Hi all,
I've received an email from the organizers of the 3rd Global Congress on IP
& OpenAir Conference on Innovation & IP in Africa (
http://www.openair.org.za/capetown2013) which will take place from 9 to 13
December, in Cape Town, calling for participation from Wikimedia movement.
I've attended the Global Congress on IP in the the past, when I was leading
researches on the subject in Brazil, and they were an opportunity to engage
with other researchers, know better the global picture and problems of IP
and discuss global initiatives and threats among both global north and
global south perspectives.
Would there be anyone interested in participating of this meeting this year?
I strongly recommend people engaged in IP and international treaties
debates join them.
Perhaps someone from South Africa?
Best regards
Oona
--
Oona Castro
Consultant for the Brazilian Catalyst Program at Wikimedia Foundation
+ 55 21 81812505
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 <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate>
Hi community,
the latest issue of the Tech News summary has been published and is now
being delivered to its subscribers across the wikis:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2013/31
The newsletter aims to help Wikimedians stay informed about recent and
future technical changes that are likely to impact their work. Thanks to
our amazing community of volunteers translators, the current issue is at
least partially available in 10 languages: for the first time ever, it
will be also delivered to recipients in Russian (ru) and Swedish (sv).
Please note that you can also subscribe to get the newsletter directly
on your talk page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery/Targets/Tech_ambass…
Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns. I
appreciate your help, feedback and involvement.
Tomasz
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Subject: was Re: About the concentration of resources in SF (it was:
"Communication plans for community engagement")
I hope Erik doesn't mind if I jump in here and give my opinion. I'm
also cc'ing Markus from WCA to highlight that I'd love to hear his
opinion here.
Chapters are especially well-placed to do Wikimedia-related development
because the people of chapters already know a lot about what their
communities need. For instance, if the people who edit WMF sites for
your language have to do a lot of tedious work to maintain the main
page, you could translate and insert the template that helps automate
that, which some volunteers wrote for Tamil Wikipedia:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2013-May/000263.h…
If the Wikipedia in your language doesn't have the "Comments in Local
Time" gadget that "changes UTC-based times and dates, such as those used
in signatures, to be relative to local time", you can localise and add
this gadget to your wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comments_in_Local_Time
Chapters who have never taken on any MediaWiki-related software projects
before should probably take a look through
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects .
The projects listed are good for students and first time contributors,
and the MediaWiki development community is ready to give guidance -- for
each Featured Project Idea you see a mentor who's agreed to shepherd new
contributors who want to work on it. You are invited to work on any of
these items. The estimate of how long it would take for you to complete
one of these items strongly depends on how much skill the developer
already has in PHP/JavaScript/jQuery/CSS, responding to code review,
asking for help when stuck, and learning from the answers. But we
expect that a college-level student with some experience in PHP could
potentially do any of the Featured Project Ideas as a three-month project.
Also on that page, "Raw projects" are interesting ideas that have been
proposed but might lack definition, consensus or mentors.
And I see Erik has replied in another message so I should read that
before I continue. :)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Sun, 28 Jul 2013 08:17:57 +0200, Michał Buczyński wrote:
> Hi,
>
> +1 to this question.
>
> If we learn that there are items where we are invited to the MediaWiki and some estimates how many e.g. developerdays we would need to finance so we know it is possible.
>
> However, we should mind that most of the chapters are not really development houses and we are lacking experience in this area.
>
> michał.
>
> 28 lipca 2013 5:41 Craig Franklin <cfranklin(a)halonetwork.net> napisał(a):
>
>
>> >
>>> > > Hi Erik (and whomever from WMDE),
>> >
>> > For the benefit of chapters that are interested in this space, can you
>> > offer any examples of projects that are of an appropriate size and type for
>> > a chapter to take on? I think that most chapters* would be willing to help
>> > out in the software development space if we got a bit of direction on how
>> > we could be the most useful.
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > Craig Franklin
>> >
>> > * Keeping in mind that my chapter probably wouldn't have the capacity to
>> > start anything in this space for at least another twelve months.
