This paper (first reference) is the result of a class project I was part of
almost two years ago for CSCI 5417 Information Retrieval Systems. It builds
on a class project I did in CSCI 5832 Natural Language Processing and which
I presented at Wikimania '07. The project was very late as we didn't send
the final paper in until the day before new years. This technical report was
never really announced that I recall so I thought it would be interesting to
look briefly at the results. The goal of this paper was to break articles
down into surface features and latent features and then use those to study
the rating system being used, predict article quality and rank results in a
search engine. We used the [[random forests]] classifier which allowed us to
analyze the contribution of each feature to performance by looking directly
at the weights that were assigned. While the surface analysis was performed
on the whole english wikipedia, the latent analysis was performed on the
simple english wikipedia (it is more expensive to compute). = Surface
features = * Readability measures are the single best predictor of quality
that I have found, as defined by the Wikipedia Editorial Team (WET). The
[[Automated Readability Index]], [[Gunning Fog Index]] and [[Flesch-Kincaid
Grade Level]] were the strongest predictors, followed by length of article
html, number of paragraphs, [[Flesh Reading Ease]], [[Smog Grading]], number
of internal links, [[Laesbarhedsindex Readability Formula]], number of words
and number of references. Weakly predictive were number of to be's, number
of sentences, [[Coleman-Liau Index]], number of templates, PageRank, number
of external links, number of relative links. Not predictive (overall - see
the end of section 2 for the per-rating score breakdown): Number of h2 or
h3's, number of conjunctions, number of images*, average word length, number
of h4's, number of prepositions, number of pronouns, number of interlanguage
links, average syllables per word, number of nominalizations, article age
(based on page id), proportion of questions, average sentence length. :*
Number of images was actually by far the single strongest predictor of any
class, but only for Featured articles. Because it was so good at picking out
featured articles and somewhat good at picking out A and G articles the
classifier was confused in so many cases that the overall contribution of
this feature to classification performance is zero. :* Number of external
links is strongly predictive of Featured articles. :* The B class is highly
distinctive. It has a strong "signature," with high predictive value
assigned to many features. The Featured class is also very distinctive. F, B
and S (Stop/Stub) contain the most information.
:* A is the least distinct class, not being very different from F or G. =
Latent features = The algorithm used for latent analysis, which is an
analysis of the occurence of words in every document with respect to the
link structure of the encyclopedia ("concepts"), is [[Latent Dirichlet
Allocation]]. This part of the analysis was done by CS PhD student Praful
Mangalath. An example of what can be done with the result of this analysis
is that you provide a word (a search query) such as "hippie". You can then
look at the weight of every article for the word hippie. You can pick the
article with the largest weight, and then look at its link network. You can
pick out the articles that this article links to and/or which link to this
article that are also weighted strongly for the word hippie, while also
contributing maximally to this articles "hippieness". We tried this query in
our system (LDA), Google (site:en.wikipedia.org hippie), and the Simple
English Wikipedia's Lucene search engine. The breakdown of articles occuring
in the top ten search results for this word for those engines is: * LDA
only: [[Acid rock]], [[Aldeburgh Festival]], [[Anne Murray]], [[Carl
Radle]], [[Harry Nilsson]], [[Jack Kerouac]], [[Phil Spector]], [[Plastic
Ono Band]], [[Rock and Roll]], [[Salvador Allende]], [[Smothers brothers]],
[[Stanley Kubrick]]. * Google only: [[Glam Rock]], [[South Park]]. * Simple
only: [[African Americans]], [[Charles Manson]], [[Counterculture]], [[Drug
use]], [[Flower Power]], [[Nuclear weapons]], [[Phish]], [[Sexual
liberation]], [[Summer of Love]] * LDA & Google & Simple: [[Hippie]],
[[Human Be-in]], [[Students for a democratic society]], [[Woodstock
festival]] * LDA & Google: [[Psychedelic Pop]] * Google & Simple: [[Lysergic
acid diethylamide]], [[Summer of Love]] ( See the paper for the articles
produced for the keywords philosophy and economics ) = Discussion /
Conclusion = * The results of the latent analysis are totally up to your
perception. But what is interesting is that the LDA features predict the WET
ratings of quality just as well as the surface level features. Both feature
sets (surface and latent) both pull out all almost of the information that
the rating system bears. * The rating system devised by the WET is not
distinctive. You can best tell the difference between, grouped together,
Featured, A and Good articles vs B articles. Featured, A and Good articles
are also quite distinctive (Figure 1). Note that in this study we didn't
look at Start's and Stubs, but in earlier paper we did. :* This is
interesting when compared to this recent entry on the YouTube blog. "Five
Stars Dominate Ratings"
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html…
I think a sane, well researched (with actual subjects) rating system
is
well within the purview of the Usability Initiative. Helping people find and
create good content is what Wikipedia is all about. Having a solid rating
system allows you to reorganized the user interface, the Wikipedia
namespace, and the main namespace around good content and bad content as
needed. If you don't have a solid, information bearing rating system you
don't know what good content really is (really bad content is easy to spot).
