New study that reviews the quality of information on depression and
schizophrenia on Wikipedia, and compares it to centrally controlled
websites, Encyclopaedia Britannica and a psychiatry textbook.
Wikipedia is generally as good as, or better than centrally controlled
websites, Encyclopaedia Britannica and a psychiatry textbook.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22166182
Nice to hear!!
Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce Sarah Stierch as our newest
Community Fellow. Sarah's fellowship begins in January, and she'll be
working on projects focused on the gender gap and editor retention. Read
all about it in our blog post:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/20/announcing-community-fellow-sarah-stie…
Welcome, Sarah!
--
Siko Bouterse
Head of Community Fellowships
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
sbouterse(a)wikimedia.org
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Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
_______________________________________________
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Welcome, wish you best,
Mardetanha
On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 10:09 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>wrote:
> ***Resending this note because the earlier version seemed to have
> really broken formatting. Hope this is better.***
>
> Hello folks,
>
> I’m delighted to tell you that the Wikimedia Foundation has a new
> Chief Talent and Culture Officer, Gayle Karen Young.
>
> Recapping: the purpose of the CTCO role is to have a person on staff
> dedicated to continually strengthening and improving all our practices
> related to people --such as recruitment, on-boarding, skills
> development, organizational design, goal-setting, compensation and
> performance assessment-- with the overall goal of ensuring that the
> Wikimedia Foundation’s work culture is healthy and high-performance.
>
> I created the role because I believe that for organizations to be
> effective, it's critical that they have good talent and culture
> practices. Most non-profits skimp on funding HR because they want to
> be cautious with donors’ money, and they think investing in people is
> a bit of a luxury. I disagree. At the Wikimedia Foundation, half our
> spending is on salaries -- in other words, on people. So it seems to
> me that recruiting great people and creating the conditions in which
> they can flourish, is an excellent investment. That’s why the
> Wikimedia Foundation has a CTCO.
>
> Back to Gayle. A few months ago, Cyn Skyberg told Wikimedia she’d be
> leaving us. I then hired Lisa Grossman of m|Oppenheim to find us a
> successor for Cyn. Lisa spoke with hundreds of candidates, and brought
> six to be interviewed by me, Erik and Garfield Byrd. Our finalist
> candidates then spoke with Cyn, Barry, Geoff and Zack, and worked on
> projects for us which involved interviewing Aaron Schulz, Alolita
> Sharma, Asher Feldman, Brandon Harris, CT Woo, Dana Isokawa, Howie
> Fung, Jay Walsh, Kul Wadhwa, Leslie Harms, Melanie Brown, Rob
> Lanphier, Steven Walling and Tomasz Finc. They were also interviewed
> by Jan-Bart de Vreede, the vice-chair of the Board and the chair of
> the Board’s HR committee.
>
> It was an extensive search! And I am really happy about the outcome.
>
> Gayle Karen Young is a seasoned HR consultant and organizational
> psychologist with expertise in leadership development, change
> management, facilitation, group dynamics, and Agile team effectiveness
> training. She has worked with a wide variety of non-profit and
> for-profit organizations across industries including tech,
> hospitality, restaurants, airlines, healthcare, and education. She is
> the board president of Spark, a non-profit organization that engages
> young people in global women’s human rights issues. Gayle is also a
> facilitator for the Stanford Graduate School of Business for their
> Interpersonal Dynamics course and their Women in Management program.
> She mentors for the Thiel Foundation’s 20 Under 20 Fellowship program,
> and generally supports futurist causes because she likes audacious
> ideas and grand challenges. She has designed and facilitated
> conferences for the Singularity Summit, BIL (TED’s un-conference
> sibling), and the Seasteading Institute. She has a BA in psychology
> from the University of San Francisco, and an MA in organizational
> psychology from Alliant International University.
>
> I think Gayle will be a really great culture fit for the Wikimedia
> movement. She's an iconoclastic geek who goes to ComicCon, but unlike
> most geeks she is warm and people-centred: when she was a kid, she
> wanted to grow up to be Deanna Troi from Star Trek. She’s insatiably
> curious and reads widely. She was born in the Philippines and travels
> annually with Spark, most recently to China and Cambodia. You can read
> more about Gayle here on her userpage on the English Wikipedia:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GayleKaren, and you can see some of
> the work she’s done for us here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GayleKaren/WMF_Recruiting_Strategy_Project
> .
>
> I want to thank everyone who was involved in this long and elaborate
> hiring process, and I want to especially thank Cyn. As the Wikimedia
> Foundation's first CTCO Cyn had the unenviable task of breaking lots
> of new ground – she leaves us in much better shape than she found us,
> and I’m grateful to her for everything she's done for us.
>
> Gayle will start work January 3. She’s a foundation-l subscriber, so I
> believe she will see any replies to this e-mail. I'm on holiday for
> the next three days, so if there are any replies to this note that
> need a response from me, you'll hear from me Friday.
>
> Thanks,
> Sue
>
>
> --
>
> Sue Gardner
> Executive Director
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> 415 839 6885 office
> 415 816 9967 cell
>
> Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
> the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
> _______________________________________________
> Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately
> directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia
> Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
> WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
>
Hey everyone,
Since folks have been asking about it, I wanted to announce that the
features development team at the Wikimedia Foundation will be holding an
office hours (in #wikimedia-office) about the general past, present, and
future of MediaWiki features being worked on here at the WMF.
This will be on January 4th, 2012 at 23:00 UTC. Documentation is on Meta
for time conversion and IRC how-tos.[1]
--
Steven Walling
Community Organizer at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
Hi Wikipedians,
I seem to have found a way to automatically judge which revision of a
Wikipedia article has the best quality.
It's very simple: look at that article's edit history and find out, within
a specified time range (e.g. the past 6 months), which revision remained
unchallenged for the longest time until the next revision occurred.
Of course there can be additional factors to refine this, such as also
considering each revision's author's reputation (Wikipedia has a reputation
system for Wikipedians), but I still feel the above idea is the simplest
and most elegant, just like the original PageRank idea is for Google.
Best Regards,
Ziyuan Yao
>
> ------------------------------
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 6:38 AM, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi Wikipedians,
> >
> > I seem to have found a way to automatically judge which revision of a
> > Wikipedia article has the best quality.
> >
> > It's very simple: look at that article's edit history and find out,
> within
> > a specified time range (e.g. the past 6 months), which revision remained
> > unchallenged for the longest time until the next revision occurred.
> >
> > Of course there can be additional factors to refine this, such as also
> > considering each revision's author's reputation (Wikipedia has a
> reputation
> > system for Wikipedians), but I still feel the above idea is the simplest
> > and most elegant, just like the original PageRank idea is for Google.
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Ziyuan Yao
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:16:15 +0000
> From: Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] "RevisionRank": automatically finding out
> high-quality revisions of an article
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <CAAQB2S9TEQhuiaD4Gb0ZjV-tVSLRgmmjHjbHJwAww=8UiFtf3A(a)mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 22:38, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > I seem to have found a way to automatically judge which revision of a
> > Wikipedia article has the best quality.
> >
> > It's very simple: look at that article's edit history and find out,
> within
> > a specified time range (e.g. the past 6 months), which revision remained
> > unchallenged for the longest time until the next revision occurred.
> >
> > Of course there can be additional factors to refine this, such as also
> > considering each revision's author's reputation (Wikipedia has a
> reputation
> > system for Wikipedians), but I still feel the above idea is the simplest
> > and most elegant, just like the original PageRank idea is for Google.
> >
>
> Okay, how about this.
>
> I find a page today that has had only one edit in the past year. That
> edit was an IP editor changing the page to insert the image of a man
> sticking his genitalia into a bowl of warm pasta (I haven't checked
> Wikimedia Commons but would not be surprised...).
>
> Nobody notices the change until I come along and undo it. I then see
> that it is a topic that interests both myself and a friend of mine,
> and we collaborate on improving the article together: he writes the
> prose and I dig out obscure references from academic databases.
> Between us, we edit the page four or five times a day, every day for a
> week improving the article until it reaches GA status. Having
> nominated it for GA, a WikiProject picks up on the importance of the
> topic and a whole swarm of editors interested in the topic swoop in
> and keep editing it collaboratively for months on end.
>
> Under your metric, in this scenario, the edits of a sysop and an
> experienced user, or later the WikiProject editors, would not be
> chosen as the high-quality stable version.
>
> As for author reputation, check out the WikiTrust extension for
> Firefox - see http://www.wikitrust.net/
>
> --
> Tom Morris
> <http://tommorris.org/>
>
>
>
>
Hi Ziyuan Yao, that is an interesting idea, but not necessarily something
that one should do automatically.
I recently found an article that since 2006 had been telling the world
where the Holy Grail had been from the closure of Glastonbury monastery
until the start of the twentieth century. It will take some years of
non-editing for the new version of that article to become the stable one.
Also some of the articles that our readers are most interested in would
look a tad dated. Sarah Palin's article may no longer be at the 25 edits
per minute stage that it peaked at, but how many years will it be before it
becomes as stable as it was a week before she became John McCain's running
mate?
Of course the edit history is out there so the earlier versions are
available under the same license as the current version. So any
enterprising mirror could adopt a system like this if they thought it would
look at least as good as the current Wikipedia. As far as I know no-one has
yet, and I suspect if they did they'd have legal problems re libellous
statements about living people. Wikipedia at least has the moral and I hope
legal defence that when we learn of an error we fix it. This sort of system
would be automatically displaying an earlier version despite knowing that
in many cases it would be displaying false and damaging information.
WSC
WSC
Hey all,
I think most Foundation-l subscribers know Philippe Beaudette from the
Foundation, but perhaps not all are aware of his title, Head of Reader
Relations, or exactly what that department is and what role it fills.
If you'd like to hear an update on the office of reader relations at the
WMF and generally interrogate Philippe, ;) this Thursday at 0:00 UTC is
your chance. Details are on Meta for how to join as well as time
conversion.[1]
Thanks,
--
Steven Walling
Community Organizer at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