>> >
>> >
>> > On 27 July 2013 09:57, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> >
>>> > > On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 2:39 PM, rupert THURNER
>>> > > <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > >
>>>> > > > If WMF is serious about letting development activities grow in other
>>>> > > > countries this might be taken into account in FDCs allocation policy.
>>> > >
>>> > > For my part, I'm happy to offer feedback to the FDC on plans related
>>> > > to the development of engineering capacity in FDC-funded
>>> > > organizations. I'm sure Wikimedia Germany, too, would be happy to
>>> > > share its experiences growing the Wikidata development team. I'd love
>>> > > to find ways to bootstrap more engineering capacity across the
>>> > > movement, as so many of our shared challenges have a software
>>> > > engineering component. If any folks on-list want to touch base on
>>> > > these questions at Wikimania, drop me a note. :)
>>> > >
>>> > > Erik
>>> > >
>>> > > --
>>> > > Erik Möller
>>> > > VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 11:30 PM, C. Scott Ananian
<cananian(a)wikimedia.org>wrote:
> This statement seems rather defeatist to me. Step one of a machine
> translation effort should be to provide tools to annotate parallel texts in
> the various wikis, and to edit and maintain their parallelism.
Scott, "edit and maintain" parallelism sounds wonderful on paper, until you
want to implement it and then you realize that you have to freeze changes
both in the source text and in the target language for it to happen, which
is, IMHO against the very nature of wikis.
Translate:Extension already does that in a way. I see it useful only for
texts acting as a central hub for translations, like official
communication. If that were to happen for all kind of content you would
have to sacrifice the plurality of letting each wiki to do their own
version.
> Once this
> is done, you have a substantial parallel corpora, which is then suitable to
> grow the set of translated articles. That is, minority languages ought to
> be accounted for by progressively expanding the number of translated
> articles in their encyclopedia, as we do now. As this is done, machine
> translation incrementally improves.
The most popular statistical-based machine translation system has created
its engine using texts extracted from *the whole internet*, it requires
huge processing power, and that without mentioning the amount of resources
that went into research and development. And having all those resources
they managed to create a system that sort of works.
Wikipedia doesn't have enough amount of text nor resources to follow that
route, and the target number of languages is even higher.
Of course statistical-based approaches should also be used as well (point 8
of the proposed workflow), however more as a supporting technology rather
than the main one.
> If there is not enough of an editor
> community to translate articles, I don't see how you will succeed in the
> much more technically-demanding tasks of creating rules for a rule-based
> translation system. The beauty of the statistical approach is that little
> special ability is needed.
One single researcher can create working transfer rules for a language pair
in 3 months or less if there is previous work (see these GsoC [1], [2],
[3]). Whichever problem the translation has, it can be understood and
corrected. With statistics, you rely on bulk numbers and on the hope that
you have enough coverage, and that makes improving its defects even harder.
It is true that writing transfer rules is technically demanding, and so it
is writing mediawiki software, which keeps being developed anyways. After
seeing how their system works, I think there is room for simplifying
transfer rules (first storing them as mediawiki templates, then as linked
data, then having a user interface). That could lower the entry barrier for
linguists and translators alike, while enabling the triangulation of rules
between pairs that have a common one.
As said before, there is no single tool that can do everything, it is the
combination of them what will bring the best results. The good thing is
that there is no need to "marry" a technology, several can be developed in
parallel and broght to a point of convergence where they work together for
optimal results.
I appreciate that you took time to read the proposal :)
Thanks,
David
[1]
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2013/akindalki/3001
[2]
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2013/jcentelles/20001
[3]
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2013/jonasfromseier/5…
MZMcBride wrote:
>... the number of non-deleted revisions per day for the
> English Wikipedia. The results are here:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/565971356
So, that looks terrible: http://i.imgur.com/Z9lYCWj.png
It looks terrible in the same way that every other graph of active
users and several other related measures look like.
But it isn't. It doesn't account for the power law of practice which
causes everyone who has ever edited Wikipedia to get better at it with
time. And since so many IP editors are obviously returning, that means
a lot more than under the false but very common assumption that every
IP editor is new.
