Wikimedia-l May 2018

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

96 participants
62 discussions

Most wanted articles across languages
by Amir E. Aharoni 31 May '18

31 May '18

Hi! There's a little research project I've been working on in the last few weeks: What are the articles that people are most often looking for in their language, and *cannot* find? I was doing this by looking at the logs of searches in the language search box in the interlanguage links panel and counting the articles on which searching for a language didn't yield any result. This can be useful to the editors in different languages for understanding which articles are in demand and should be created. This may also be useful for considering how to reorganize existing articles. Of course, actually doing this is up to the editing communities in each language; I'm just trying to show where exactly does this happen. My first attempt at producing a report about it can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Most_wanted_articles_across_languages This is my first attempt to make a public version of this report, so you may find some issues there, for example contradicting or missing data. Also, the tables could probably be more nicely designed. Bug reports, suggestions for improvement, and all other feedback is obviously welcome. However, I believe this is good enough for taking a first look and reaching some conclusions. The two immediate findings that I can see are that the most notable articles that people cannot find fall into the following categories: * Topics that are popular in the news: "Avengers: Infinity War", "General Data Protection Regulation", "Avicii". In particular, I should note that topics that are featured in Google Doodles [1] come up often: "Georges Méliès", "Mahadevi Varma", etc. * Topics that are covered in another language, but cannot be found because of different organization of information. This often happens with articles where there are cultural differences between languages, for example "Football" in the English Wikipedia refers to several different games (I'd guess that many people around the world are interested in "Association Football"). This also often happens with articles about Biology and species: "Homo Sapiens", "Blueberry", etc.; these are organized differently in different Wikipedias. [1] https://www.google.com/doodles/ -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2 2

Invitation to the Wikimedia Foundation May 2018 Metrics & Activities Meeting: Thursday, May 31, 18:00 UTC
by Lena Traer 31 May '18

31 May '18

Hello everyone, The next Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting will take place on Thursday, May 31, 2018 at 6:00 PM UTC (11 AM PDT). The IRC channel is #wikimedia-office on https://webchat.freenode.net, and the meeting will be broadcast as a live YouTube stream.[1] We’ll post the video recording publicly after the meeting. During the May 2018 meeting, we will hear about languages across the Wikimedia projects. Meeting agenda: * Welcome and introduction * Movement update * The Compact Language Links project * Executive update * Questions and discussion * Wikilove Please review the meeting's Meta-Wiki page for further information about the meeting and how to participate: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_metrics_and_activities… You can also sign up to participate in future meetings on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_metrics_and_activities… June 2018 Metrics & Activities meeting will take place on Thursday, 28 June, starting at 6:00 PM UTC (11 AM Pacific Daylight Time). Thank you, Lena [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOaiU-v7PbE Lena Traer Project Coordinator // Communications // Advancement Wikimedia Foundation

3 3

New Free Research Accounts via the Wikipedia Library Card
by Jake Orlowitz 30 May '18

30 May '18

Hi! The Wikipedia Library has new, free research donations available through the Library Card platform: <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/> NEW * Rock's Backpages (Music articles and interviews from the 1950s onwards):< https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/69/> * Invaluable (Database of more than 50 million auctions and over 500,000 artists): <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/68/> * Termsoup (Translation tool): <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/70/> EXPANSIONS * Fold3 - Available content has more than doubled, now including new military collections from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand: <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/43/> * Oxford University Press - The Scholarship collection now includes Electronic Enlightenment (http://www.e-enlightenment.com/): <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/52/> * Alexander Street Press - Women and Social Movements Library ( https://alexanderstreet.com/products/women-and-social-movements-library) now available: <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/60/> * Cambridge University Press - Orlando Collection ( http://orlando.cambridge.org/) now available: <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/58/> Many other partnerships are available through the Wikipedia Library Card Platform: <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/partners/> Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikimedia projects: sign up today! --The Wikipedia Library Team wikipedialibrary(a)wikimedia.org <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library>

2 1

Recognition of the Igbo Wikimedians User Group
by Kirill Lokshin 30 May '18

30 May '18

Hi everyone! I'm very happy to announce that the Affiliations Committee has recognized [1] the Igbo Wikimedians User Group [2] as a Wikimedia User Group. The group aims to support the Igbo Wikimedia community and to encourage people that are literate in Igbo language at any level to become involved in the Wikimedia movement. Please join me in congratulating the members of this new user group! Regards, Kirill Lokshin Chair, Affiliations Committee [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/ Resolutions/Recognition_Igbo_Wikimedians_User_Group [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Igbo_Wikimedians_User_Group

6 5

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimania-l] Update on Wikimania '18
by Gheorghe Zugravu 29 May '18

29 May '18

On 29.05.2018 20:33, praveenp wrote: > I haven't seen any attempt to share the knowledge and wisdom acquired > from Wikimania to community through mailing list or wiki. Users > including me generally feel that community is being mocked on. Hi to all, without being too original here, and following praveenp comments - would be good to encourage recipients of WMF scholarship to organize some type of Wikimania follow-up activities back in their groups or chapters. I do believe that most of them are doing it anyway without any requirements from WMF, but if majority would do it - we could have something as a ”permanent Wikimania” unfolding globally for a couple of months after the official Wikimania. regards, /gheorghe > Hi, > > As I have said last year, this is not a complaint that I didn't get > selected. This is not personal. This is about same persons receiving > Wikimania scholarship year after year repeatedly. I am just using > familiar user names from a familiar community, who got many repeated > scholarships. > > Even after I argued that none of these 'permanent scholarship > receivers' sharing anything to community, I haven't seen any attempt > to share the knowledge and wisdom acquired from Wikimania to community > through mailing list or wiki. Users including me generally feel that > community is being mocked on. > > I tried to keep myself away from local discussion about this, but > injustice is so clear. And nobody is ready to discuss it openly, most > probably because of the 'incompetency shaming' in almost all replies. > > ~user:Praveenp > > > On Tuesday 29 May 2018 11:19 PM, Lodewijk wrote: > Given the context of the previous email you sent, I am assuming this > is more a complaint that you didn't get selected than that the other > two got selected. > > Similarly to the previous time you tried to have this discussion - I > feel uncomfortable to make this about individuals. > > Is there a way to give rejected applicants more feedback on which > factors play a main role, so that they can learn from it, especially > if there is something they could improve in their application. I would > add two sidenotes here though: it should only be provided on request > (no need to rub people's noses into something unnecessarily) and it > seems only viable at a level that can be easily extracted from the > process (high level). > > Perhaps someone who knows the scholarship committee's work intimately > could comment. > > Best, > Lodewijk > > On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 10:21 AM, praveenp <me.praveen(a)gmail.com > <mailto:me.praveen@gmail.com>> wrote: > > Hi, > > Congratulation to all the selection committee who break the > tradition[1] of selecting one of the Malayalam communities two > permanent Wikimania attendees, by selecting both of them. > > Congratulation to User:Netha Hussain & User:viswaprabha also. > > [1] "Granting Scholarship to same persons every year" thread, > https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimania-l/2017-May/008026.html > <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimania-l/2017-May/008026.html> > > ~User:Praveenp > > > On Tuesday 15 May 2018 11:19 PM, Ellie Young wrote: > * > > All, > > > Here's an update on various activities pertaining to the > upcomingWikimania '18 which is being held July 18-22 in Cape Town, > South Africa. > > WMF Scholarship Program: 135 people were offered and subsequently > accepteda full or partial scholarship to attend. The awardees are > listed by usernames and the list is posted > here:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:TPS/Wikimania_scholars<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:TPS/Wikimania_scholars>Submissions: > The program committee has just finished its review anddeliberations. > Rejections and acceptance emails have gone out in the past week. > > 95% of the accepted submissions are listed at: > > > https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/Program > <https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/Program> > > > Plenaries and other sessions will be listed soon and a scheduled > program in June. > > Registration and accommodation information is now up for everyone > at:https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration<https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration>https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/Accommodation<https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Accommodation>If > you are a scholarship or other WMF funded attendee (staff, > contractor,board, etc), please wait until you hear from the WMF with > your registrationand accommodation instructions.If you have any > questions about the conference, please emailwikimania-info at > wikimedia.org<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l>Please > spread the word!!!!On behalf of the Wikimania '18 Organizing Team > > Ellie YoungEvents Manager, Wikimedia > Foundation<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l> > > *

1 0

Does anyone know what wikimedia france are up to with the Request Network ?
by geni 29 May '18

29 May '18

According to their twitter feed they have announced a partnership with something called the "Request Network‏" for cryptocurrency donations. Also this article here https://www.wikimedia.fr/2018/04/27/wikimedia-france-annonce-partenariat-fo… Ok. I don't approve but I'm not french so not its not an area where I can reasonably expect anyone to pay any attention to my opinions. What concerns me is that they have retweeted something claiming the partnership is with the wikimedia foundation rather than just wikimedia france: https://twitter.com/wikimedia_fr?lang=en Is some form of clarification possible? -- geni

13 20

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Category: French Jews on en.wp / GPDR
by sashi 28 May '18

