenable to the AbuseFilter was already being addressed quickly in nearly all cases and hence its impact on the persistence of vandalism may already have been fairly limited. I've posted some summary data on the wiki at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism_statistics Given the nature of the approximations I made in doing this analysis I suspect it is more likely that I have somewhat underestimated the vandalism problem rather than overestimated it, but as I said in the beginning I'd like to believe I am in the right ballpark. If that's true, I personally think that having less than 0.5% of Wikipedia be vandalized at any given instant is actually rather comforting. It's not a perfect number, but it would suggest that nearly everyone still gets to see Wikipedia as intended rather than in a vandalized state. (Though to be fair I didn't try to figure out if the vandalism occurred in more frequently visited parts or not.) Unfortunately, that's it for now as I need to get back to my thesis / job search. -Robert Rohde

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[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia
by Gerard Meijssen 21 Aug '09

21 Aug '09

Hoi, For me while interesting, it is hardly new and therefore not that interesting what people like Ed H Chi write about Wikipedia. They do not write about Wikipedia, they write about the English language Wikipedia. Invariably news written about Wikipedia concentrates on just one of over 260 projects. It diminishes what Wikipedia is about and it ignores important things that are happening. I would be interested in more study looking at the "other" wikipedias. This is where all kinds of other phenomena exist. Yesterday Siebrand observed that there is a group of languages that have solid localisations and, the current localisation rally makes this group stand out even more. We have the impression that this coincides with the vitality of projects; German French Dutch are top performers in localisation they have a healthy community and provide a great Wikipedia. For languages like Spanish Turkish Swedish Italian it is still possible for people to take part in the translatewiki.net localisation rally. People who participate on languages like Estonian and Khmer find that they have to concentrate on doing the most used and MediaWiki core messages first (our rationale being that our Wikipedia readers are best served in this way. With a sample size fof 260, it becomes possible to do research into the effect of localisation and the performance of a project. As LocalisationUpdate is being tested for use in the WMF, timely delivery of localisations becomes a reality once it is implemented. This will give the numbers of localisation and performance a much more direct relation with each other... The question is, if someone is interested in the numbers provided by such research.. It is known for languages like Bangla that Wikipedia is the biggest resource in that language in that language, I can imagine that this is true for other languages as well. When a Wikipedia has such a status, it changes the relevance of that Wikipedia for scientists who study thea language. It is interesting to learn what the effects are on the people who use the internet in these languages. With Wikipedia being the biggest resource does this populate the Google search results and, does this make the Internet more of a worthwhile experience? We know that things like sources, NPOV, BLP are particularly relevant on our biggest projects. On our smaller projects these things do not get the same attention. Here it is more important to have articles in the first place. The make-up of these communities is likely to be utterly different as well. Would it not be nice to understand how our projects are populated and study how it evolves over time? At what stage all kinds of policies start to kick in? Research, the numbers they provide are important on many levels. They indicate issues, they indicate where we want to put our resources. The lack of research on the other Wikipedias make the other Wikipedias invisible, issues particular to other languages do not get attention and consequently resources needed to address issues are not available. My argument is that there is a lack of research on Wikipedia, Wikipedia as a whole would benefit from research and indeed where the English Wikipedia's growth is slowing down, there is plenty of room for growth elsewhere of standard encyclopaedic information in the other projects. This in turn will bring up many subjects that en.wp does not cover. The existence of articles on subjects not covered in en.wp are indicative of a bias and once en.wp starts to cover these subjects it will improve its neutral point of view.. Consequently ALL our Wikipedias including en.wp will benefit from research on the "other" Wikipedias. Thanks, GerardM

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[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia
by Erik Zachte 20 Aug '09

20 Aug '09

> Also a say 30% share of bot edits on some Wikipedia does not mean 30% of > articles have been created by bots. My guess is that share is higher. That was too rash. I simply don't know the actual amount, but there is no linear relation for sure. Let me rephrase that more safely: If say only 1% of bots edits is for the creation of an article it might still mean 10% or 20% of articles have been created by bots. Erik Zachte

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[Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles
by Erik Zachte 20 Aug '09

20 Aug '09

There is another way to detect 100% reverts. It won't catch manual reverts that are not 100 accurate but most vandal patrollers will use undo, and the like. For every revision calculate md5 checksum of content. Then you can easily look back say 100 revisions to see whether this checksum occurred earlier. It is efficient and unambiguous. This will work for any Wikipedia for which a full archive dump is available. Erik Zachte

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: Talis Incubator for Open Education funding available
by Samuel Klein 20 Aug '09

20 Aug '09

This seems like an amazing chance for WikiProjects in almost any area. Describe how your work supports open education, set a project with milestones and metrics for success, and submit a grant request: http://blogs.talis.com/education/incubator/guidelines/ SJ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:08 PM Subject: [Internal-l] Talis Incubator for Open Education funding available To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed subscription)" <internal-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, chapters(a)wikimedia.ch Via the Creative Commons blog - http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17005 Talis Incubator for Open Education For the latest news follow us on twitter: @talisincubator Talis understands the growing importance of the Open Education movement and its potential impact on how education is accessed, assessed and certified. Aimed at individuals or small groups, the Talis Incubator for Open Education provides angel funding and other forms of assistance for ideas and projects that have the potential to further the cause of Open Education through the use of technology. All we ask in return is that you donate or ‘open source’ the intellectual property generated back to the communities that could benefit most from your work. The brief 1. Write a proposal outlining your Open Education related project or idea, making a bid for funding of between £1,000 and £15,000. 2. After reviewing and making sure your proposal meets the guidelines, submit it to incubator(a)talis.com. 3. A proposal review board made up of independent thought leaders and Talis representatives decide which projects get funding. 4. For successful bids, Talis awards you the funds and organises any other help you have asked for. 5. Complete the project according to the schedule outlined in your proposal. 6. Talis helps you to make sure your work is disseminated amongst the community. from http://blogs.talis.com/education/incubator/ they also note "We also welcome applications from outside the UK, however we regret that we can only consider and award amounts in GBP (£), so if you are from outside the UK please account for exchange rate fluctuation, and make sure you can receive funds paid in GBP." Looks a bit interesting! cheers Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/ _______________________________________________ Internal-l mailing list Internal-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/internal-l

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Wikimedia-l August 2009