Dear all,
Over the last few months, a small team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been
working on a project that has been discussed by many people in our movement
for many years: building ‘enterprise grade’ services for the high-volume
commercial reusers of Wikimedia content. I am pleased to say that in a
remarkably short amount of time (considering the complexity of the issues:
technical, strategic, legal, and financial) we now have something worthy of
showing to the community, and we are asking for your feedback. Allow me to
introduce you to the Wikimedia Enterprise API project – formerly codenamed
“okapi”.
While the general idea for Wikimedia Enterprise predates the current
movement strategy process, its recommendations identify an enterprise API
as one possible solution to both “Increase the sustainability of our
movement” and “Improve User Experience.”[0] That is, to simultaneously
create a new revenue stream to protect Wikimedia’s sustainability, and
improve the quality and quantity of Wikimedia content available to our many
readers who do not visit our websites directly (including more consistent
attribution). Moreover, it does so in a way that is true to our movement’s
culture: with open source software, financial transparency, non-exclusive
contracts or content, no restrictions on existing services, and free access
for Wikimedia volunteers who need it.
The team believes we are on target to achieve those goals and so we have
written a lot of documentation to get your feedback about our progress and
where it could be further improved before the actual product is ‘launched’
in the next few months. We have been helped in this process over the last
several months by approximately 100 individual volunteers (from many
corners of the wikiverse) and representatives of affiliate organisations
who have reviewed our plans and provided invaluable direction, pointing out
weaknesses and opportunities, or areas lacking clarity and documentation in
our drafts. Thank you to everyone who has shared your time and expertise to
help prepare this new initiative.
A essay describing the “why?” and the “how?” of this project is now on
Meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Essay
Also now published on Meta are an extensive FAQ, operating principles, and
technical documentation on MediaWiki.org. You can read these at [1] [2] and
[3] respectively. Much of this documentation is already available in
French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
The Wikimedia Enterprise team is particularly interested in your feedback
on how we have designed the checks and balances to this project - to ensure
it is as successful as possible at achieving those two goals described
above while staying true to the movement’s values and culture. For example:
Is everything covered appropriately in the “Principles” list? Is the
technical documentation on MediaWiki.org clear? Are the explanations in the
“FAQ” about free-access for community, or project’s legal structure, or the
financial transparency (etc.) sufficiently detailed?
Meet the team and Ask Us Anything:
The central place to provide written feedback about the project in general
is on the talkpage of the documentation on Meta at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Enterprise
On this Friday (March 19) we will be hosting two “Office hours”
conversations where anyone can come and give feedback or ask questions:
-
13:00 UTC via Zoom at https://wikimedia.zoom.us/j/95580273732
-
22:00 UTC via Zoom at https://wikimedia.zoom.us/j/92565175760 (note:
this is Saturday in Asia/Oceania)
Other “office hours” meetings can be arranged on-request on a technical
platform of your choosing; and we will organise more calls in the future.
We will also be attending the next SWAN meetings (on March 21)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Wikimedia_Affiliates_Network, and
also the next of the Wikimedia Clinics
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Clinics
Moreover, we would be very happy to accept any invitation to attend an
existing group call that would like to discuss this topic (e.g. an
affiliate’s members’ meeting).
On behalf of the Wikimedia Enterprise team,
Peace, Love & Metadata
-- Liam Wyatt [Wittylama], Wikimedia Enterprise project community liaison.
[0]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recomme…
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/FAQ
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Principles
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise
*Liam Wyatt [Wittylama]*
WikiCite <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite> Program Manager & Wikimedia
Enterprise <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Okapi> Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation
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
According to the recent Independent Auditors' Report of the WMF [1], at
some point prior to the end of June 2020, an entity called the "Wikimedia
Knowledge Equity Fund" was established, and $8.723 million was transferred
to it by the WMF, in the form of an unconditional grant. The Fund is
"managed and controlled by Tides Advocacy" (a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit
previously led by the WMF's current General Counsel/Board Secretary, who
served as CEO, Board Secretary, and Treasurer there). Given that a Google
search for "Wikimedia Knowledge Equity Fund" yields zero results prior to
the release of the report, it is clear that the WMF kept this significant
move completely secret for over five months, perhaps over a year. The
Report FAQ additionally emphasizes that the WMF "has no right of return to
the grant funds provided, with the exception of unexpended funds."
The WMF unilaterally and secretly transferred nearly $9 million of movement
funds to an outside organization not recognized by the Affiliations
Committee. No mention of the grant was made in any Board resolutions or
minutes from the relevant time period. The amount was not mentioned in the
public annual plan, which set out rather less than this amount for the
entire grantmaking budget for the year. No application was made through any
of the various Wikimedia grants processes. No further information has been
provided on the administration of this new Fund, or on the text of the
grant agreement.
I am appalled.
-- