I expect to see an increase in these once the idea spreads
Rui
------------------------------
> *From:* Jourdan Hilaire
> *Sent:* Thursday, May 29, 2014 1:00 AM
> *To:* Jourdan Hilaire
> *Subject:* Grants
>
> I, Liliane Bettencourt Authenticate this email of 3.5M USD grant to you, please view my link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliane_Bettencourt and Email me on Bettencourtliliane88(a)rogers.com for more info
>
>
>
>
--
_________________________
Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Work Consultant
Bridge to Angola - Angola Liaison Consultant
Mobile Number in South Africa +27 74 425 4186
Número de Telemóvel na África do Sul +27 74 425 4186
_______________
Hi all,
Our usual Signpost publisher and Editor-in-Chief, The_ed17, has very limited internet access. Tony and I have finished content for the May 28th Signpost but we can't work out the technical details of the publication process. We need a password for the automated publishing process that we don't have, and we're trying to get it. I have been working through some of the (complicated and poorly documented) Signpost templates and LivingBot for manual publication but there are still parts that I can't work out. Thanks for your patience until we normalize our publication process.
If you go to [1] you will see that the banner says May 21st but we have updated content for the week of May 28th. Please enjoy the content, and apologies again for the delays and technical difficulties.
Pine
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost
> (non-CS) engineer friends ... upon hitting that edit button,
> basically went "Gak! No way!"
Wikitext is simpler than what phototypesetter operators in the
1960s-1990s had to deal with, and they had a much better gender
balance.
> Wikitext resitricts editing to pretty much only "computer science
> professionals, highly computer-literate professionals (which excludes
> most of Academia -- have you ever done IT support for a university?),
> and westerners with enough leisure time to learn it the hard way".
There are abundant counter-examples.
>... selects strongly against women.
Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding
wikitext than men?
The journal article by Hasty et al published on May 1st 2014 basically took
ten Wikipedia articles and ten “researchers” (either medical students or
residents). Each Wikipedia article was then assessed by two of these
researchers to try to determine how many statements of fact they contained.
The first issue was that the number of statements of fact each reviewer
found sometimes differed by nearly 100%. They than took these individual
facts and the “researchers” compared them with the peer reviewed literature
as found on pubmed or the medical website Uptodate. They did not check to
see if the sources Wikipedia was using were high quality or were accurately
reflected. Additionally medical students and residents are hardly experts
in medical research.
No errors in Wikipedia are mentioned directly in the original journal
article. When I spoke with the lead author he declined to release the
underlying data for us at Wikipedia to correct the “errors” they had found
stating that he may 1) wish to publish more on the topic and 2) wished to
protect the researchers. So much for independent verifiability in science.
Hasty did make some claims to the popular press about errors on Wikipedia.
Some of the facts he mentioned however accurately reflected some of the
best available peer reviewed sources. For example he claimed that blood
pressure should only be checked twice to make the diagnosis of hypertension
and that when we state three times we are wrong. However look at the
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (previous known as the
National Institute of Clinical Health / NICE) on page 7 in this document
http://www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/pdf/CG18background.pdf It is thus a little
ironic that the Telegraph, a UK paper, repeated this incorrect statement
and the BBC covered the story so uncritically.
Wikipedia has strong recommendations for what counts as a suitable source.
We recommend the use of secondary sources published in well respected
journals from the last 3-5 years, position statements of national or
internationally recognized medical bodies or major textbooks. Is Wikipedia
a perfect source? No, but it is just as good as many and better than most
other sources out there. Or else why would the world be using it? Hasty's
work did not have a comparison group. Basically he invented a new method to
test the quality of medical content and then only applied this new method
to one source, Wikipedia. Without a comparator this single data point is
meaningless. I am curious what he would have found if he would have applied
this to a NICE guideline or emedicine?
We recently surveyed our top contributors and asked about their
backgrounds. What we found was that 52% have either a masters, PhD, or MD.
Another 33% have a BSc. About half are health care providers. 82% are male,
9% are female and 9% classified themselves as other or would rather not
say. This is very similar to results published by Nusa Faric in her
master's thesis. Additionally we are working with a number of organizations
including: the National Institute of Health, the Cochrane collaboration,
and the UCSF college of medicine among others to improve Wikipedia’s health
care content.
What Hasty did show was 1) the peer reviewed literature does not agree with
itself (ie different peer reviewed sources come to different conclusions
which is no surprise to anyone that has read much of it) 2) the peer review
process is sometimes flawed as he was able to publish a "peer reviewed"
article whose data does not support its conclusions. As someone who has
read a lot of the peer reviewed literature this is also not surprising.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
> Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2014 06:39:38 +0100
> From: Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first
> three weeks]
> Message-ID:
> <CAH7nnD3meyLLRFd+ssS-trSajXRreq0uiDOm07M_9nx-oiqyTw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 1 June 2014 04:26, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> >>... selects strongly against women.
> >
> > Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding
> > wikitext than men?
>
> (Probably drifting to "Increase participation by women")
>
> As someone who has run editathons on women focused topics, I found
> this an odd comment that does not match anecdotal experience. New
> women users seem little different to men in the issues that arise, and
> though I have found myself apologising for the slightly odd syntax,
> given the standard crib-sheet most users get on with basic article
> creation quite happily.
>
> There are far more commonly raised issues such as the complex issues
> associated with image upload (copyright!), or the conceptual
> difficulty of "namespaces" which mean that some webpages behave
> differently to others. None is something that appears to "select
> strongly against women", though the encyclopedia's way of defining
> notability can make it harder to create articles about pre-1970s
> professional women, purely because sources from earlier periods tend
> to be biased towards men.
>
> If there are surveys that wiki-syntax is more of a barrier for women
> than men (after discounting out other factors), perhaps someone could
> provide a link?
>
> Fae
FWIW, I think that Lila said at the Zurich hackathon that she had found research indicating that fewer women click the "edit" button than men do. That sounds like a phenomenon that could use some research and experimentation. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014-05-10_Wikimedia_Hackathon_Lila…
Also, the Individual Engagement Grants Committee and WMF have funded a research project in this IEG round focused on women's participation. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Women_and_Wikipedia
Pine
Hi Rodrigo,
Thank you for these questions. There have been questions about the India
program as well, so these questions about Brazil can be added to the list of
issues for WMF to investigate.
I am not personally familiar with either of the Brazil or India catalyst programs,
but I suggest that you contact Asaf or Anasuya if you don't get a response
on this list or on the discussion page within two days.
Thank you again for bringing up these questions.
Pine