:* My Wikimania talk was all about gathering data from people about articles
and using that to train machines to automatically pick out good content. You
ask people questions along dimensions that make sense to people, and give
the machine access to other surface features (such as a statistical measure
of readability, or length) and latent features (such as can be derived from
document word occurence and encyclopedia link structure). I referenced page
262 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to give an example of the
kind of qualitative features I would ask people. It really depends on what
features end up bearing information, to be tested in "the lab". Each word is
an example dimension of quality: We have "*unity, vividness, authority,
economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance,
precision, proportion, depth and so on.*" You then use surface and latent
features to predict these values for all articles. You can also say, when a
person rates this article as high on the x scale, they also mean that it has
has this much of these surface and these latent features.
= References =
- DeHoust, C., Mangalath, P., Mingus., B. (2008). *Improving search in
Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery*. Technical Report.
PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/6/68/DeHoustMangalat…>
- Rassbach, L., Mingus., B, Blackford, T. (2007). *Exploring the
feasibility of automatically rating online article quality*. Technical
Report. PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/d/d3/RassbachPincock…>
Hoi,
I have asked and received permission to forward to you all this most
excellent bit of news.
The linguist list, is a most excellent resource for people interested in the
field of linguistics. As I mentioned some time ago they have had a funding
drive and in that funding drive they asked for a certain amount of money in
a given amount of days and they would then have a project on Wikipedia to
learn what needs doing to get better coverage for the field of linguistics.
What you will read in this mail that the total community of linguists are
asked to cooperate. I am really thrilled as it will also get us more
linguists interested in what we do. My hope is that a fraction will be
interested in the languages that they care for and help it become more
relevant. As a member of the "language prevention committee", I love to get
more knowledgeable people involved in our smaller projects. If it means that
we get more requests for more projects we will really feel embarrassed with
all the new projects we will have to approve because of the quality of the
Incubator content and the quality of the linguistic arguments why we should
approve yet another language :)
NB Is this not a really clever way of raising money; give us this much in
this time frame and we will then do this as a bonus...
Thanks,
GerardM
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: LINGUIST Network <linguist(a)linguistlist.org>
Date: Jun 18, 2007 6:53 PM
Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
To: LINGUIST(a)listserv.linguistlist.org
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831. Mon Jun 18 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.
Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar(a)linguistlist.org>
Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry(a)linguistlist.org>
Reviews: Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project
<reviews(a)linguistlist.org>
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/
The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University,
and donations from subscribers and publishers.
Editor for this issue: Ann Sawyer <sawyer(a)linguistlist.org>
================================================================
To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html
===========================Directory==============================
1)
Date: 18-Jun-2007
From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org >
Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers
-------------------------Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:49:35
From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org >
Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers
Dear subscribers,
As you may recall, one of our Fund Drive 2007 campaigns was called the
"Wikipedia Update Vote." We asked our viewers to consider earmarking their
donations to organize an update project on linguistics entries in the
English-language Wikipedia. You can find more background information on this
at:
http://linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2007/wikipedia/index.cfm.
