Hello. It’s Robert Harris once again. It’s been just over a
month since I began working on the study commissioned by the Wikimedia Board on
Potentially Objectionable Content on WMF projects. During that time, I’ve
spoken to many people inside and outside Wikimedia, but the time has come, I
think, to actively begin a discussion within the communities about some of the
questions which I've encountered, specifically around Commons and
images within Commons. To that end,
I’ve posted a series of questions for discussion on the Meta page that hosts
the study (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_C….) Please feel free to visit the page and contribute to the
discussion. And please post the link, if you might, anywhere within the
projects where you think it might be relevant.
I look forward to the comments of any of you who wish to join the discussion.
The WMF mission is to provide free knowledge to the world. Wikipedia, in
particular, hopes to summarize all notable topics into a neutral sum.
Accomplishing this goal means Wikipedia an the WMF will have to evolve.
Consider the implications of the mission: Every single work that contains
notable topics must have complete coverage in Wikipedia. While every article
need not cite every work, every article must accurately summarize every
notable opinion of every notable topic in every work.
Some have interpreted the role of the proposed citations project as one of
merely centralizing the citations that already exist in Wikipedia. The
mission, however, calls for a broader vision. This new project should have a
bibliography of all works since that is the scope of the mission. The nature
of knowledge further calls for us to understand the links between items
containing knowledge, their categorical context and their abstract
relationships. This broad, unambiguous view of works and their topics will
allow us to explicate them neutrally and select only the most notable ones
for inclusion. It will, in the limit of time, prevent our judgment from
being clouded by the limited, local view of knowledge that we currently
have.
The proposed new project has the following features: It is a bibliography of
all kinds of works that fall under the umbrella of the WMF mission. Works
and collections of works contain disambiguating user contributed text and
media. Works can link to other works. Works come together to form
categories. People can use this site as their personal bibliography,
encouraging participation of a much greater community of users and curation
of the bibliography them.
There are many challenges to creating a project of such scale, but in order
to accomplish our goals of freeing knowledge we must strive to collect it
and understand it in a more nuanced way than we currently are.
Brian Mingus
Graduate student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder
... on this weeks NY Times "tech talk" podcast. Subjects include:
flagging enthusiasm for Wikipedia, the differences between the
Foundation & the contributor base, WMF efforts to increase diversity,
Google Translation Toolkit, British Museum collaborations, and a very
brief mention of flaggedrefs.
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/technology/techtalk.html
Starts at 16:02 and runs for 7 minutes.
-- Phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Hi folks,
It's been a little while since I've sent out an update (sorry about that).
The Pending Changes trial continues apace, with 1,382 articles configured
to use the feature as of this writing.
Most of the work on the software that powers Pending Changes is focused on
refactoring and stability. Some of the performance problems associated with
this feature have been fixed, and we believe we have fixed all of the
user-visible performance problems. Looking at our backend systems, there's
some areas where this feature is still causing more load than it should,
which is where our work is focused now.
Aaron Schulz, who has done the lion's share of the development to date
(thanks Aaron!) continues to stay involved, but at a much reduced level as
he focuses on non-Wikimedia stuff, while Chad Horohoe ramps up.
We'll be publishing some statistics soon which outline per page metrics on
revisions under Pending Changes. Nimish Gautam and Devin Finzer (Devin is
an intern that is working for Wikimedia Foundation this summer) are working
on some statistics that they'll be publishing soon. More discussion is
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Metrics
It will be time for a vote soon about whether to keep Pending Changes
enabled on en.wikipedia.org. We'll be pinging folks in the community about
the post-trial discussion. If we're rigidly following the proposal, the
trial will end on August 15, regardless of whether a vote has happened.
However, we're probably already running late for making a decision by then.
For a variety of operational reasons, we plan to leave the feature running
while the community decides whether to keep the feature on, assuming that
process lasts no more than a month or so after August 15.
The main discussion area for this feature is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Feedback
If you have comments/suggestions/questions, that's a good place to post
them.