Here's what really matters, articlespace size: http://i.imgur.com/TfaD99V.png
The size of the article text in bytes has been marching on linearly
since the beginning of Wikipedia, with extremely low variation, just
like the short popular vital articles and every other measure of
quality content.
There is no legitimate basis to worry about anything until the linear
trend of the total article bytes breaks out of its 12 year linear
trend.
(If you multiply columns 'E' and 'I' from
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm the database size
shows a cusp at around 2006, corresponding to the growth modes, but
two separate linear trends fit both modes far better than any growth
model fits the entire curve.)
A few weeks ago a car salesman came to us and said: 'You will get a new car.' We were able to do some test drives with it before it got delivered and noticed that the car still needed doors and a steering wheel, but the idea was great! We reported to the manufacturers that some essential things weren't ready, like the doors, safety bumbers and steering wheel and the manufacturers said that they will make sure that that will be ready when the car is delivered. They also said that in a month time the car will be delivered, and we said - seeing the car - that the timeline is too short in regards with the things that needed repair.
In the past week we got the notice that the car will be delivered this week. Again we did a full check, and while a lot of things were changed, still our reported essential things weren't ready. When we asked about this, we got a car salesman who tried to sell the car even harder and pushed as much as he could to sell the car. We all together discussed the situation and came to the conclusion that the car would damage the people and damage the road, and that local people afterwards can solve the problems what the car causes. The onliest thing we good do, for the sake of the people and the roads, is to refuse to receive the car. When that came clear to car manufacturer, they started to threaten us, that we must use it, no matter if it caused many damage or not.
The car salesman told us in the mean while that the delivery is delayed for two days and that the car for 5 days only should be used by adult users and later children may also use it. He also told us that the main reason to deliver the car too early was because of that the manufacturer made for himself a too short time schedule to get it finished, it hired its personnel for a too short time and that it shortly after would go produce something else, instead of delivering a fully functional car.
When other people heard about the this story and the worse policies of the manufacturer, they got angry as they think that the safety and health of the local people and environment are more important than the goal of the manufacturer, while the manufacturer does not respect that.
---------------------------------
This story is in fact the story what happened on the Dutch Wikipedia in the past weeks, the car is the visual editor, the manufacturer is WMF, the salesman is the liaisons hired by WMF. In the past days the Dutch community held a voting that very clear explained what the situation is, what the problems are and asked the community if they considered the issues of the visual editor as a problem that needs to be fixed first or that the visual editor should be launched already.
About 80% of the users is for delaying the visual editor as this software is **not** ready and causes too many problems in articles. Among the 20% of users were also users who dislike the visual editor completely and do not like it to be deployed at all.
In general the Dutch community likes the idea of getting an visual editor as they like the idea that (new) inexperienced users will be able to edit the articles, but at the moment it is too soon as the software is not ready.
Some reactions I have seen (roughly translated):
* Seems to buggy. The WMF has product managers... If managers can be paid, why not pay programmers to do their work properly?
* A worse product from the developers. If they do something, they must do that in a good way.
* Not yet stable.
* Multiple times crashed with the visual editor.
* Switch off until all problems have been solved. Wikipedia has no need for its own OV-chipkaart (Dutch card to travel with public transport with so many bugs with the launch): something that is finished half, not been tested sufficiently and still pushed through your throat. Njet !
* First the teething troubles out
* It's a very good alpha, but it should never have been launched outside of a test deployment. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Alpha )
Conclusion: if software is launched for everyone, communities want a finished product. If not it is respect-less for local communities who daily do the actual work: writing, updating and improving articles. Communities want respect and taken serious. The current communication wasn't that, it was mainly one way communication as WMF doesn't listed to our concerns. At least since 2007 there are complaints about the communication of WMF, sure you are trying to improve, but hiring liaisons but not listing yourselves to what communities have to say is still a problem.
This is not about small things, it is about damaging articles due software that doesn't understand all wikisyntax. We have these problems black on white but we are ignored.
We care very much for the articles in Wikipedia, we explained again our problems today to WMF, and instead of being listened to us we got threatened.
Is that the way how the Wikimedia Foundation works? Forcing things whatever it takes?
Romaine
Denny Vrandečić wrote:
>...
> Is the graph <http://i.imgur.com/TfaD99V.png> based on actual data?
Yes, the precise sizes for the
dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/YYYYMMDD/enwiki-YYYYMMDD-pages-articles-multistr…
files are:
2012-07-02 9524994664
2012-08-02 9824345489
2012-09-02 9929910893
2012-10-01 10015876877
2012-11-01 10124555675
2012-12-01 10220499338
2013-01-02 10315766966
2013-02-04 10425240648
2013-03-04 10430830645
2013-04-03 10433658645
2013-05-03 10525475953
2013-06-04 10617572833
2013-07-08 10721955835
The byte count approximations from multiplying columns 'E' and 'I'
from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm are at the
end of this message. Again, that data best fits two linear trends,
with a cusp around 2006.
> our content is increasing... but the number of active
> contributors is not.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that as contributors become more
experienced, they choose to do most of their work logged out. What are
the advantages of using a registered account? Theoretically you can
prove that you made contributions, but as far as I know only one
person so far has ever obtained professional credit for their
contributions (there is a recent thread on wiki-research-l about
this.) What are the disadvantages of using a registered account to
edit? Anyone who opposes an edit politically is likely to examine the
entirety of the editor's contribution history and will all too often
stalk, punish by reverting old edits, or dispute the contributor's
work. Anonymous IP editors rarely face such time wasting scrutiny and
hassles. For anyone whose primary goal is to build an encyclopedia as
opposed to socializing, amassing administrative power, or obtaining a
job with the Foundation, the choice is obvious. Those who wish their
contributions to be remembered for posterity are more likely to become
serial puppeteers than registered editors, unless they want to spend
most of their time being hassled in article space.
John Vandenberg wrote:
>...
> I would love to see stats about quality rather than quantity....
It would be a mistake to rely on volunteer or Foundation assessments
of quality, because the likelihood that they would be biased is far to
great. We should rely only on third party assessments of article
quality, such as those in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Assessments
nearly all of which show continuous ongoing improvement.
Automatic measures of quality proposed so far have not really
impressed me, but I think http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.2517.pdf has huge
potential and I am confident that the ideas it promotes will be easily
automated by bots after it is proven through peer review.
> Does anyone have stats for the number of blocked users per month
Yes, but it's almost meaningless because the vast majority of blocks
are for persistent vandalism, often at schools or libraries where we
really have no way to determine whether the editors involved ever
returned to do productive work.
---
Products of columns 'E' and 'I' from
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm :
Jan-10 11330500000
Dec-09 11262300000
Nov-09 11206500000
Oct-09 10788000000
Sep-09 10725000000
Aug-09 10653000000
Jul-09 10263100000
Jun-09 10213800000
May-09 9791600000
Apr-09 9718800000
Mar-09 9328500000
Feb-09 9301500000
Jan-09 9250200000
Dec-08 8855600000
Nov-08 8806200000
Oct-08 8415000000
Sep-08 8375000000
Aug-08 8317500000
Jul-08 7960800000
Jun-08 7941600000
May-08 7557800000
Apr-08 7498000000
Mar-08 7112600000
Feb-08 7068600000
Jan-08 6738900000
Dec-07 6699000000
Nov-07 6318000000
Oct-07 6256000000
Sep-07 5859600000
Aug-07 5823500000
Jul-07 5499000000
Jun-07 5181600000
May-07 5140800000
Apr-07 4793600000
Mar-07 4724800000
Feb-07 4662400000
Jan-07 4320000000
Dec-06 4257000000
Nov-06 3917200000
Oct-06 3871000000
Sep-06 3551600000
Aug-06 3510000000
Jul-06 3195600000
Jun-06 2896300000
May-06 2856700000
Apr-06 2557000000
Mar-06 2476177000
Feb-06 2312907000
Jan-06 2170049000
Dec-05 2013600000
Nov-05 1869076000
Oct-05 1746960000
Sep-05 1627864000
Aug-05 1526784000
Jul-05 1407976000
Jun-05 1300334000
May-05 1209984000