The speed with which we met our goal, thanks to the interest and generosity
of
our readers, was a sure sign that the linguistics community was enthusiastic
about the idea. Now that summer is upon us, and some of you may have a bit
more
leisure time, we are hoping that you will be able to help us get started on
the
Wikipedia project. The LINGUIST List's role in this project is a purely
organizational one. We will:
*Help, with your input, to identify major gaps in the Wikipedia materials or
pages that need improvement;
*Compile a list of linguistics pages that Wikipedia editors have identified
as
"in need of attention from an expert on the subject" or " does not cite any
references or sources," etc;
*Send out periodical calls for volunteer contributors on specific topics or
articles;
*Provide simple instructions on how to upload your entries into Wikipedia;
*Keep track of our project Wikipedians;
*Keep track of revisions and new entries;
*Work with Wikimedia Foundation to publicize the linguistics community's
efforts.
We hope you are as enthusiastic about this effort as we are. Just to help us
all
get started looking at Wikipedia more critically, and to easily identify an
area
needing improvement, we suggest that you take a look at the List of
Linguists
page at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguists. M
Many people are not listed there; others need to have more facts and
information
added. If you would like to participate in this exciting update effort,
please
respond by sending an email to LINGUIST Editor Hannah Morales at
hannah(a)linguistlist.org, suggesting what your role might be or which
linguistics
entries you feel should be updated or added. Some linguists who saw our
campaign
on the Internet have already written us with specific suggestions, which we
will
share with you soon.
This update project will take major time and effort on all our parts. The
end
result will be a much richer internet resource of information on the breadth
and
depth of the field of linguistics. Our efforts should also stimulate
prospective
students to consider studying linguistics and to educate a wider public on
what
we do. Please consider participating.
Sincerely,
Hannah Morales
Editor, Wikipedia Update Project
Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable
-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831
Hi folks,
to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course
corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me
and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process,
starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according
to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the
Board [1]:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero)
- Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams)
- Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity
I'm proposing the following initial schedule:
January:
- Editor Engagement Experiments
February:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (Contribs + Zero)
March:
- Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects)
- Funds Dissemination Committee
We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly
metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on
their recent progress, which will help set some context that would
otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will
also create open opportunities for feedback and questions.
My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly
review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as
meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this
discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here
which we can use to discuss the concept further:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…
The internal review will, at minimum, include:
Sue Gardner
myself
Howie Fung
Team members and relevant director(s)
Designated minute-taker
So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual
Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker.
I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a
duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks:
- Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter,
compared with goals
- Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would?
- Review of challenges, blockers and successes
- Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other
action items
- Buffer time, debriefing
Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved
structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases
where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world.
In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be
to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than
a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews
may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally
to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in
engineering.
As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can
help inform and support reviews across the organization.
Feedback and questions are appreciated.
All best,
Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi everyone,
WMF researchers have agreed to participate in an office hour about WMF research projects and methodologies.
The currently scheduled participants are:
* Aaron Halfaker, Research Analyst (contractor)
* Jonathan Morgan, Research Strategist (contractor)
* Evan Rosen, Data Analytics Manager, Global Development
* Haitham Shammaa, Contribution Research Manager
* Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Strategy
We'll meet on IRC in #wikimedia-office on April 22 at 1800 UTC. Please join us.
Pine
All,
The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts
work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools
for our users (like cross-wiki notifications). These changes will mean
users have the same account name everywhere, will let us give you new
features that will help you edit & discuss better, and will allow more
flexible user permissions for tools. One of the pre-conditions for
this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900
Wikimedia wikis.[0]
Unfortunately, some accounts are currently not unique across all our
wikis, but instead clash with other users who have the same account
name. To make sure that all of these users can use Wikimedia's wikis
in future, we will be renaming a number of accounts to have "~” and
the name of their wiki added to the end of their accounts' name. This
change will take place on or around 27 May. For example, a user called
“Example” on the Swedish Wiktionary who will be renamed would become
“Example~svwiktionary”.
All accounts will still work as before, and will continue to be
credited for all their edits made so far. However, users with renamed
accounts (whom we will be contacting individually) will have to use
the new account name when they log in.
It will now only be possible for accounts to be renamed globally; the
RenameUser tool will no longer work on a local basis - since all
accounts must be globally unique - therefore it will be withdrawn from
bureaucrats' tool sets. It will still be possible for users to ask on
Meta for their account to be renamed further, if they do not like
their new user name, once this takes place.
A copy of this note is posted to meta [1] for translation. Please
forward this to your local communities, and help get it translated.
