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
Dear all,
It is an honor to announce that the Affiliations Committee has resolved
[1] recognizing the Wikimedia User Group China as a Wikimedia User
Group; their main focus areas are getting more chinese people know and
use Wikipedia, encouraging people to become contributors to the
different Wikimedia projects, and maintain the community healthy and
growing. Let's welcome the newest member of the family of affiliates
-and the fourth from the Sinosphere!
Regards,
Carlos
1:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/Wikimedi…
--
"*Jülüjain wane mmakat* ein kapülain tü alijunakalirua jee wayuukanairua
junain ekerolaa alümüin supüshuwayale etijaanaka. Ayatashi waya junain."
Carlos M. Colina
Vicepresidente, A.C. Wikimedia Venezuela | RIF J-40129321-2 |
www.wikimedia.org.ve <http://wikimedia.org.ve>
Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Affiliations Committee
Phone: +972-52-4869915
Twitter: @maor_x
Hi all,
This is a personal note to clarify a some questions that recently came up,
specifically in the context of my role as the incoming ED.
My partner Wil and I are partners in our private lives. We have always both
been extremely independent, and we respect that in each other. That said we
have different roles: I am the Executive Director with responsibilities
towards the Foundation and the movement, and he is an independent community
member with his own voice.
I make my decisions using my own professional judgement in conjunction with
input from the community and staff. I don’t consult Wil on these matters,
ask him to do anything on my behalf or monitor his engagements with the
community. When I speak here, it is in my capacity as an ED.
Wil, on the other hand, has a very strong personal interest in the
community and agreat deal of curiosity about how the Wikimedia
projectswork. It is very important to him that he remains an
independent individual
able to speak with his own voice and ask his own questions. He does not
take direction from me. He will not work for the WMF or engage with the WMF
employees.
I hope this addresses some of the questions and draws distinction between
my role as ED and Wil’s participation as an independent member. If you have
any questions for Wil you can reach him directly. If you have any questions
for me or the WMF, you can get a hold of me by email or on my talk page.
Thanks,
Lila
Hi folks,
We are the Finance Fellows, a multicultural team consisting of 4 young
professionals. We are happy to introduce a 6-month movement-wide project
that focuses on the consistency of how we operate, which is explained
further in this announcement.
*But here's some information about us*:
Arda [User:Melmas_(WMF)] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Melmas_(WMF)> is
from Turkey. He holds a BA in Economics.
Lene [User:Lgillis_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Lgillis_(WMF)> is from Belgium. She
holds a Master's degree in Applied Economics and a Master's degree in
Business Communication.
Seyi [User:Oolukoya_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Oolukoya_(WMF)> is from Nigeria. She
holds a Master's in International Business and a BSc in Economics.
Walter [User:Wagsegura_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wagsegura_(WMF)> is from Nicaragua.
He holds a BA in Applied Economics.
*About the project "Movement-wide financial report"*
Driven by the Wikimedia Foundation's guiding principles of transparency and
accountability, our goal is to gather data and develop systematic metrics
in order to provide a better understanding of financial statements. The aim
is to help make financial data and statements more consistent and
comparable across all Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic Organizations, and the
Wikimedia Foundation, to the benefit of the whole movement.
The idea of this project comes from the WMF Board of Trustee's Audit
Committee and is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. An initial quantitative
analysis of Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic Organizations
<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Chapters_in_Numbers>
demonstrated
at Wikimania 2013 by Michal Buczyński (User:Aegis Maelstrom)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aegis_Maelstrom>, highlighted the
importance of meaningful, obtainable and unified data.
The Finance Fellows have been formed by WMF to spearhead this project. The
intention of this project is to enable Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic
Organizations to benchmark activities and costs in a consistent way. We
will begin by gathering comparable quantitative financial data about
Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic Organizations. Our findings will later be
released movement-wide, on Meta-Wiki.
Please note that this is not an audit process. We are simply collecting the
data and developing global metrics. The metric is an objective measurement
that will enable data to be consistent, meaningful and comparable among the
Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic Organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation.
We will build on existing data sets and reach out to Chapters and Thematic
Organizations if further information is required. After processing the
gathered information, we will confirm the data with each organization.
In the long run, we envision that this project could be replicated
annually. In this attempt to enable Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic
Organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation to help make the movement's
financial data more consistent, we rely on the data provided by the
organizations. We believe that there is enough data available to make a new
attempt on capturing the movement's finances as a whole.
A meta page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement-wide_Financial_Report>
was
created for the project, in order to make the information accessible to
everyone and create a space for discussion and/or suggestions. We strongly
encourage you to share with us what types of additional information is
desired.
And of course: This is all an experiment! If it does not work, we will try
to apply a modified 'agile' process by iterating, repeating, and trying
again based on the feedback we are getting. If this does not seem right, or
if it appears we are missing something obvious, please let us know!
Thank you,
WMF Finance Fellows (User:WMF Finance Fellows)
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WMF_Finance_Fellows>
Hi folks,
This is a response to Martin's note here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-August/073936.html
.. and also a more general update on the next steps regarding disputes
about deployments. As you may have seen, Lila has also posted an
update to her talk page, here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LilaTretikov#Working_Together
I want to use this opportunity to respond to Martin's and other
people's criticisms, and to talk about next steps from WMF’s
perspective following discussions with Lila and the team. I’m also
sending a copy of this note to all the stewards, to better involve
them in the process going forward.
I am -- genuinely -- sorry that this escalation occurred. We would
have preferred to avoid it.
I would like to recap how we find ourselves in this situation: As
early as July, we stated that the Wikimedia Foundation reserves the
right to determine the final configuration of the MediaViewer feature,
and we explicitly included MediaWiki: namespace hacks in that
statement. [1] When an admin implemented a hack to disable
MediaViewer, another local admin reverted the edit. The original admin
reinstated it. We then reverted it with a clear warning that we may
limit editability of the page. [2] The original admin reinstated the
hack. This is when we protected the page.
Because all admins have equal access to the MediaWiki: namespace,
short of desysopping, there are few mechanisms to actually prevent
edit wars about the user experience for millions of readers.
Desysopping actions could have gotten just as messy -- and we felt
that waiting for a "better hack" to come along (the likeliest eventual
outcome of doing nothing) or disabling the feature ourselves would not
be any better, either from a process or outcome standpoint.
Our processes clearly need to be improved to avoid these situations in
the future. We recognize that simply rejecting a community request
rather than resolving a conflict together is not the right answer.
We’ve been listening to feedback, and we’ve come to the following
conclusions:
- We intend to undertake a review of our present processes immediately
and propose a new approach that allows for feedback at more critical
and relevant junctures in the next 90 days. This will be a transparent
process that includes your voices.
- As the WMF, we need to improve the process for managing changes that
impact all users. That includes the MediaWiki: namespace. For WMF to
fulfill its role of leading consistent improvements to the user
experience across Wikimedia projects, we need to be able to review
code and manage deployments. This can be done in partnership with
trusted volunteers, but WMF needs to be able to make an ultimate
determination after receiving community feedback regarding production
changes that impact all users.
- We are prepared to unprotect MediaWiki:Common.js on German Wikipedia
and enter constructive, open-ended conversations about the way
forward, provided we can mutually agree to do so on the basis of the
current consistent configuration -- for now. We would like to request
a moratorium on any attempts to disable the feature during this
conflict resolution process. The goal would be to make a final,
cross-wiki determination regarding this specific feature, in
partnership with the community, within at most 90 days.
With regard to the German Wikipedia situation, we’d like to know if
stewards want to at all be involved in this process: In a situation
like this, it can be helpful to have a third party support the
conversation. Stewards are accountable to "valid community consensus
within the bounds of the Foundation's goals" [3], which seems to be
precisely the intersection of concerns at issue here. We would like to
suggest an IRC meeting with stewards ASAP to talk about the specific
question of stewards’ involvement, if any. If stewards prefer not to
be involved, we understand, but it's probably a good idea to have a
sync-up conversation regardless.
I hope we can move forward in good faith from here, and find better
ways to work together. As Lila has expressed, we believe there is a
need for a clear understanding of our role. It is as follows:
Managing software development, site configuration and deployment is a
core WMF responsibility. The community leads in the development of
content; the Wikimedia Foundation leads in the development of
technology.