Rob
Hi All:
I'm still riding the wave of enjoyment I caught at
Wikimania in Gdansk, thanks for that :).
One of the topics that came up in my conversations
there had to do with Wikimedia's policies surrounding
free software.
It is my view that a good portion of 'the sum of all
knowledge' is currently embodied in software and
programming practice. At the same time, I know
that access to knowledge is often done 'by any
means necessary'.
Given the potential for confusion and even frustration
when rights and responsibilities aren't clear, I think it
would be great if the foundation had some clear policies
about how it will invest in software development.
I note that this year's GNU Hackers Meeting is taking place
very soon; http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/denhaag/ --
Personally I'd love it if future Wikimanias could be
co-located with or otherwise bridged with GNU meetings.
Joe
We've got one new member, Amir Ahroni. He is a linguist, he knows a
couple of languages and he is active in support of smaller Wikipedian
communities.
I am happy to announce that folk from Translatewiki [1] have joined
the Language committee as the Globalization subcommittee [2]. GlobCom
will take care about localization, internationalization and, as
Siebrand likes to say, globalization of MediaWiki and Wikimedia
projects. The fact is, of course, that Translatewiki is already doing
that job and that GlobCom will formalize connection between
Translatewiki and Wikimedia Foundation. Inside of the LangCom, GlobCom
will be in charge for checking localization requirements for creation
of new projects.
[1] - http://translatewiki.net/
[2] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Globalization_subcommittee
Interesting blog post here which is really about the future of
journalism but has implications for Wikipedia too.
"The Federal Trade Commission suggests that copyright law could be
expanded to limit the right of aggregators to republish reported facts
within a specific time period, a change known as a "hot news"
exemption."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/22/google-ftc-proposals-hurt-j…
Hi,
The 2010-11 Annual Plan and Questions and Answers have just been posted
to the Foundation website
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2010-2011_fiscal_year).
The plan was approved by the Board last week.
The 2010-11 plan differs from previous years in that this plan is rooted
in the five-year (2010-2015) Wikimedia Strategy which has been developed
collaboratively over the past year. In 2010-11, we have planned
continued growth over previous years reflecting continued and increased
investments to serve our mission and increase our impact.
The 2009-10 year is projected to exceed revenue targets and to be
underspent in expenses primarily due to underspending in the first
quarter of the 2009-10 fiscal year.
Veronique
I have been working with Sam and others for some time now on brainstorming a
proposal for the Foundation to create a centralized wiki of citations, a
WikiCite so to speak, if that is not the eventual name. My plan is to
continue to discuss with folks who are knowledgeable and interested in such
a project and to have the feedback I receive go into the proposal which I
hope to write this summer. The proposal white paper will then be sent around
to interested parties for corrections and feedback, including on-wiki and
mailing lists, before eventually landing at the Foundation officially. As we
know WMF has not started a new project in some years, so there is no
official process. Thus I find it important to get it right.
The basic idea is a centralized wiki that contains citation information that
other MediaWikis and WMF projects can then reference using something like a
{{cite}} template or a simple link. The community can document the citation,
the author, the book etc.. and, in one idealization, all citations across
all wikis would point to the same article on WikiCite. Users can use this
wiki as their personal bibliography as well, as collections of citations can
be exported in arbitrary citation formats. This general plan would allow
community aggregation of metadata and community documentation of sources
along arbitrary dimensions (quality, trust, reliability, etc.). The hope is
that such a resource would then expand on that wiki and across the projects
into summarizations of collections of sources (lit reviews) that
make navigating entire fields of literature easier and more
reliable, getting you out of the trap of not being aware of the global
context that a particular source sits in.
To give all a more concrete view, here is an example from some software that
I have implemented in our lab called WikiPapers. Please take note that while
this is a scientific literature example, the idea is general to *all
publications ever*. Also, while I have implemented a feature-full version of
a WikiCite, it's important to point out that for the WMF project we will
need a new extension that handles the needs of the project exactly, and in
PHP (I use Python :).
