Wikimedia-l February 2018

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

99 participants
68 discussions

New Affiliations Committee appointments
by Kirill Lokshin 07 Mar '18

07 Mar '18

Hi everyone, I'm pleased to announce that Derick Ndimnain Alangi, Biplab Anand, and Sami Mlouhi have appointed to the Affiliations Committee as new members. In addition, two incumbent members -- Maor Malul and Emna Mizouni -- have been re-appointed for an additional term. Please join me in welcoming our new and returning members. The committee extends its profound gratitude to Galileo Vidoni, who is stepping down after having served six years on the committee, and to everyone who participated in the recent selection process, whether by standing as a candidate or by providing feedback on the applications. Regards, Kirill Lokshin Chair, Affiliations Committee

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About Facebook Linked in some of Wikimedia projects
by Minata Hatsune 07 Mar '18

07 Mar '18

Hello, I have a question: is it legal and valid for Wikipedia communities put promotion links to their Facebook pages on public space as Main Page or Sitenotice? I see many of Wikimedia projects doing this, as Indonesia Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, etc... Their Facebooks page also have blue checkmark of Facebook as verified. All what I concern is: Facebook is a commerical website, we put a link as "official" to them, will it same with Wikipedia biased for Facebook and violated the NPOV policy? And in finally: is it OK if other projects can do that? Vietnamese Wikipedia also have a discussion about sitenotice promotion to Facebook at < https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Th%E1%BA%A3o_lu%E1%BA%ADn/Qu%E1%BA%… >. If this is OK, I think we have no reason to reject it. Thank you! Trần Nguyễn Minh Huy Vietnamese Wikimedian

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Paid translation
by John Erling Blad 06 Mar '18

06 Mar '18

This discussion is going to be fun! =D A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles, the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small. What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand articles from the expanded list[2]. Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1 for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks good translation tools. I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help. Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not have to be full translations of the source article. A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias? [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_hav…

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knowing English is a privilege (was Re: Paid translation)
by James Salsman 03 Mar '18

03 Mar '18

> building an authoritative dictionary is considerably > harder than building a (de facto) authoritative encyclopedia. What reason is there to think that? My any measure of editor hours, or the amount of money it would take to replicate the effort, or the maintenance load going forward, I'm sure that even a three shelf foot encyclopedia is harder than a 100,000 word dictionary. > We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles. What is the difference between delivering the text of an encyclopedia article and teaching it? Encyclopedias are not written to be accompanied by a lecturer, tutor, or teacher. We even teach how to write them, to students, in schools, and the students often if not almost always get academic credit for their work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_program/Educators Knowing any language is a privilege, and suggesting that there is any reason to narrow the Foundation's focus away from language instruction seems completely absurd to me. > Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki articles. Why? We are already the best at that. Why not make the wiki articles in Wiktionary better by not just playing audio recordings of words, which volunteers (not the Foundation) already provide, but meeting that initiative by recording utterances and predicting whether they are intelligible pronunciations, and doing the same with recording gadgets in Wikipedia's pronunciation articles? http://j.mp/irslides I'm serious that I think the Foundation should hire all my Google Summer of Code students to support doing that, because it will take about that many people to set it up so that volunteers can complete the work for all languages, not just English. There is no reason that the Foundation can't both pay to translate Wikipedia articles and pay to up Wiktionary's language instruction game at the same time. That would have made sense ten years ago, and the budget is much larger now. We are at a juncture in aligning our long term strategy to the mission, so I hope both projects get funded. If it has to be proposed budget-neutral to be compelling, then get rid of the mobile app and mobile web versions except on platforms where they are genuinely easier for editors, not just readers, to use. Best regards, Jim

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¿Qué te hace feliz esta semana? / What's making you happy this week? (Week of 25 February 2018)
by Pine W 01 Mar '18