Individuals who are affected will be notified via talk page and e-mail
notices nearer the time.
[0] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login
[1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_User_Login_finalisation_announcement
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
FYI
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 5:38 PM
Subject: [Tech/Product] Engineering/Product org structure
To: Staff All <wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi folks,
consistent with Sue's narrowing focus mandate, I’ve been thinking &
talking the last few weeks a fair bit with a bunch of different people
about the future organizational structure of the engineering/product
department. Long story short, if we want to scale the dept, and take
seriously our identity as a tech org (as stated by Sue), it’s my view
that we need to split the current department into an engineering dept
and a product dept in about 6-8 months.
To avoid fear and anxiety, and to make sure the plan makes sense, I
want to start an open conversation now. If you think any of the below
is a terrible idea, or have suggestions on how to improve the plan,
I’d love to hear from you. I’ll make myself personally available to
anyone who wants to talk more about it. (I'm traveling a bit starting
tomorrow, but will be available via email during that time.) We can
also discuss it at coming tech lunches and such.
There’s also nothing private here, so I’m forwarding this note to
wikitech-l@ and wikimedia-l@ as well. That said, there’s no urgency in
this note, so feel free to set it aside for later.
Here’s why I’m recommending to Sue that we create distinct engineering
and product departments:
- It’ll give product development and the user experience more
visibility at the senior mgmt level, which means we’ll have more
conversations at that level about the work that most of the
organization actually does. Right now, a single dept of ~70 people is
represented by 1 person across both engineering and product functions
- me. That was fine when it was half the size. Right now it’s out of
whack.
- It’ll give us the ability to add Director-level leadership functions
as appropriate without making my head explode.
- I believe that separating the two functions is consistent with Sue’s
recommendation to narrow our focus and develop our identity as an
engineering organization. It will allow for more sustained effort in
managing product priorities and greater advocacy for core platform
issues (APIs, site performance, search, ops improvements, etc.) that
are less visible than our feature priorities.
A split dept structure wouldn’t affect the way we assemble teams --
we’d still pull from required functions (devs, product, UI/UX, etc.),
and teams would continue to pursue their objectives fairly
autonomously.
It’s not all roses -- we might see more conflict between the two
functions, more us vs. them thinking, and more communications
breakdowns or forum shopping. But net I think the positives would
outweigh the negatives, and there are ways to mitigate against the
negatives.
The way we’d get there:
I’m prepared to resign from my engineering management responsibilities
and to focus solely on my remaining role as VP of Product, as soon as
a successor for VP of Engineering has been identified. We would start
that hiring process probably in early 2013. I’m recommending to Sue
that we seriously consider internal candidates for the VP of
Engineering role, as we have a strong engineering management team in
place today.
So realistically we'd probably identify that person towards the end of
the fiscal year.
Obviously I can’t make any promises to you that in that brave new
world, you’ll love whoever gets hired into the VP of Engineering role,
so there’s some unavoidable uncertainty there. I’ll support Sue in the
search, though, and I’m sure she’d appreciate feedback from you on the
kind of person who you think would be ideal for the job.
The VP of Product role would encompass a combination of functions.
Howie and I would work with the department to figure out what makes
sense as an internal structure. My opening view is that Analytics and
User Experience are potential areas that may benefit from dedicated
Director-level support roles. (Analytics is tricky because it includes
a strong engineering piece, but also a research/analyst piece working
closely with product.) The new structure would therefore be as
follows:
* VP of Engineering -> Directors of Engineering
* VP of Product -> Director of Product Development, plus new
Director-level functions (we've discussed UX/Design as a likely new
leadership function, and Analytics as a _potential_ area to centralize
here because it works so closely with product)
Why Product? I’m happy to help the org in whatever way I can; I
believe I’d be most useful to it in focusing there and helping build
this relatively new organizational function. Based on my past
experience, Howie & I make a great team. I know how engineering
operates, which could help mitigate against some of the aforementioned
issues. Plus, our product priorities generally already reflect lots of
thought and consideration, and we have no intent of reopening
questions like "Is Visual Editor the top product priority".
I look forward to hearing your thoughts & discussing this further in
coming weeks.