The name of the wiki article is a unique key that is a combination of the
author names and the year, in the following format:
Author1Author2Author3EtAl10b. This works for scientific articles, but we may
find we need to modify the key for other kinds of sources. The content of
the wiki article is composed of an infobox constructed via the Citation
template, and any other text and media the community determines it is useful
and legal to include in the article. Example article:
Screenshot of how this infobox renders on our wiki:
http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/0/0e/KangHsuKrajbich…
Title: KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09
{{Citation
|publisher=SAGE Publications
|dateadded=2010-07-17
|author=Kang M.J. and Hsu M. and Krajbich I.M. and Loewenstein G. and
McClure S.M. and Wang J.T. and Camerer C.F.
|url=http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/8/963.full
|abstract=Curiosity has been described as a desire for learning and
knowledge, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We scanned
subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they read trivia
questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions was correlated with
activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in
anticipated reward. This finding led to a behavioral study, which showed
that subjects spent more scarce resources (either limited tokens or waiting
time) to find out answers when they were more curious. The functional
imaging also showed that curiosity increased activity in memory areas when
subjects guessed incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance
memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory
enhancement was confirmed in a behavioral study: Higher curiosity in an
initial session was correlated with better recall of surprising answers 1 to
2 weeks later.
|title=The Wick in the Candle of Learning
|bibtex type=article
|number=8
|volume=20
|owner=Sethherd
|journal=Psychological Science
|year=2009
|cites=O'ReillyFrank06,Cowan95,Wise04,Fuster80,Panksepp98,KakadeDayan02b,DelgadoLockeStengerEtAl03,BrewerZhaoDesmondEtAl98,DelgadoNystromFiez00,Beatty82,Baddeley92,Waanabe96,Roland93lm,DelgadoNystromFissellEtAl00,WagnerSchacterRotteEtAl98,SeymourDawDayanEtAl07,ODoherty04,BandettiniMoonen99,ODohertyDayanFristonEtAl03,RogersOwenRobbins99,KnutsonWestdorpKaiserEtAl00,CircuitryMemory,OReillyFrank06,Watanabe96a,BrewerZhaoGabrieli98,WagnerSchacterBuckner98,RogersOwenMiddletonEtAl99,Baddeley86,Watanabe96,Rolls96a,PallerWagner02
|cited_by=Author1Author2Author3EtAl10,etc...
|pages=963
}}
Then, any other WMF wiki, or any other MediaWiki, could cite this universal
entry by simply typing {{cite|KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09}}
Additionally, if a technology such as Semantic MediaWiki is used (as it is
in WikiPapers), arbitrary lists of collections of literature can be
generated by constructing simple queries that are boolean combinations of
template properties. Given that SMW does not scale well, I have a plan that
uses Lucene instead for fast, scalable dynamic generation of collections of
citations. Imagine the possibilities..
Feel free to provide your feedback on this idea, in addition to your own
ideas, in this thread, or to me personally. I am especially interested in
the potential benefits to the WMF projects that you see, and to hear your
thoughts on the potential of this project on its own, as that will feature
prominently in the proposal. Additionally, what do you think WikiCite would
eventually be like, once it is fully matured?
Brian Mingus
Graduate Student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:22 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com>wrote:
> There have been a number of proposals floated in the Wikimedia
> community over the years to build a wiki-based project for collecting
> journal citation information. For those interested in that topic, you
> might want to check out the University of Prince Edward Island's
> "knowledge for all" project proposal -- it proposes to build an open
> universal citation index (to serve as an alternative to the many
> hundreds of proprietary citation index products that libraries
> currently buy). This of course is not the first attempt at this
> problem, but it's an interesting proposal that's getting a bit of buzz
> in the library community.
> http://library.upei.ca/k4all
>
> -- phoebe
>
> --
> * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
> <at> gmail.com *
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
