Just a reminder this will be taking place in one hour!
On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 2:49 PM, Sarah R <srodlund(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this February 15, 2017 at
> 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.
>
> YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6smzMppb-I
>
> As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research.
> And, you can watch our past research showcases here
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#February_2017>
> .
>
> This month's presentations:
>
> Wikipedia and the Urban-Rural DivideBy *Isaac Johnson*Wikipedia articles
> about places, OpenStreetMap features, and other forms of peer-produced
> content have become critical sources of geographic knowledge for humans and
> intelligent technologies. We explore the effectiveness of the peer
> production model across the rural/urban divide, a divide that has been
> shown to be an important factor in many online social systems. We find that
> in Wikipedia (as well as OpenStreetMap), peer-produced content about rural
> areas is of systematically lower quality, less likely to have been produced
> by contributors who focus on the local area, and more likely to have been
> generated by automated software agents (i.e. “bots”). We continue to
> explore and codify the systemic challenges inherent to characterizing rural
> phenomena through peer production as well as discuss potential solutions.
>
>
> Wikipedia Navigation VectorsBy *Ellery Wulczyn
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ewulczyn_(WMF)>*In this project, we
> learned embeddings for Wikipedia articles and Wikidata
> <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page> items by applying
> Word2vec <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec> models to a corpus of
> reading sessions. Although Word2vec models were developed to learn word
> embeddings from a corpus of sentences, they can be applied to any kind of
> sequential data. The learned embeddings have the property that items with
> similar neighbors in the training corpus have similar representations (as
> measured by the cosine similarity
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity>, for example).
> Consequently, applying Wor2vec to reading sessions results in article
> embeddings, where articles that tend to be read in close succession have
> similar representations. Since people usually generate sequences of
> semantically related articles while reading, these embeddings also capture
> semantic similarity between articles.
>
> --
> Sarah R. Rodlund
> Senior Project Coordinator-Product & Technology, Wikimedia Foundation
> srodlund(a)wikimedia.org
>
--
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Project Coordinator-Product & Technology, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org
When a contentious question about the community's opinion is
preventing consideration of one or more proposals, what is the best
way forward, in general?
I am considering commissioning a survey of community opinion from a
neutral and respected third party who has published a well-received
survey of English wikipedians a few years ago.
The Foundation is not willing to help, in part because, "Reaching
consensus on what wording to use, the quality of the results, and how
to interpret the results will be very challenging and take significant
amount of time." I would argue that not doing such a survey, or
relying on opt-in methods like RFCs, are both worse than obtaining a
respected third party to perform a straw poll of recent editors with
an established history of contributions composed of a few unambiguous
opinion questions.
If I did this, would anyone object to a gofundme intended to recover
the cost of commissioning the survey on a voluntary basis?
Hi, y'all.
Is anybody traveling to the WMF offices in San Francisco next week?
It is that time of the month. Everybody is invited. Newcomers and old hands
welcome. Wi-Fi is available. Snacks and refreshments will be served,
including adult beverages.
Details and to RSVP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bay_Area_WikiSalon_February_2017
Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Time: 6-8:30 p.m.
See you soon!
Wayne Calhoon
Ben Creasy
and Stephen LaPorte
Hello all,
The Wikimedia Foundation StandingElections Committee is, from today
until February 17, seeking additional members to help facilitate
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustee and Funds Dissemination Committee
elections. This is a volunteer role and the appointment is for two
years. Please note that, while you are a member of the Committee, you
will not be able to run for any election overseen by the Committee –
this includes the upcoming 2017 Board and FDC elections and any other
election where the committee had already begun formal preparation before
your departure. You will also be restricted in your ability to publicly
advocate for community members running in those elections.
The Elections Committee has the following duties, as defined by a July
2015 Board Resolution
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Elections_Committee>:
*
The Committee shall recommend the dates, rules, and regulation of
the voting procedures for approval by the Board of Trustees pursuant
to Article IV, Section 3(C) in the Foundation Bylaws
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bylaws%7CWikimedia>.
*
The Committee shall recommend who is qualified to vote for the Board
of Trustees pursuant to Article IV, Section 3(C) in the Wikimedia
Foundation Bylaws <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bylaws>.
*
The Committee shall be responsible for preparing recommendations for
the dates, rules and regulation of the voting procedures for the
Funds Dissemination Committee
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Funds_Dissemination_Committee>,
and the Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson, consistent with
the charter of the Funds Dissemination Committee.
*
To the extent possible, the Committee shall consult with the wider
Wikimedia community in developing and revising election procedures
within the scope of this charter.
*
The Committee shall be a source of information to any member of the
Wikimedia community interested in the community selection processes
of the Wikimedia Foundation.
*
Under the direction of the Board Governance Committee, the Committee
shall take actions as necessary to execute the selection process for
the Board of Trustees, the Funds Dissemination Committee, and the
Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson.
*
As needed, the Committee may assist with other duties as may be
assigned by the Board or the Board Governance Committee.
In practice, a member's duties involve communicating with the global
committee who help to steward Board and FDC Elections. During an
election period – one of which is over the next three to four months –
this will be especially important as you help to run the upcoming
elections for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and the Funds
Dissemination Committee. During this period, members of the Elections
Committee meet for semi-regular meetings to discuss the current election.
However, this appointment is not just for election periods. Outside of
the election season you will lead community discussions on election
process and advise the Board of Trustees Governance Committee
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_Governance_Commi…>as
requested, such as in their search for appointed board members. The
expected time commitment can range from around 10 hours a week during an
election to one or two hours outside of the election period.
If you'd like to apply please send an email to
bec-newmembers(a)lists.wikimedia.org with:
*
Your username;
*
A brief summary of your Wikimedia related experience and any other
experience you think may be useful along with;
*
Why you're interested in the role and a quick statement saying you
understand the requirements.
Given the private information that committee members handle, candidates
must be 18 years of age or older, and be willing to sign the
confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Confidentiality_agreement_for_nonpublic_inf…>if
they haven't already. You can view information on how to sign this on
Meta-Wiki
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Confidentiality_agreement_for_nonpublic_inf…>.
As much as possible we want the committee to represent the diversity of
the Wikimedia movement so if you're interested please apply! If you know
of others, not on this list, who may want to apply please feel free to
forward.
KTC,
On behalf of the Elections Committee
--
Katie Chan
Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine
---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
Hi Everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this February 15, 2017 at
11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6smzMppb-I
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#February_2017>.
This month's presentations:
Wikipedia and the Urban-Rural DivideBy *Isaac Johnson*Wikipedia articles
about places, OpenStreetMap features, and other forms of peer-produced
content have become critical sources of geographic knowledge for humans and
intelligent technologies. We explore the effectiveness of the peer
production model across the rural/urban divide, a divide that has been
shown to be an important factor in many online social systems. We find that
in Wikipedia (as well as OpenStreetMap), peer-produced content about rural
areas is of systematically lower quality, less likely to have been produced
by contributors who focus on the local area, and more likely to have been
generated by automated software agents (i.e. “bots”). We continue to
explore and codify the systemic challenges inherent to characterizing rural
phenomena through peer production as well as discuss potential solutions.
Wikipedia Navigation VectorsBy *Ellery Wulczyn
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ewulczyn_(WMF)>*In this project, we
learned embeddings for Wikipedia articles and Wikidata
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page> items by applying
Word2vec <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec> models to a corpus of
reading sessions. Although Word2vec models were developed to learn word
embeddings from a corpus of sentences, they can be applied to any kind of
sequential data. The learned embeddings have the property that items with
similar neighbors in the training corpus have similar representations (as
measured by the cosine similarity
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity>, for example).
Consequently, applying Wor2vec to reading sessions results in article
embeddings, where articles that tend to be read in close succession have
similar representations. Since people usually generate sequences of
semantically related articles while reading, these embeddings also capture
semantic similarity between articles.
--
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Project Coordinator-Product & Technology, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org
On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 6:03 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What would your intended use of the results of such a survey be? How do you
> think the community, or any group of people, should interpret, value and
> react to the results?
I only intend that the results be published as soon as possible. As I
pointed out over a week ago, several different people on this have
made more than ten proposals, most of which can not reasonably be
acted on until we know the opinions of the volunteer community.
Without that information, none of the remaining proposals are likely
to go anywhere.
-Will
Hi all,
Just a reminder that scholarship applications for Wikimania 2017 which is
being held in Montréal, Canada on August 9–13, 2017 are now being accepted.
Applications are open until Monday, 20 February 2017 23:59 UTC.
Applicants will be able to apply for a partial or full scholarship. A full
scholarship will cover the cost of an individual's round-trip travel,
shared accommodation, and conference registration fees as arranged by the
Wikimedia Foundation. A partial scholarship will cover conference
registration fees and shared accommodation.
Applicants will be rated using a pre-determined selection process and
selection criteria established by the Scholarship Committee and the
Wikimedia Foundation, who will determine which applications are successful.
To learn more about Wikimania 2017 scholarships, please visit:
https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships
To apply for a scholarship, fill out the multi-language application form
on: https://scholarships.wikimedia.org/apply
It is highly recommended that applicants review all the material on the
Scholarships page and the associated FAQ ( https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships/FAQ ) before submitting an application.
If you have any questions, please contact:
<wikimania-scholarships at wikimedia.org
<wikimania-scholarships(a)wikimedia.org>>
or leave a message at:
https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scholarships
Please help us spread the word!
Best regards,
Adrian Raddatz
for the Scholarship Committee
https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarship_committee
All,
I'm very pleased to send out the Wikimania Montréal Call for Submissions,
which can be found in French here:
https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/fr
and in English here:
https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/en
On behalf of the Wikimania programme committee,
Phoebe Ayers
-----
Que vous soyez un membre de la communauté de l’un des projets Wikimédia
(tels que Wikipédia, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikimedia
Commons, Wiktionnaire, MediaWiki ou autres), un créateur de contenu libre
ou un consommateur, nous recevrons avec plaisir votre proposition pour une
session lors de Wikimania 2017.
*dates importantes*
Appel aux propositions ouvert : 2 février 2017
Date limite de soumission des présentations (conférence, panneau, table
ronde et atelier) : 30 mars 2017
Date limite de soumission des brefs exposés, affiches et réunions d’oiseaux
de la même plume : 15 mai 2017.
Notification d’acceptation des présentations : 20 avril 2017
Notification d’acceptation des brefs exposés, affiches et réunions
d’oiseaux de la même plume : 10 juin 2017
*Types de soumissions & Comment soumettre: *
https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/fr
*Des questions ?* Merci de contacter le Comité du programme par
wikimania-program(à)wikimedia.org.
----
Whether you are a community member of one of the Wikimedia projects (such
as Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikimedia Commons,
Wiktionary, MediaWiki or others), or a fellow open content creator or
consumer, we welcome your proposal for a session at Wikimania 2017.
*Important dates*
Call for proposals opens: February 2, 2017
Deadline for submitting presentation (lecture, panel, roundtable and
workshop) submissions: March 30, 2017
Deadline for submitting lightning talks, poster, and birds of a feather
submissions: May 15, 2017
Notification of acceptance for presentations: April 20, 2017
Notification of acceptance for lightning talks, poster and birds of a
feather submissions: June 10, 2017
*Submission types & how to submit:*
https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/en
*Any questions?* Please contact the Programme Committee at
wikimania-program at wikimedia.org
Hi everyone,
The Wikimedia Foundation Project Grants program launches its third open
call today, February 13. We will be accepting proposals through March 14
for new ideas to improve Wikimedia projects. <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project>
Funds are available to support individuals, groups and organizations to
implement new experiments and proven ideas, whether focused on building a
new tool or gadget, organizing a better process on your wiki, researching
an important issue, coordinating an editathon series or providing other
support for community-building.
Ideas from the current Inspire Campaign on developing outside knowledge
networks are very welcome. <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire>
We will be hosting weekly proposals clinics via Hangouts for real-time
discussions about the Project Grants Open Call. Links for Hangouts will be
posted by tomorrow here: <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project#Upcoming_events>
In addition, we have just launched our new tutorial videos to help guide
applicants through key portions of the proposal writing process: <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Tutorial>
We are excited to see your grant ideas that will support our community and
make an impact on the future of Wikimedia projects. Put your idea into
motion, and submit your proposal between February 13 and March 14! <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Apply>
Please feel free to get in touch with me (mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org) or Alex
Wang (awang(a)wikimedia.org) with questions about getting started with your
project!
Warm regards,
Marti
*Marti JohnsonProgram Officer*
*Individual Grants*
*Wikimedia Foundation <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home>*
+1 415-839-6885
Skype: Mjohnson_WMF
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share
<http://youtu.be/ci0Pihl2zXY> in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it
a reality!
Support Wikimedia <https://donate.wikimedia.org/>