Hey all,
As you might know, the Editor Engagement Experiments team spent several weeks in
2012-13 testing changes to the account creation page, aiming to make
it easier for new editors to join our projects.[1]
Soon you'll see wider announcements on-wiki and on the blog about the
"soft launch" of the interface changes we've built now that testing is
over. The short version: for roughly a week, we're initially launching
the changes in MediaWiki core on an opt-in basis, so that editors can
test the localizations and hunt for bugs on their home wiki without
potentially disrupting the essential functions of login and account
creation.
This Saturday the 27th at 18:00 UTC,[2] we'll be hosting IRC office
hours to talk about these changes with anyone interested. Please join
us. :-)
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
Millions of Wikidata stubs invade small Wikipedias .. Volapük
Wikipedia now best curated source on asteroids .. new editors flood
small wikis .. Google spokesperson: "This is out of control. We will
shut it down."
Denny suggested:
>> II ) develop a feature that blends into Wikipedia's search if an article
>> about a topic does not exist yet, but we have data on Wikidata about that
>> topic
Andrew Gray responded:
> I think this would be amazing. A software hook that says "we know X
> article does not exist yet, but it is matched to Y topic on Wikidata"
> and pulls out core information, along with a set of localised
> descriptions... we gain all the benefit of having stub articles
> (scope, coverage) without the problems of a small community having to
> curate a million pages. It's not the same as hand-written content, but
> it's immeasurably better than no content, or even an attempt at
> machine-translating free text.
>
> XXX is [a species of: fish] [in the: Y family]. It [is found in: Laos,
> Vietnam]. It [grows to: 20 cm]. (pictures)
This seems very doable. Is it desirable?
For many languages, it would allow hundreds of thousands of
pseudo-stubs (not real articles stored in the DB, but generated from
Wikidata) to be served to readers and crawlers that would otherwise
not exist in that language.
Looking back 10 years, User:Ram-Man was one of the first to generate
thousands of en.wp articles from, in this case, US census data. It was
controversial at the time and it stuck. Other Wikipedias have since
then either allowed or prohibited bot-creation of articles on a
project-by-project basis. It tends to lead to frustration when folks
compare article counts and see artificial inflation by bot-created
content.
Does anyone know if the impact of bot-creation on (new) editor
behavior has been studied? I do know that many of the Rambot articles
were expanded over time, and I suspect many wouldn't have been if they
hadn't turned up in search engines in the first place. On the flip
side, a large "surface area" of content being indexed by search
engines will likely also attract a fair bit of drive-by vandalism that
may not be detected because those pages aren't watched.
A model like the proposed one might offer a solution to a lot of these
challenges. How I imagine it could work:
* Templates could be defined for different Wikidata entities. We could
make it possible to let users add links from items in Wikidata to
Wikipedia articles that don't exist yet. (Currently this is
prohibited.) If such a link is added, _and_ a relevant template is
defined for the Wikidata entity type (perhaps through an entity
type->template mapping), WP will render an article using that
template, pulling structured info from Wikidata.
* A lot of the grammatical rules would be defined in the template
using checks against the Wikidata result. Depending on the complexity
of grammatical variations beyond basics such as singular/plural this
might require Lua scripting.
* The article is served as a normal HTTP 200 result, cached, and
indexed by search engines. In WP itself, links to the article might
have some special affordance that suggests that they're neither
ordinary red links nor existing articles.
* When a user tries to edit the article, wikitext (or visual edit
mode) is generated, allowing the user to expand or add to the
automatically generated prose and headings. Such edits are tagged so
they can more easily be monitored (they could also be gated by default
if the vandalism rate is too high).
* We'd need to decide whether we want these pages to show up in
searches on WP itself.
Advantages:
* These pages wouldn't inflate page counts, but they would offer
useful information to readers and be higher quality than machine
translation.
* They could serve as powerful lures for new editors in languages that
are currently underrepresented on the web.
Disadvantages/concerns:
* Depending on implementation, I continue to have some concern about
{{#property}} references ending up in article text (as opposed to
templates); these concerns are consistent with the ones expressed in
the en.wp RFC [1]. This might be mitigated if Visual Editor offers a
super-intuitive in-place editing method. {{#property}} references in
text could also be converted to their plain text representation the
moment a page is edited by a human being (which would have its own set
of challenges, of course).
* How massive would these sets of auto-generated articles get? I
suspect the technical complexity of setting up the templates and
adding the links in Wikidata itself would act as a bit of a barrier to
entry. But vast pseudo-article sets in tiny languages could pose
operational challenges without adding a lot of value.
* Would search engines penalize WP for such auto-generated content?
Overall, I think it's an area where experimentation is merited, as it
could not only expand information in languages that are
underrepresented on the web, but also act as a force multiplier for
new editor entrypoints. It also seems that a proof-of-concept for
experimentation in a limited context should be very doable.
Erik
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Wikidata_Phase…
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
Today the Editor Engagement Experiments team has ported our new designs for
account creation and login to the current version of MediaWiki core,
meaning it is now available for testing on all Wikipedias and Wikimedia
projects.
The main purpose of starting with an opt-in testing period is to iron out
any last minute bugs and wait for localizations to catch up before we turn
it on by default. Testing instructions and background on this project are
available in our blog post,[1] and we're holding IRC office hours this
Saturday at 18:00 UTC to discuss things.[2]
I'm in the process of posting locally to Village Pumps as well, targeting
the top ten Wikipedias and the English version of all other projects. Help
spread the word if you can. :)
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/try-new-login-accountcreation/
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
Interesting views from Project Gutenberg users.
David Richfield
+27718539985
Sent from a mobile device.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Bess Richfield" <bess(a)telkomsa.net>
Date: 25 Apr 2013 09:56
Subject: Re: Wikipedia FYI
To: "David Richfield" <davidrichfield(a)gmail.com>
Cc:
David,
I am sure that, given the sheer size of wikipedia, it is possible to find
many examples of real excellence that perhaps counter the general
statements I gave below. This, unfortunately, misses the point.
I feel very strongly that, no matter how many really, really fantastic
things there are in wikipedia, it is not as good as it can be. And it is
not about the final product, but how to attain that ideal.
I use wikipedia every day - multiple times. It is a wonderful edifice.
But could it not be so much better if it used the resources (possible
contributors) more productively and inclusively?
Could it be that you are too close to the forest, seeing only trees, and
losing the sense of what I am trying to say?
I am formulating some very interesting ideas about the subject - but I have
to get them properly sorted out - then I will post you about it. Or maybe
we can discuss it on the phone or skype.
-------------------
What kind of window will there be between your flying in home, and
departing on holiday?
Bess
-------------------
-----Original Message----- From: David Richfield
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2013 8:46 AM
To: Bess Richfield
Subject: Re: Wikipedia FYI
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Featured_article_**candidates<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates>
for examples of people taking great care and attention to articles to
get them to be the best they possibly can. One of them is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Pennsylvania-class_battleship<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania-class_battleship>,
which is
certainly not a topic of purely recent interest.
On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 5:59 AM, Bess Richfield <bess(a)telkomsa.net> wrote:
> David,
>
>
>
> A couple of weeks ago I noticed that there was a thread called WIKIPEDIA in
> one of the forums of Distributed Proofreaders. So I investigated . . .
>
>
>
> When today the last contribution below arrived, I thought you’d like to
> take
> a look.
>
>
>
> I am leaving out only two small irrelevant comments in between. I
> contributed on the 6th of April 2013.:
>
>
>
> 31 August 2012 (Start of thread)
>
>
>
> Well I finally gave up on Wikipedia after close to a decade of
> contributions, particularly in the topic of astronomy. (Over 70,000 edits,
> many many new articles, reviews, citations, and 20 featured articles.) My
> main beef was with certain stubbornly foolish individuals who managed to
> sap
> all of the enjoyment out of the process. I think I'll spend a lot more time
> on DP now because it's a more structured process and there's very little
> negativity here. Plus it's a nice feeling to know that the contributions
> you
> make here won't get wiped out by some nincompoop.
>
> Just needed to vent a little.
>
>
>
> 31 August 2012
>
>
>
> Funny you should say that. I recently looked over a project in P1 and found
> that on one page the only change made by the proofer was replacing a
> clearly
> correct (both visually and grammatically) comma with a semicolon.
>
>
> Nincompoops Of The World, Unite!
>
>
>
> 6 September, 2012
>
>
>
> This is why many do not bother with it at all. I have added things in the
> earlier days only to have whole pages replaced by someone that has no idea
> what they are talking about. Then bicker over the changes I make to
> correct
> thier misinformation.
>
>
>
> 6 April 2013 (This is my contribution)
>
>
>
> Just came across this thread. I would love to work on Wikipedia, and I
> have
> made some contributions; but the negativity and sheer difficulty of
> navigating their processes turned me off completely. Not to mention the
> bumptious rudeness of what I assume to be young males with absolutely no
> perspective. My SO and my "young male" son, who both do a huge amount for
> Wikipedia, have managed to tolerate and survive Wikipedia. Interestingly,
> neither of them work in DP, although my son did sign up before even I did,
> but has probably lapsed since he never contributed.
>
> I would like to know how much of an overlap there is between contributors
> to
> Wikipedia and DP. Since both are concerned with volunteers making
> knowledge
> available for free to the whole world, one would expect a good match. But
> the very different cultures seem to attract different populations. Any
> comments?