Apr-05 1002925000
Mar-05 924630000
Feb-05 872320000
Jan-05 838272000
Dec-04 861724000
Nov-04 806195000
Oct-04 743904000
Sep-04 689924000
Aug-04 644502000
Jul-04 595665000
Jun-04 552900000
May-04 511038000
Apr-04 476750000
Mar-04 440286000
Feb-04 403010000
Jan-04 375536000
Dec-03 350336000
Nov-03 329219000
Oct-03 310616000
Sep-03 294689000
Aug-03 278630000
Jul-03 261555000
Jun-03 244454000
May-03 230328000
Apr-03 217200000
Mar-03 204630000
Feb-03 193475000
Jan-03 182936000
Dec-02 171010000
Nov-02 162150000
Oct-02 150480000
Sep-02 80733000
Aug-02 66990000
Jul-02 59755000
Jun-02 55420000
May-02 49259000
Apr-02 47790000
Mar-02 44968000
Feb-02 39350000
Jan-02 30582000
Dec-01 26832000
Nov-01 21994000
Oct-01 17244000
Sep-01 10982000
Aug-01 7100000
Jul-01 4186000
Jun-01 3240000
May-01 2373600
Apr-01 1295800
Mar-01 596904
Feb-01 186636
Jan-01 33800
Steven Walling wrote:
>... We know, for instance, that as the summer progresses,
> editing activity drops and climbs again in the fall....
How do we know that? According to
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm database edits
increased from June to July and fell from July to September in the past two
years.
I'm sure things will improve as the visual editor is debugged, but anyone
who thinks it is an improvement at present needs a wider perspective.
Dario,
Do you intend to measure the total number of edits per day prior to
and after the visual editor roll-out?
It appears that you have not analyzed or presented any data associated
with those statistics.
For example, why are you not providing a daily version of the hourly
graph at http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/graphs/enwiki_ve_hourly_by_ui
?
In my opinion the liaisons failed very much with the VE, as they act like a car salesman who gives much the impression that communication is only in one direction: the community. They said they send our feedback to WMF but we haven't seen any results at all from that. After a month still all feedback was untouched, nothing was changed on all subjects we have given feedback on. Even critical bugs. I sure believe that the liaisons do their work, and that the problem lies in WMF itself, but still the liaisons became very much annoying. It is like they got a training to talk everything right or minimize the serious critic. I really hate such behaviour, to me and the rest of the community it is a signal that we aren't taken seriously. I consider the liaison involvement as a failure, certainly not recommended to repeat that in future this way.
Besides that, with previous software changes we have had technical ambassadors who maintained mostly the feedback between developers and the communities and that worked well so far I can see. I seriously do not understand why they ignored them with the VE and instead hired liaisons which behaved more like staff of WMF with the agenda that they must sell the car, than neutral people who are involved in the local community. That is not the way how communities should be approached.
Perhaps the gap between communities and WMF, already there in 2007, still hasn't become much closer since. I think the problem lies in the idea that the WMF is thinking top-down, while the communities work bottom-up (they do the actual daily work at the end). Also I notice for years that there is also a gap between North America and the rest of the world in culture, or at least certainly between North America and Europe. Both are part of the western culture, but still the way Americans deal with things is not the way Europeans would deal with. WMF seems to be too much America based and doesn't internal reflect enough the worldwide movement the whole Wikimedia community is. As I see a clear gap in culture between North America (including WMF style) and Europe, I guess such gap is also there between North America and other parts of the world, but I do not have a clear view on those areas.
Romaine
Katherine Casey fluffernutter.wiki at gmail.com
Tue Jul 23 14:03:50 UTC 2013
(...)
> *Or, to tl;dr this whole thing*: Liaisons could be SO MUCH MORE USEFUL than
> they are right now, and that would go a long way toward improving these PR
> disasters. But that would require the cooperation of every aspect of the
> Foundation's staff.
>
> -Fluffernutter
