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
Being put together by Eliezer Yudkowsky of LessWrong. Content is
cc-by-sa 3.0, don't know about the software.
https://arbital.com/p/arbital_ambitions/
Rather than the "encyclopedia" approach, it tries to be more
pedagogical, teaching the reader at their level.
Analysis from a sometime Yudkowsky critic on Tumblr:
http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/140995096534/a-year-ago-i-remember-be…
(there's a pile more comments linked from the notes on that post,
mostly from quasi-fans; I have an acerbic comment in there, but you
should look at the site yourself first.)
No idea if this will go anywhere, but might be of interest; new
approaches generally are. They started in December, first publicised
it a week ago and have been scaling up. First day it collapsed due to
load from a Facebook post announcement ... so maybe hold off before
announcing it everywhere :-)
- d.
Hello, everyone.
(this is an announcement in my capacity as a volunteer.)
Inspired by a lightning talk at the recent CEE Meeting[1] by our colleague
Lars Aronsson, I made a little command-line tool to automate batch
recording of pronunciations of words by native speakers, for uploading to
Commons and integration into Wiktionary etc. It is called *pronuncify*, is
written in Ruby and uses the sox(1) tool, and should work on any modern
Linux (and possibly OS X) machine. It is available here[2], with
instructions.
I was then asked about a Windows version, and agreed to attempt one. This
version is called *pronuncify.net <http://pronuncify.net>*, and is a .NET
gooey GUI version of the same tool, with slightly different functions. It
is available here[3], with instructions.
Both tools require word-list files in plaintext, with one word (or phrase)
per line. Both tools name the files according to the standard established
in [[commons:Category:Pronunciation]], and convert them to Ogg Vorbis for
you, so they are ready to upload.
In the future, I may add OAuth-based direct uploading to Commons. If you
run into difficulties, please file issues on GitHub, for the appropriate
tool. Feedback is welcome.
A.
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2015/Programme/Lightn…
[2] https://github.com/abartov/pronuncify
[3] https://github.com/abartov/Pronuncify.net
--
Asaf Bartov
Seconding Lodewijk here. I can already count at least 5 phrases or
statements that David Emrany has said which made me cringe and wonder why
hasn't this been blocked/moderated already?
Hostile, accusatory, and vulgar behavior degrades this entire forum (beyond
its already damaged capacity for inclusion of multiple voices).
Please do something.
Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi)
Hi everyone,
The important part of this email is this link:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Status_repor…
This is the second Community Wishlist Survey status report. In November and
December, active contributors to Wikimedia projects proposed, discussed and
voted on the features and fixes that they most want to see. The Wikimedia
Foundation Community Tech team has been tasked with working on
these. Additionally, Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes team has been
working on wishes from the German-speaking community. There's overlap
between the two wishlists, and the teams are collaborating on various
wishes, so this report includes progress made by both teams as well as
great work being done by volunteer developers and other WMF staff.
So far, we (in the broad sense) have added support for:
*) Migrating dead external links to archives (but there's more work to be
done!)
*) Pageview stats
*) Global notifications
*) A category watchlist
We're currently working on:
*) Improving the plagiarism detection bot
*) Improving the diff compare screen
*) Numerical sorting in categories
*) The possibility to add an expiry date to watchlist items
*) A revision slider to help editors navigate through diff pages
For more information on these projects as well as upcoming tasks, see the
full status report on Meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Status_repor…
We're looking forward to talking and working with you as we go along.
Thanks,
//Johan Jönsson
User:Johan (WMF)
--
Question 1: Would anyone care if we kill the "loginCTA" campaign, which
tracks when people use the link at the bottom of Special:UserLogin to get
to the account creation page?
Question 2: Would anyone care if we remove the extension entirely from
Wikimedia wikis? Wikiapiary seems to show only one user outside of
Wikimedia.
Background: The extension needs a rewrite for AuthManager, and in
particular the "loginCTA" campaign will be a bit of a pain to keep working.
If someone is making use of the extension that's fine, but if not we may as
well not continue to spend development resources on it.
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
I am pleased to announce the launch of the third Inspire Campaign for
IdeaLab, focused on addressing harassment of Wikimedia project contributors:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire>
Harassment diminishes the experience of contributing and participation for
a substantial number of individuals, even those who simply witness it.
Current methods of dealing with harassment are considered unacceptable as
they often do not lead to productive outcomes.[1]
During the month-long campaign, you are invited to submit & review ideas on
how to better address harassment. Consider joining a team to help make an
idea happen. Ideas can be submitted in any language, and focus on
research, building tools or software, outreach efforts, or something
completely new. Grants are available from the Wikimedia Foundation to fund
projects that are eligible for financial support.[2] Ideas focused on
changes to community policies and guidelines are also welcome. Google
Hangout sessions are also scheduled in June if you’d like to discuss your
idea or have questions about WMF grants.[3]
Questions about the campaign can be directed at the Inspire talk page.[4]
An FAQ page about the campaign is also available.[5]
If you want to help make your projects safer for everyone to participate
in, I encourage you to participate in this Inspire Campaign. I believe we
can work together to address this difficult and important issue.
With thanks,
Chris "Jethro" Schilling
I JethroBT (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:I_JethroBT_(WMF)>
Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home>
[1] <
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harassment_Survey_2015_-_Results_Re…
>
[2] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start>
[3] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Events>
[4] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/Inspire>
[5] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire/FAQ>
Dear Wikimedia colleagues,
The deadline for submitting a Letter of Intent for 2016-2017 Round 1 of the
FDC process is 1 July.
*Who should submit a letter of intent?*
Organizations that plan to apply for funding in Round 1 of the FDC process
should submit their Letters of Intent by 1 July. Proposal forms for Round 1
will be due by 1 October 2016 and most Round 1 grants will begin 1 January
2017. If you think you will apply for funding in this round, it's a good
idea to submit a letter of intent.
*How to submit a letter of intent.*
Organizations may submit their Letters of Intent by creating a proposal hub
page here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG. Please complete this
step of creating a proposal hub page, from which you can access a button to
create your letter of intent, rather than copy-pasting a letter of intent
template from previous years.
*Why submit a letter of intent for the FDC process?*
You must complete this step to submit a proposal in the next round, for
funding during the 2017 calendar year, so that your organization will be
evaluated for eligibility to submit a proposal. If you're not sure whether
or not you want to apply, it's a good idea to contact FDC staff at <
fdcsupport(a)wikimedia.org> right away, so you can be sure and understand
your status before the Letter of Intent deadline. In the letter of intent,
you will write the amount of funding you expect to apply for, but you can
change this at any time before your proposal form is submitted on 1 October.
Learn more at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Information:
*Letters of Intent due: 1 July 2016
*Eligibility confirmed: 15 September 2016
*Proposal forms due: 1 October 2016
*Community review: 1 October - 30 October 2016
*FDC recommendation: by 30 November 2016
*Board decision: by 1 January 2017
*Grants begin: 1 January 2017 - 1 February 2017
Best regards from FDC staff!
--
Winifred Olliff
Senior Program Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
Hoi,
For a bit of background form 990 is probably something everybody knows
about as it is financial and important and that is why we mention this..
For all of you who do not know, we have a FAQ where you may find what is
relevant about all this.
Thanks,
GerardM
PS sorry Greg for pulling your leg. :)
On 18 May 2016 at 20:55, Gregory Varnum <gvarnum(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Sent on behalf of Wikimedia Foundation's Finance Team:
>
> The Wikimedia Foundation Form 990 for FY 2014 - 2015 has been posted on the
> Wikimedia Foundation Wiki's Financial Reports page:
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports
>
> A list of answers to frequently asked questions about this form has also
> been posted on the same page.
>
> Please contact Jaime Villagomez or Tony Le with any questions:
> jvillagomez(a)wikimedia.org or tle(a)wikimedia.org
>
> Thank you,
> Finance Team
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> _______________________________________________
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>
>