>
>
>
> 24 April 2013
>
>
>
> Wikipedia and DP aren't the only crowdsource information-aggregating
> projects. I'm a very low-level Wikipedia contributor, but a medium-level
> contributor at CCEL and the Open Directory Project.
>
>
>
> 25 April 2013
>
>
>
> A topic I could probably write a lot on... after sitting in an armchair...
> and I'm not going to do that for everyone's sake.
>
> Some quick thoughts: DP, presumably, appreciates that older, public domain
> works have value--intrinsically, historiographically, etc.--while Wikipedia
> tends to minimize anything but the au currant. Wikipedia calls this
> "recentism", which is a by-product of the interests of the average
> 20-something editor: movies, video games, current news events, biographies
> of often marginally notable living people, etc. If "scholasticism", if you
> will, was ever a value for Wikipedia users during the site's formative
> years, that has largely been lost.
>
> Wikipedia shares certain transactional similarities with DP that would also
> appear to make them similar; you edit a page, and there is no commitment
> beyond that edit. The difference, I think--getting to my unsupported thesis
> that the cultures are quite different--is that DP contributors have some
> abiding interest in seeing the specific projects they work on succeed,
> while
> many Wikipedia edits/editors expend great effort on non-abiding matters.
> This is often called "drive-by" editing, or "gnoming"; generally a
> disinterested affair that does nothing to further explicate the subject of
> the article. I'm referring to correcting a typo, reverting vandalism,
> reverting good-faith additions because someone didn't provide a source; and
> worst of all, adding those pointless templates that say "the lede is too
> short" or "this article has an essay-like tone".
>
> The handful of editors that actually research and write good content on
> Wikipedia, which is of course the hardest and most "loving" job by far, is
> drying up quite quickly, it seems to me, because the culture and norms no
> longer reflect the ostensible "encyclopedic" goal of the project.
> "Encyclopedia", after all, is an "old" idea; and Wikipedia's users are
> young; and they have gradually morphed that idea into more of a quick-fix,
> add-a-factoid, add-a-template style of editing and construing knowledge,
> that is frankly at the polar opposite of truly engaging with an
> encyclopedia
> subject: like a book on DP does. So there's a certain pleasure, I presume,
> that we all take in bringing out fully-fledged texts, even if they're old,
> something that can be chewed on--and that counters the short-attention-span
> world we live in.
>
> I therefore think that at the median, there is a surprising disjunct
> between
> who would edit Wikipedia a lot, and who would edit DP a lot.
>
>
>
> ---------------------
> Bess Richfield
> Somerset West
>
--
David Richfield
[[:en:User:Slashme]]
+27718539985
-----
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This press release is also available online here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/The_Wikidata_Revolution
The Wikidata revolution is here: enabling structured data on Wikipedia
San Francisco, 25 April 2013 -- A year after its announcement as the first
new Wikimedia project since 2006, Wikidata has now begun to serve the over
280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data
that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.
By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to
collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency
and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the
encyclopedia. Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata's universal, machine-readable
knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous
external applications.
"Wikidata is a powerful tool for keeping information in Wikipedia current
across all language versions," said Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director
Sue Gardner. "Before Wikidata, Wikipedians needed to manually update
hundreds of Wikipedia language versions every time a famous person died or
a country's leader changed. With Wikidata, such new information, entered
once, can automatically appear across all Wikipedia language versions. That
makes life easier for editors and makes it easier for Wikipedia to stay
current."
The development of Wikidata began in March 2012, led by Wikimedia
Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement. Since
Wikidata.org went live on 30 October 2012, a growing community of around
3,000 active contributors started building its database of 'items' (e.g.
things, people or concepts), first by collecting topics that are already
the subject of Wikipedia articles in several languages. An item's central
page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links which
previously connected these articles about the same topic in different
Wikipedia versions. Wikidata's collection of these items now numbers over
10 million. The community also began to enrich Wikidata's database with
factual statements about these topics (data like the mayor of a city, the
ISBN of a book, the languages spoken in a country, etc.). This information
has now become available for use on Wikipedia itself.
"It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world's complex knowledge in a
structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it," said Wikidata
project director Denny Vrandečić. "Whether that's readers of Wikipedia who
are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this
data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge."
The next phase of Wikidata will allow for the automatic creation of lists
and charts based on the data in Wikidata. Wikimedia Deutschland will
continue to support the project with an engineering team that is dedicated
to Wikidata's second year of development and maintenance.
Wikidata is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and its fact database is
published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication [
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/] . Funding of Wikidata's
initial development was provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial
Intelligence [AI]², the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Google, Inc.
More information available here:
* Project homepage: https://www.wikidata.org/
* Example of an "item" page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q159
* Description of the project:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction
* How volunteers can get involved with Wikidata:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Contribute
* Some of the first applications demonstrating the potential of Wikidata:
** http://simia.net/treeoflife/ - a (still very incomplete) "tree of life"
drawn from relations among biological species in Wikidata's database
** "GeneaWiki" generates a graph showing a person's family relations as
recorded in Wikidata, example: Bach family
https://toolserver.org/~magnus/ts2/geneawiki/?q=Q1339
About the Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://blog.wikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix,
Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation
receive more than 517 million unique visitors per month, making them the
fifth-most popular web property worldwide (comScore, March 2013). Available
in 285 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 25 million articles
contributed by a global volunteer community of roughly 80,000 people. Based
in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited,
501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Wikimedia Foundation media contact
Jay Walsh
Communications
+1 415-839-6885 ext. 6609 (San Francisco)
jwalshwikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from the Wikimedia Foundation's press release distribution
list, reply with "unsubscribe" in the subject line.
**
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Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
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Dear all,
it has been mentioned several times that Meta is sometimes a messy
place, with information scattered everywhere around.
"It is on Meta" (TM) is one of our most used (and feared) terms.
Also Wikimedia Chapters often have a hard time to keep their info
updated, provide their reports at the right place. A "Chapters Portal"
which links all information has been mentioned.
Since Ziko asked to link strategic plans on Meta (yet another place to
keep updated) and we (WMAT) recently got harrased because we didn't
publish our office address on a Meta page we never heard of before
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_offices - anyone?), I decided
now to be bold and go ahead:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_Portal
I also linked this page now on {{Chapters association}} and
{{Chapters}}, so I hope people will find it and from there will find the
information they need.
Please, this is ongoing work - feel free to add more links, descriptions
etc. I tried to cluster the links as much as I could and provide a brief
description so people don't have to follow all the links to find what
they are looking for but it is not yet ready.
Regards,
Manuel
--
Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Lausanne, +41 (21) 34066-22 - www.wikimedia.ch
Aubrey,
2013/4/24 Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com>
> I feel that we could boost a lot the idea of a "family of projects", of an
> integrated, global, comprehensive approach to knowledge.
> Right now, the fact is that Wikipedia both attracts and cannibalizes users
> to/from sister projects, which are kinda invisible if you don't know they
> exist.
>
> Could we promote better our sister projects, making them more visible?
> For this purpose, user Micru and me just created a RfC for interproject
> links
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Interproject_links_int…
> (I
> invite you all to propose other solutions), but
> the underlying question is if we, as the Wikimedia community, are aware of
> the "theoretical" shift this means.
>
The strongest promotion -- and actually your proposal goes into this
direction -- would be to rebrand the sister projects, and then integrate
them tighter. A first step, and a necessity before any further integration
could happen, would be to give up the many different brands the Wikimedia
movement has, and huddle together under one flag.
As said, your proposal suggests that - it doesn't say "Wikiquote", it just
says "Quotes", etc. This basically means that it is not Wikiquote anymore,
but Wikipedia Quotes.
Without that, I am afraid, such a strong integration between the projects
always remains fragile and touchy, because the projects - if they are not
mere supporting projects like Commons or Wikidata anyway - might feel
offended and debranded every time they are integrated in such a way.
Having said that, this thread is half hijacked by "what are projects, how
important are they, what kind of support do they need" instead of
discussint the original topic.
Cheers,
Denny
--
Project director Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
Forwarding from a non subscriber.
Alex
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ad Huikeshoven <ad(a)wikimedia.nl>
Date: 2013/4/24
Subject: Question: How much does administration in Chapters cost the
Wikimedia movement?
To: wikimedia-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi Fae,
Great question Fae. For a fundraising charity a breakdown in program,
fundraising and administrative cost is natural, and in compliance with
accountanting standards. As far as I know WMF reports according to FAS 117,
see
http://www.fasb.org/cs/BlobServer?blobcol=urldata&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blob…
In the UK the standard would be SORP. Wikimedia Nederland adopted Richtlijn
650 which is mandatory for getting a certificate from CBF, see
http://www.rjnet.nl/Documents/Uitingen%202011/0000034578_RJ-Uiting%202011-1…
and http://www.cbf.nl/CBF-Beoordelingen/criteria-keur.php.
The accounting standards give guidelines about what can be allocated to
program costs, what should be included in fundraising cost and what are
administrative cost. FDC entities are required to produce audited financial
statements. The external auditor will review allocation of cost and
transparency of explanatory notes.
International charity guideline is to have
program:fundraising:administrative cost ratios according to 75:10:15,
noting the 10 and 15 are maximums. A source for these ratios is
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=48
Costs of evaluating impact of programs. Would you include those cost in
administrative costs? Could costs of impact evaluations be part of program
cost. If not, why not? If yes, what is your rationale?
Greetings and regards,
Ad Huikeshoven
Treasurer Wikimedia Nederland