01 Mar '18

(Hello, I am trying something new this week by writing in Spanish. I am hoping to encourage people to contribute to this conversation in their preferred languages.) Hola, estoy intentando algo nuevo esta semana escribiendo en español. Espero animar a las personas a contribuir a esta conversación en sus idiomas preferidos. Algo que me hace feliz esta semana es la disponibilidad de "diffs visuales" como se describe en el Blog de la Fundación Wikimedia: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/02/20/visual-diffs/. ¿Qué te hace feliz esta semana? Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

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New Stewards elected
by Mardetanha 01 Mar '18

01 Mar '18

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Who if not Wikipedia
by Gerard Meijssen 28 Feb '18

28 Feb '18

Hoi, There is a lot of data available to us that is not presented as information in any and all languages. Our mission is one where we share in the sum of all knowledge. There is however a big difference between knowledge and information. We do not provide knowledge, we provide information. When the information is in a digistable format, people understand the information and it is integrated in their knowledge. It takes knowledge to provide information. It is needed by the authors of Wikipedia articles, it is needed by the people adding data to any and all of the Wikimedia projects. When we have enough data in Wikidata to provide information, we could provide this information when this data is sought. This award [1] does not have an article in any language, it is a prestigeous award that I added because I learned that [2] received the award in 2017. There is a very moving Youtube clip that explains what this organisation does [3]. When you check the links you may be informed in any language, the youtube clip is English only. When we consider what we do, we overestimate what we achieve with Wikipedia. We could inform our audience much better when we start providing information. We can generate text in any language if we choose to. We would probably do a better job when we write the prose but we fail completely when we do not provide the information. In answer to the question, who if not Wikipedia.. We could provide generated information even text when there is nothing available. In this way we will provide a better service in any language. We could do this within any Wikipedia .. who / where if not Wikipedia? Thanks, GerardM [1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q50227997 [2] https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=49330 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDL1ADvimxg

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Global preferences available for testing
by Keegan Peterzell 27 Feb '18

27 Feb '18

Greetings, Global Preferences [0], a result of the 2016 Community Wishlist campaign [1], are ready for testing before being released to the wikis. To test them out and leave feedback, login or register on a beta wiki such as the English Wikipedia [2], German Wiktionary [3] or Hebrew Wikipedia [4], then visit your global preferences [5]. After that you can wander around the beta wikis, trying things out. If you find bugs or anything else of note to comment on, you can leave feedback on the Help discussion page [6]. Thanks, see you on the wikis. 0. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:GlobalPreferences 1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Categories/M… 2. https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org 3. https://de.wiktionary.beta.wmflabs.org 4. https://he.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org 5. Special:GlobalPreferences (for example https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:GlobalPreferences ) 6. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help_talk:Extension:GlobalPreferences -- Keegan Peterzell Technical Collaboration Specialist Wikimedia Foundation

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What's making you happy this week? (Week of 18 February 2018)
by Pine W 27 Feb '18

27 Feb '18

What's making me happy this week is Isarra's persistence in working on the Timeless skin. Timeless is based on Winter. [0] [1] For anyone who would like to try Timeless, it's available in Preferences under Appearance / Skin. What's making you happy this week? Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Timeless [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Winter

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Creative Commons Global Summit: April 13-15 in Toronto
by Jennie Rose Halperin 26 Feb '18

26 Feb '18

Hi Wikimedians! Hoping to see you there in April! Thanks for your attention. Jennie -------- The Creative Commons annual Global Summit is from April 13-15 in Toronto. Planned Wikimedia-related events include a keynote by Katherine Maher and several discussions and sessions on how Wikimedia and Creative Commons works together. We'd love to have a strong Wikimedia presence at the summit – join us in April! Register here: https://summit.creativec ommons.org/register2018/ The annual Global Summit brings together an international community of leading technologists, legal experts, academics, activists, and community members who work to promote the power of open and future of the Commons worldwide. The Summit provides leaders, stakeholders, and the broader open web community an opportunity to drive the open movement forward, cross-pollinate ideas and expertise, and expand our impact. Our 2018 Global Summit will take place in Toronto, Canada from April 13-15, 2018, at the Delta Toronto Hotel. See you there!

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Wikimedia-l February 2018