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi all,
Last week I noticed a nice design for the list info page of the WLM-US
mailing list that I tweaked for this mailing list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/cabal-l
What do you think? Mentally replace all instance of "cabal-l" with
"wikimedia-l" and compare to
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l. Unfortunately
Mailman only seems to allow this change to be made for the English version
of the page, so if you try to view the page in another language, you'll
still get the standard list info page.
Any objections to changing it?
--
Thehelpfulone
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone
Hello!
I have started a proposal for a new wiki project: WikiLang (meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiLang). It is about endangered languages and language documentation/decipherment. It is a very important step in order to save our linguistic diversity which is ongoing faster than the extinction of animals. Most of our languages are highly endangered and there are pessimistic estimations that by 2100 90% of them will be extinct. So, please support the project and vote for it and/or give your feedback! (I for myself belong to a language minority and I can tell how important this is.) Thanks a lot!
Kevin
Hi all,
There's currently a proposal on the internal mailing list to close it, as well as the internal wiki. Although I don't disagree with closing the internal-l mailing list (it's definitely served its time), I would like us to collectively reconsider using the internal wiki.
There is information within the Wikimedia movement that can't be shared publicly. Some of that information has been shared on the internal wiki, but much has been kept confidential within the various Wikimedia organisations that now exist. I think there's a lot of benefit to sharing more of that information in a confidential fashion on an internal wiki, and that we should start doing that much more than we're currently doing.
Some examples of what I mean here are:
# Agreements, particularly those with global impact, and/or where they affect more than one Wikimedia organisation. Part of the recent Monmouthpedia/Gibraltarpedia situation was caused by a lack of transparency about who had signed what agreements, and when they had been signed - if these had all been shared on an internal wiki then some of this could have been avoided. There's also a lot of experience now with existing agreements that could be reused when new agreements are being written, e.g. for Wikimedians in Residences. Sadly, not all of these can be made publicly available (or at least, they haven't been to date).
# Press releases. When there's an upcoming significant press release from a Wikimedia organisation, then it should be good practice to share it with the other movement partners prior to its release, so that they are aware of it, can provide feedback, and can plan around it. Some of this already happens on wmfcc-l, but not consistently - much more could be done here.
# Domain names. There is a list of these on internal already, which is actually being maintained by some people. Tackling squatted domain names and keeping track of who owns what is a global problem that should be done collaboratively, but in confidence, rather than just by individual organisations.
# Contact information for the various organisations. Some of this can be done publicly, but not all, and it would be good to have a central place for this information anyway.
# Notices of sensitive activities. E.g. if there's an upcoming risk of law suits, infrastructure difficulties within organisations, etc. then it would be good to be able to share these and ask for help without publishing them to the world at the same time. That doesn't need a mailing list - it can be done on a wiki.
# … and I'm sure there's more examples that can go here, this isn't trying to be a complete list!
So, rather than close the internal wiki, I'd like to propose a radical redesign and repurposing of it. Is there the interest and willingness in the WMF and the chapters to share such information with each other?
Thanks,
Mike
(Note: this is a personal viewpoint, not necessarily that of WMUK.)
Hi,
We are about to organize a wikiexpedition devoted to train
infrastructure in Poland. It will be officially co-organised with
Polish Railways. Polish Railways will provide us free tickets for
traveling across Poland using any trains and special passes to legally
enter and photograph rail tracks, workshops, rail yards, cargo railway
stations, museums belonging to Polish Railways etc. In order to get
the pass it will be obligatory to undergo a special basic one-day
railtrack safety training which will be provided for free by Polish
Railways employees. Actually we don't know what time it will happen -
for sure during summer, but it is actually to negotiate. It is
possible to have several 2-4 people teams. The requirements will be
just:
*being devoted wiki-photographer ready to submit photos to Wikimedia
Commons under free licences
*being highly crazy about railways stuff - i.e. be ready to travel
across Poland using mainly slow, local trains which stops on every
tiny station, sleep in low cost hostels, feed yourself for 32 PLN a
day :-)
*You don't need to speak Polish - we can try to organize a mixed teams
fro both training and expeditions.
If there is anyone ready for such a wiki-safari - just drop me an E-mail...
--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerekhttp://www.ganicz.pl/poli/http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz