>>> The people who are loudest in their demands for consensus
>>> do not represent the Wikimedia movement.
>>
>> The voices loudest for the WMF doing something against the
>> Trump administration are not representative of the Wikimedia
>> movement either....
>
> Is the Community Process Steering Committee currently
> prepared to "engage more 'quiet' members of our community"
> with a statistically robust snap survey to resolve this question?
Anyone can go to Recent Changes and send a SurveyMonkey link to the
most recent few hundred editors with contributions at least a year
old, to get an accurate answer.
Will a respected member of the community please do this? I would like
to know what the actual editing community thinks of the travel ban and
their idea of an appropriate response. I don't want to see community
governance by opt-in participation in obscure RFCs.
I would offer to do this myself, but I value keeping my real name
unassociated with my enwiki userid.
-Will
Hullo everyone.
I was asked by a volunteer for help getting stats on the gender gap in
content on a certain Wikipedia, and came up with simple Wikidata Query
Service[1] queries that pulled the total number of articles on a given
Wikipedia about men and about women, to calculate *the proportion of
articles about women out of all articles about humans*.
Then I was curious about how that wiki compared to other wikis, so I ran
the queries on a bunch of languages, and gathered the results into a table,
here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ijon/Content_gap
(please see the *caveat* there.)
I don't have time to fully write-up everything I find interesting in those
results, but I will quickly point out the following:
1. The Nepali statistic is simply astonishing! There must be a story
there. I'm keen on learning more about this, if anyone can shed light.
2. Evidently, ~13%-17% seems like a robust average of the proportion of
articles about women among all biographies.
3. among the top 10 largest wikis, Japanese is the least imbalanced. Good
job, Japanese Wikipedians! I wonder if you have a good sense of what
drives this relatively better balance. (my instinctive guess is pop culture
coverage.)
4. among the top 10 largest wikis, Russian is the most imbalanced.
5. I intend to re-generate these stats every two months or so, to
eventually have some sense of trends and changes.
6. Your efforts, particularly on small-to-medium wikis, can really make a
dent in these numbers! For example, it seems I am personally
responsible[2] for almost 1% of the coverage of women on Hebrew Wikipedia!
:)
7. I encourage you to share these numbers with your communities. Perhaps
you'd like to overtake the wiki just above yours? :)
8. I'm happy to add additional languages to the table, by request. Or you
can do it yourself, too. :)
A.
[1] https://query.wikidata.org/
[2] Yay #100wikidays :) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/100wikidays
--
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
https://donate.wikimedia.org
Hi all,
==Background==
In November 2016, I presented the result of a joint research that
helped us understand English Wikipedia readers better. (Presentation
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIaMuWA84bY ). I talked about how
we used English, Persian, and Spanish Wikipedia readers' inputs to
build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use-cases along several dimensions,
capturing users’ motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of
knowledge they are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of
interest prior to visiting Wikipedia. I also talked about the results
of the study we did to quantify the prevalence of these use-cases via
a large-scale user survey conducted on English Wikipedia. In that
study, we also matched survey responses to the respondents’ digital
traces in Wikipedia’s server logs which enabled us in discovering
behavioral patterns associated with specific use-cases. You can read
the full study at https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05379 .
==What do we want to do now?==
There are quite a few directions this research can continue on, and
the most immediate one is to understand whether the results that we
observe (in English Wikipeida) is robust across languages/cultures.
For this, we are going to repeat the study, but this time in more
languages. Here are the languages on our list: Arabic, Dutch, English,
Hindi, Japanese, Spanish (thanks to all the volunteers who have been
helping us translating all survey related documents to these
languages.:)
==What about your language?==
If your language is not one of the six languages above and you'd like
to learn about the readers of Wikipedia in it (in the specific ways
described above), please get back to me by Monday, April 24, AoE. I
cannot guarantee that we can run the study in your language, however,
I guarantee that we will give it a good try if you're interested. The
decision to include more languages will depend on: our capacity to do
the analysis, the speed at which your community can help us translate
the material to the language, the traffic to that language, a couple
of sentences on how you'd think the result can help your community,
and your willingness to help us document the results for your language
at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Be…
(Quite some work will need to go to have readable/usable
documentations available and we are too small to be able to guarantee
that on our own for many languages.)
Best,
Leila
--
Leila Zia
Senior Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello,
I am Adele Vrana, Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Foundation.
We have contacts at Amazon and will seek to clarify the questions raised on
this thread. I will make sure to circle back with you once we have an
update.
All the best,
Adele
On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Simon Poole <simon(a)poole.ch> wrote:
>
>
> Am 27.07.2017 um 18:37 schrieb Andreas Kolbe:
> >
> > Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowden ...
> >
> > I will not spend an hour trying to identify the exact article version
> that
> > matches Alexa's output in that video best, but it's safe to assume that
> > this inserted "Ed", too, came from Wikipedia, even though it had gone by
> > the time the video was uploaded to YouTube.
>
> The current (full) answer is
>
> 'Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowden, the American computer professional former
> CIA employee, and government contractor who leaked classified
> information from the U.S. National Security Agency in 2013.'
>
> Now obviously there could be -lots- going on behind the scenes, for
> example long term caching of search results (difficult to believe that
> Bing would allow that if it is really from them, but who knows) and so on.
>
> Simon
>
>
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--
*Adele Vrana*
*Strategic Partnerships - Global Reach*
Wikimedia Foundation
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6773
avrana(a)wikimedia.org
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Donate.
<https://donate.wikimedia.org/>*
Hi list members,
The list admins (hereafter 'we', being Austin, Asaf, Shani and I, your
humble narrator) regularly receive complaints about the frequent
posters on this list, as well as about the unpleasant atmosphere some
posters (some of them frequent) create.
It is natural that frequent posters will say specific things that more
frequently annoy other list members, but often the complaints are due
to the volume of messages rather than the content of the messages.
We are floating some suggestions aimed specifically at reducing the
volume, hopefully motivating frequent posters to self-moderate more,
but these proposed limits are actually intending to increasing the
quality of the discourse without heavy subjective moderation.
The first proposal impacts all posters to this list, and the last
three proposals are aimed at providing a more clear framework within
which criticism and whistle-blowing are permitted, but that critics
are prevented from drowning out other discussions. The bandwidth that
will be given to critics should be established in advance, reducing
need to use subjective moderation of the content when a limit to the
volume will often achieve the same result.
--
Proposal #1: Monthly 'soft quota' reduced from 30 to 15
The existing soft quota of 30 posts per person has practically never
been exceeded in the past year, and yet many list subscribers still
clearly feel that a few individuals overwhelm the list. This suggests
the current quota is too high.
A review of the stats at
https://stats.wikimedia.org/mail-lists/wikimedia-l.html show very few
people go over 15 in a month, and quite often the reason for people
exceeding 15 per month is because they are replying to other list
members who have already exceeded 15 per month, and sometimes they are
repeatedly directly or indirectly asking the person to stop repeating
themselves to allow some space for other list members also have their
opinion heard.
--
Proposal #2: Posts by globally banned people not permitted
As WMF-banned people are already banned from mailing lists, this
proposal is to apply the same ‘global’ approach to any people who have
been globally banned by the community according to the
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_bans policy.
This proposal does not prevent proxying, or canvassing, or “meat
puppetry” as defined by English Wikipedia policy. The list admins
would prefer that globally banned people communicate their grievances
via established members of our community who can guide them, rather
than the list admins initially guiding these globally banned people on
how to revise their posts so they are suitable for this audience, and
then required to block them when they do not follow advice. The role
of list moderators is clearer and simpler if we are only patrolling
the boundaries and not repeatedly personally engaged with helping
globally banned users.
--
Proposal #3: Identity of an account locked / blocked / banned by two
Wikimedia communities limited to five (5) posts per month
This proposal is intended to strike a balance between openness and
quality of discourse.
Banned people occasionally use the wikimedia-l mailing list as a
substitute of the meta Request for comment system, and banned people
also occasionally provide constructive criticisms and thought
provoking views. This proposal hopes to allow that to continue.
However people who have been banned on a few projects also use this
list as their “last stand”, having already exhausted the community
patience on the wikis. Sometimes the last stand is brief, but
occasionally a banned person is able to maintain sufficient decorum
that they are not moderated or banned from the list, and mailing list
readers need to suffer month after month of the banned person
dominating the mailing lists with time that they would previously have
spent editing on the wikis.
--
Proposal #4: Undisclosed alternative identities limited to five (5)
posts per month
Posting using fake identities allows people to shield their real life
*and* their Wikimedia editing 'account' from the repercussions of
their actions. This provision to allow fake identities on wikimedia-l
is necessary for whistle-blowing, and this mailing list has been used
for that purpose at important junctures in the history of the
Wikimedia movement.
However it is more frequently abused, especially by some ‘critics’ who
have used incessant hyperbole and snark and baiting to generally cause
stress to many readers. Sometimes this is also accompanied with many
list posts on various unrelated threads as the ‘critic’ believes their
criticism is so important that all other discussions about Wikimedia
should be diverted until their problem has been resolved to their
satisfaction, which is unlikely anyway.
Note this explicitly does not include anyone posting using their real
world identity, whether or not they have a Wikimedia account.
Where a poster does not clearly link to either Wikimedia account, or
does not appear to be using a real identity, and only after it is
exceeding the five post limit, the list admins will privately ask the
poster to either verify their identity or stop posting until the end
of the month. Very frequently a whistle-blower is able and even
prefers to be documenting the problem on meta, but needs the high
profile of this list to spark the discussion and draw attention to
their meta page.
---
The five post allowance for proposals 3 and 4 are to ensure that
anyone who has not been globally banned can post criticisms without
repercussions, which is vital for whistleblowing and transparency
generally, but they need to use their five posts per month wisely.
Once they have used their five posts, community members can reply with
less concern about being drawn into a direct argument with the poster.
It aims to force the poster to listen to others in the community once
their limit of five posts has been reached.
If there is support for these proposals, the list admins would not
immediately add moderation or bans, but would implement them as
needed, when we notice someone has exceeded one of these limits, and
we would make a note on a meta page where the community can review
these actions without allowing moderation meta-discussion to dominate
the discourse on the mailing list. Refinements to the list moderation
limits can then occur organically as we see how these rules plays out
in practise.
The RFC is at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/wikimedia-l-post-limits
However please also feel welcome to reply on-list if you wish to
express explicit support or opposition to any of the four proposals
above (please identify them by number, to ease counting). We will
count votes (here and on the meta RFC) after two weeks, and post a
more refined final version back to this mailing list.
The list administrators will default to *enacting* all four proposals,
but will refrain from enacting any proposal receiving more opposition
than support.
--
John Vandenberg
Those of you running Windows 10 will be familiar with the
regularly-changing "lockscreen" images showing things like beautiful
scenery and scenes from nature:
https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/find-windows-spotlight-lock-screen-images-wind…
The last one I just saw was labelled "copyright [photographer name]
and Shutterstock"
Is there someone at WMF, with contacts at Microsoft, who could
persuade them to use some featured images from Commons, with a small
piece of text explaining that people may upload their own images?
That would seem to be a simple way to do a massive piece of outreach,
to a new audience.
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
Greetings,
The certified results of the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
election are now available on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2017/Results
Congratulations to María Sefidari (User:Raystorm), Dariusz Jemielniak (User:pundit), and James Heilman (User:Doc James) for receiving the most community support. Subject to a standard background check, they will be appointed by the Board at their August meeting at Wikimania.
These results have been certified by the elections committee, the Wikimedia Foundation staff advisors to the committee, and the Board of Trustees.
There were 5,581 votes cast, with 5,120 of those being valid. The 461-vote difference comes from recast ballots, where eligible voters recast ballots to change their votes, and struck votes, of which there were 34. (Some of the recast votes were also struck.)
Additional information is available on the Wikimedia Blog: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/20/board-of-trustees-elections-2017/
More statistics on the elections and a post-mortem from the committee will be published in the coming days. In the meantime, we would appreciate your input—what went well for you in this election? What could we do better next time? These reports are crucial to helping future elections be even more successful, and we hope that you will offer your feedback and ideas: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2017/Post_mo…
The committee would like to thank everyone that participated in this year’s election for helping make it, again, one of the most diverse and representative in the movement’s history.
Sincerely,
– Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
_______________________________________________
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:
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In some cases we need to attribute content created on external sites, and
reused on Wikimedia-sites. In Norway Åndsverksloven says "The creator has
the right to be named according to good practice" ("Opphavsmannen har krav
på å bli navngitt slik som god skikk tilsier") and for our content that is
given by our license and our terms of use. That means by a link to the page
if possible, or if possible an entry in the history.
Now we use a template on the page itself, or similar, but it is not the
page on our site that the external entity has provided, they have provided
the content at their site. So we must say that in some consistent way.
I believe that the best option would be to have a log entry injected into
the history for our page that says "this revision comes in full or part
from that external source". Such an entry could be made by the editor or by
an administrator, but must be made as an extension of the revision. It
should also be possible to delete such an entry.
An alternative could be to make the summary editable, but the summary is
the description of the revision, not the source of the revision.
Does this make sense? Will it solve the problem, or is it just another
level that makes things more confusing?
John Erling Blad