Because these processes are deeply interdependent, we need to develop
better protocols for timely feedback and resolution of disagreements.
At the same time Lila’s and the Board’s statements make it very clear
that the WMF will not accept RfCs or votes as the sole determining
factor in global software deployments.
This means that technology and UX changes should not be decided by
vote or poll and then disabled at-will: where we disagree, we need to
talk to each other (and yes, that means a more judicious application
of RESOLVED WONTFIX on our end, as well!). We need to ensure a
process where the community voice is heard earlier at critical
junctions in the product development. All of this is consistent with
the principle of "shared power" articulated in the Guiding Principles
[4] approved by the Board of Trustees.
At the same time, as noted above and earlier, the superprotection
feature should be replaced with a better mechanism for code review and
deployment in the MediaWiki: namespace. This is discussed in [5] and
ideas and suggestions are welcome. Let’s be upfront about control
structures for production changes to avoid misunderstandings and
ambiguity in the future.
We are exploring options on how to improve dispute resolution
mechanisms -- whether it’s e.g. a standing working group or a better
protocol for responding to RfCs and engaging in discussions. We've
started a brainstorming page, here, which we hope will usefully inform
the process of conflict resolution regarding German Wikipedia, as
well, so we can arrive at a more concrete conflict resolution process
soon. Your thoughts/suggestions are welcome, so we can (in NPOV style)
look at different possibilities (e.g. workgroups, committees, votes,
surveys) that have been discussed in the past:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_(Product)/Process_ideas
We’re absolutely not saying that WMF simply wants to be able to
enforce its decisions: we completely understand there need to be
mechanisms for the community to influence decisions and outcomes at
all stages of the development and release of software. We need to
arrive at this process together.
Again, we are sorry that this escalation occurred - and we hope we can
move forward constructively from here.
Sincerely,
Erik
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_Diskussion:Meinungsbil…
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki_Diskussion:Common.js&d…
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards_policy
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Guiding_Principles#Sha…
[5] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69445
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Hey,
Don't worry, we indeed have a lot of time till the next elections, but as
this issue had been raised during the last elections - and we decided that
we can't change the rules few weeks before the elections, now I want to
raise the discussion enough time before.
According to the current rules [1], in order to influence and vote in the
elections, you need to be active editor, developer or WMF staff/contractor.
Last year this issue concern some of us. The foundation is not small
organizations as it been before, and by comparison, the number of people
participating in the elections every year is not high.
For example, last elections there were 1809 valid votes. By comparison, the
number of WMF staff this days is 218, what makes there voting power 12% of
the total voters last year. This consider to be a great amount of power
when we are talking about elections (In the last election you would have
around 650 votes in order to be elected...)
Wikimedia thematic organizations staff and contractors for example don't
have the same privilege to vote only because they are employees of the
movement, only if they are editors as well. The question - what make the
WMF staff different, and if this is not a little bit problematic that the
staff have such power to decide on their direct board, but in general - the
board of the whole movement.
Do we need to give the same privilege also to all the staff in our
movement?
Should we limited the elections to staff (both WMF and chapters) that are
active editors or developers as additional to their work in the movement?
I'll be happy to hear yours input.
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/Vote_Qu…
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2013/Results
*Regards,Itzik Edri*
Chairperson, Wikimedia Israel
+972-(0)-54-5878078 | http://www.wikimedia.org.il
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment!
Re: http://twkozlowski.net/the-pot-and-the-kettle-the-wikimedia-way/
Two questions:
1. Where can I find a response from either the WMF board or WMF
funding/finance to the criticisms of a lack of transparency or the
apparent failure of the project to deliver value for the donor's money
as raised in this blog post?
2. Where can I read an officially recognized report for the outcomes
of this project in terms of value for Wikimedia projects? Obviously we
do not want to rely on second-hand analysis when reports to the WMF
are a requirement for such projects.
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Really. Who thought it was a good idea to MAKE THE BANNER FOLLOW YOU
DOWN THE PAGE?
There must be an identifiable person who actually said "yes, this is a
good decision, I shall make this decision."
- d.