28 May '18

Hello again, Thanks for your input on this question! I'll add a few clarifications here to respond to points raised in the discussion so far. (As I'm subscribed in digest mode, I'll have to cut & paste.) ------- Nathan commented: "I'm not seeing an argument here for why Wikimedia should adhere to this law, if it is correctly stated by the OP. If France passed a law banning Internet-published photos of living people, how would we approach that law? If Germany barred publishing the place of birth, date of birth or religious preference of public figures? If the United States banned publishing the name of individuals accused of mass murder?" ------- Since I quoted it the law of 6 January 1978 in French, I'm pretty sure I got it right. ^^ On the other hand, I didn't translate or interpret the law in the context of current jurisprudence, so yes, maybe some more should be said... It is legal in France to write an article about a notable person and mention their religious affiliation if they volunteer that information. What is *not* legal is to extract that information about them and add it to a database which lists Catholics -- as was done during the Vichy regime with punchcards. How exactly were Jewish people rounded up and sent off to concentration camps? (How did prefects go about locating Freemasons during the war?). While there was certainly some collaboration with the National Statistics Service (SNS) established during the Occupation, the most recent research suggests that this collaboration was not as significant as was once commonly assumed. The 1978 law was written before this research. The fact that -- today on en.wp -- these religious categories are being overwhelmingly applied to Jews (and to a lesser degree to Freemasons) is certainly striking. (cf. the 862 members of Category:French Jews & the 21 members of the Category:French Christians). Regarding the hypothetical situations you evoke (the first of which, of course, being particularly relevant since people in France do have a right to refuse the publication of their image (*unless* they are for some reason newsworthy))... I imagine that they will have to be dealt with on a case by case basis until national laws have been superseded by the new-wikiwiki-order of supranational arbitration. ------- Todd commented: "We should no more follow French censorship laws than we should follow Turkish ones. All editors are responsible for compliance with the laws in their jurisdiction." ------- First, the issue is privacy, not censorship. Nobody has prosecuted or will prosecute a newspaper for mentioning, for example, that Vincent Bolloré is Catholic (since he is open about that fact and does not object to having it reported). However, when the CRIF (a Jewish foundation) petitioned the CNIL for the right to compile a list of folks whose surnames were the same as the 150 most common donors to the foundation for the purposes of a survey they were told this would be a clear violation of the law. (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCnil.do?oldAction=rechExpCnil&id=CNILT…) What exists on en.wp is an ad-hoc categorization that does not guarantee the quality of sourcing. Anyone can add the category "French Jews" to 100s of living people's biographies with hotcat in a matter of minutes (with or without a source). Only the vigilance of the community is a safeguard against this sort of action. The state of the database at the moment is, again, telling: there are not 40 times more Jews in France than Christians nor are Freemasons likely to be 7 times more numerous than Christians. Yet this is precisely the *deformed* picture that emerges from this ad-hoc categorization system. As James and Yarsolav both observed, this is likely due to a problem of "bad editing" on en.wp. (I didn't mention it in my OP, but just as there are no such categories on French Wikipedia, Wikidata also does not seem to have categories based on the religion of living French people. Based on my limited research into the question, the ontology at Wikidata does indeed seem more respectful of personal privacy.) Second, concerning legally responsibility: of course! The WMF only supplies the platform. The anonymous individuals who make use of it are legally responsible for their contributions. As a result, living people not wanting to have their religion included in a system of automatic list-generation would need to file a complaint against X (porter plainte contre X) in order to try to get the WMF to react to the violation of their privacy if they cannot convince the anonymous volunteer they contact in order to enforce their privacy rights (by deleting the ethnic/religious category from their Wikipedia entry). Still, it could be persuasively argued that a foundation has a *duty of care* to its volunteers and should not facilitate their contributors (whose age they don't verify) falling afoul of their national laws. Simply excluding members of Category:BLP & Category:French Jews/Catholics/Muslims/Freemasons/etc. from the hidden Category "requiring diffusion" and adding them to the hidden Category "noindex" would go a long way towards protecting privacy rights (at least as far as google is concerned). Finally -- again -- how useful are these automatically generated lists towards advancing the "freedom of knowledge" (as Nathan put it)? To repeat: these categories make it seem that there are/have been 40 times more notable Jewish people and five times more notable Muslims in France than notable Christians . This (derived) "knowledge" is patently false. Now, granted, the purpose of the automatically generated categories is not to come up with a comparative tally of noteworthy people; but I think what this tally shows is in itself revealing: Wikipedians are 40 times more likely to tag notable Jewish people as Jews and 5 times more likely to tag notable Muslims as Muslim than they are to tag notable Christians as Christians. This is worth thinking about for a minute... Why would it be so hard to be humble and respect national laws by making it such that membership in the category would not be diffused concerning living people in countries where such lists are illegal? (As Yaroslav points out, there is no guarantee of the quality of the sourcing). En.wp might be wise to learn from the conservative approach to this question taken by fr.wp and wikidata. I hope this helps to clarify the original post. sashi ps: *Correction*: Contrary to what I mistakenly wrote in my OP there are 96 members of the category French Muslims (not 0).

6 6

GDPR and Wikimedia content?
by David Gerard 28 May '18

28 May '18

I'm a big fan of the GDPR and why it had to be created. (I'm doing a lot of the bureaucratic work on the tech side at the day job and am getting very used to thinking of ways something could constitute Personally Identifying Information.) But I'm wondering how we'll approach it for the Wikimedia sites. Not just the log data - but the content. We already have problems with Right To Be Forgotten, and well-cited content being removed from the search engines. What do we have in place to deal with this when - not if - we get GDPR requests to remove information about a person from the site? I don't mean just the letter of the law, in the EU or the US - I mean also, how we can handle this *right*. Because there are multiple competing legitimate interests here, and the editing communities tend to take a lot more care than they're strictly required to by law, because we are here to get things right. (This is why our DMCA numbers are ridiculously low for a top 10 site, for example.) Is anyone keeping track of what the communities are doing, as well as WMF itself? - d.

5 5

Kio faras vin feliĉa ĉi-semajne? / What's making you happy this week? (Week of 27 May 2018)
by Pine W 27 May '18

27 May '18

The Wikidata development team released to production the first version of Wikidata support of lexicographical data: https://lists.wikimedia.org/ pipermail/wikidata/2018-May/012090.html. A large issue of *The Signpost* was published with several thought-provoking pieces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2018-05-24. Multilingual captions will be an early feature of structured data on Commons. A request for feedback is here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Get_involved/Feedback_requests/Multilingual_ Captions_and_MediaInfo What's making you happy this week? You are welcome to comment in any language. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

2 1

Category: French Jews on en.wp / GPDR
by sashi 25 May '18

25 May '18

Hello, I am writing to ask if there are any plans to render the English Wikipedia compliant with French privacy laws. Currently, if a French high school student goes to a French library, reserves a computer, and types "List of French Jews" into Google, Duckduckgo, or Dogpile, an adhoc en.wikipedia list of over 850 people (approximately half of them living) appears in the #2 position (Category: French Jews). In the first position is the English Wikipedia page "List of French Jews" containing the following text, originally added in 2010, showing that the en.wikipedia community is aware that they are breaking French law: "The French nationality law itself, strongly secular, forbids any statistics or lists based on ethnic or religious membership." A French person tagging biographies of living people in en.wp with the category "French Jews" is a violation of French privacy law which would expose the Wikipedian to a penalty of €300,000 and/or 5 years imprisonment: "Le fait, hors les cas prévus par la loi, de mettre ou de conserver en mémoire informatisée, sans le consentement exprès de l’intéressé, des données à caractère personnel qui, directement ou indirectement, font apparaître les origines raciales ou ethniques, les opinions politiques, philosophiques ou religieuses, ou les appartenances syndicales des personnes, ou qui sont relatives à la santé ou à l’orientation ou à l'identité sexuelle de celles-ci, est puni de cinq ans d’emprisonnement et de 300 000 € d’amende." (source: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/les-sanctions-penales ) There is, to the best of my knowledge, no such category on fr.wp, as people in France are well aware of the law. See also "List of West European Jews" / Category: French People of Jewish descent / Category: French People of Arab descent / Category: French Freemasons (167), Category: French Atheists (93 including a recent president), etc. I noticed in researching the question that the Category "French rapists" (2 BLP) is associated with the hidden category "No indexed", whereas the category "French Jews" (100s of BLP) is associated with the hidden category: "categories requiring diffusion". As a temporary measure (to avoid actively feeding this info into search engines), perhaps categories related to racial/ethnic origins, religious & philosophical opinions could be tagged "No indexed" rather than "requiring diffusion"? The WMF hosts their servers in the US, the Netherlands and will soon also be hosting off-shore in Singapore, which probably leads WMF legal to believe that this grants them immunity from French privacy laws. Nevertheless, I thought I would mention that this is a potentially significant problem going forward. Discussion leading to action correcting this potential avenue of abuse might help the WMF to avoid litigation, given that the current policies on English Wikipedia actively facilitate violation of French laws. (data from petscan.wmflabs.org): French Christians (21 members), French Hindus (17 members), French Buddhists (9 members), French Muslims (0 members), French Jews (862 members). Thank you for your time considering how best to address this problem. sashi

6 5

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

Wikimedia-l May 2018