Reminder: this is starting in a few minutes, and will run until 1830 UTC.
SJ
On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 12:59 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> There will be another open meeting tomorrow on IRC.
>
> For those who are available, please join us in #wikimedia at 1700 UTC.
> (There's a link to a web-based client you can use.) All are welcome
> to add discussion topics.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings#June_17.2C_2010
Since there has been so much discussion about Interlanguage links
recently, i thought that it would be appropriate to raise another
issue, which has already been raised several times on Bugzilla, Meta
and Wikitech-l, but has not garnered enough attention.
I am referring to the problem with the current implementation of
Interlanguage links as a list of language codes with target article
names, which is placed at the end of the article's source in each
language. This makes the links a nightmare to maintain: doing it by
hand is practically impossible, so it is done by bots. The bots add a
huge number of not-very-useful edits to article histories, which is
somewhat annoying, but functionally they do a lot of the work Right.
They can't be perfect, however, because interwiki conflicts often
occur.
A simpler solution was proposed and implemented by Nikola Smolenski
about two years ago (see the links at the end). It still haven't been
enabled in the live WMF projects because of technical issues, which
seemed to me rather minor (although i might be wrong).
Wikitech-l is probably the right technical forum to discuss it, but i
wondered whether anyone of the less technical people are interested in
it.
Links for reference:
* http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:A_central_wiki_for_interlanguag…
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interlanguage_link
(its talk page has important discussions!)
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_conflicts
Thanks for your attention.
--
אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
Amir Elisha Aharoni
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
Thought people here might be interested in this.
We should be at that conference (last bullet point) IMO.
Are we looking to set up a new data-centre in Europe?
-Liam [[witty lama]]
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Julian Assange <julian(a)wikileaks.org>
Date: 16 June 2010 19:34
Subject: WikiLeaks inspired "New media haven" proposal passes Parliament
To: liamwyatt(a)gmail.com
FYI:
Reykjavik, Iceland; 4:00 UTC, June 16th 2010.
The WikiLeaks advised proposal to build an international
"new media haven" in Iceland, with the world's strongest
press and whistleblower protection laws, and a "Nobel" prize for
for Freedom of Expression, has unaminously passed the
Icelandic Parliament.
50 votes were cast in favor, zero against, one abstained. Twelve
members of parliament were not present. Vote results are available
at http://www.althingi.is/dba-bin/atkvgr.pl?nnafnak=43014
One of the inspirations for the proposal was the dramatic August 2009
gagging of
of Iceland's national broadcaster, RUV by Iceland's then largest bank,
Kaupthing:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Financial_collapse:_Confidential_exposure_analysi…
Two changes were made to the proposal from its original form as per
the opinion of the parliament's general affairs committee
[http://www.althingi.is/altext/138/s/1329.html]. The first of these
altered slightly the wording of the first paragraph so as to widen
the arena for research. The second of these added two new items to
the list of tasks for the government:
- That the government should perform a detailed analysis,
especially with respect to operational security,
for the prospect of operating data centers in Iceland.
- That the government should organize an international conference
in Iceland regarding the changes to the legal environment being caused
by expansion of cloud computing, data havens, and the judicial state
of the Internet.
Video footage from the proposal's vote will be available at:
http://www.althingi.is/altext/hlusta.php?raeda=rad20100616T033127&horfa=1http://www.althingi.is/altext/hlusta.php?raeda=rad20100616T033306&horfa=1
For details of the proposal and press contacts, please see
http://www.immi.is
There will be another open meeting tomorrow on IRC.
For those who are available, please join us in #wikimedia at 1700 UTC.
(There's a link to a web-based client you can use.) All are welcome
to add discussion topics.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings#June_17.2C_2010
I also cleaned up the pages for Board meetings and open Wikimedia
meetings; we're having our next IRC meeting on Friday, after which we
should be publishing the minutes from the past two in-person meetings.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_meetings
SJ
Recently I had a discussion with one of my fellow Malayalam wikipedian (
http://ml.wikipedia.org) about the creation of new articles in small
wikipedias like ours. He is one the few users who is keen on creating new
articles *based on the requirement of our readers*. (Of course we have many
people who only reads our wiki)
During discussion he raised this interesting point:
Some feature is required in the MediaWiki software that enable us to see a
list of keywords used most frequently by the users to search for non-exist
articles. If we get such a list then some users like him can concentrate on
creating articles using that key words.
Of course, I know that this feature may not be helpful for big wikis like
English. But for small wikis (especially small non-Latin language wikis),
this will be of great help. It is almost like* creating wiki articles based
on user requirement*.
I would like to know your opinion regarding the same.
Shiju
Just wanted to give everybody a quick update on Pending Changes.
Basically, it looks like we're in good shape for going live on the
English Wikipedia shortly.
We rolled the new code yesterday afternoon Pacific time. We've had a few
hiccups, but everything seems well in hand. The biggest issue wasn't
discovered until the wee hourss of the morning; the new code fought with
a configuration issue on the Hebrew Wikisource, apparently breaking the
wiki. (Sorry for that!) Domas Mituzas fixed the config and had
everything back up within a few hours of the initial report. Other than
that, there have been some small issues fixed promptly by Aaron, Chad,
Ariel, Tomasz, and Tim.
There has also been some lively feedback on some interface changes
designed to make unreviewed edits more obvious. Some projects would
rather that they not be quite so attention-getting, and so have used
local CSS changes to quiet them down a bit. That's not a showstopper,
but we'll definitely be taking a look at that issue soon.
The next step will be to enable Pending Changes on the English
Wikipedia. That will take place in an hour or two. We expect that to go
more smoothly. No new code will go out; we're just turning on the
extension used elsewhere, with a config that has been tested for the
last 10 weeks on a labs site. Once everything is working and stable,
we'll let everybody know.
After that, we expect to release updates weekly to the English
Wikipedia. We have some interface improvements already in the queue, but
will be listening carefully. to the community for feedback.
William
P.S. We'll be doing a retrospective afterward to see what lessons we can
learn from this, so if you have feedback, please send me an off-list
email and I'll make sure it gets incorporated.
What would you think about an automobile repair shop, when you
discover after you try the car again that you can no longer remove the
key and stop the engine ?
This what happened on the Spanish Wikipedia where I logged in and
found out that the logout link ("Salir" in Spanish) is hidden behind
the Wikipedia logo.
Screenshot :
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_in_Spanish_new_version.j…
I finally found out how to log out, and I sometimes use different web
browsers, but it is difficult to say this is a nice experience.
Forwarded.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yann Forget <yannfo(a)gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 6:57 AM
Subject: Usability: page weight
To: foundation-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hello,
While we are talking about usability issues, I would like to mention
an issue which was not mentioned up to now : page weight.
I am now surfing most of time with a 3G key with a bandwidth of 16
KB/s maximum, and often less.
My experience of Wikimedia sites compared with the other websites I am
using regularly, GMail and Facebook,
shows that these load much faster than Wikimedia pages, even if the
page is mostly empty.
It seems that these sites use some fancy caching for that.
Page weight is a major hurdle for working on any Wikimedia sites
affecting users who do not enjoy a broadband connection.
And I believe that small wikis with non-European languages are more
affected than others (a study would be interesting here).
For improving outreach of Wikimedia outside of the Western world,
improving the page weight should be a priority.
What can be done?
Regards,
Yann
We developed clicktracking to see what buttons were being used on our
toolbar. It was enabled for all Wikimedia projects that had the
usability toolbar and only gave us information of the type that "a user
who has an edit count of 3 just clicked the 'bold' button". Collecting
such data for internal research purposes is fully consistent with the
letter and intent of the Wikimedia Foundation privacy policy: whenever
we do so, we strive to minimize the amount of information collected to
what's strictly necessary.
(Read
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/click-tracking-on-edit-toolbar-deploy…
for more details, or see the code in SVN at http://bit.ly/c7hg0J ) .
We wanted to know, roughly, who was a novice and who was an expert, and
we had the edit count metric for that. We also wanted to know who is
active and who isn't, so for that we created a metric of edit count vs
timeframe. Specifically, when someone clicks, we record what event
happened (i.e., they clicked 'bold', 'left navigation-logo' etc), what
their edit count at the time was, what their edit count over the last 1,
3, and 6 months was, and a randomly generated session ID that lasts
until page refresh. This was done intentionally to keep the data anonymous.
We turned this feature on for left-navigation at a sampling rate of
about 1 in 1000 to get an idea of what was being clicked and what
wasn't, so that we'd know what to collapse and what not to.
We also used click-tracking on old editing toolbar to make sure that we
didn't leave any buttons off that people really liked.
The Special:ClickTracking page referenced here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee/Audit_Sub…
was a prototype for visualizing the aforementioned data. It was never
actually "turned on" to begin with, and it wasn't our highest priority
to get it up and running, especially since *the visualization's*
database operations aren't exactly lightning-fast and haven't been
optimized yet. It also wasn't and won't ever be a wikipedia
administrator tool.
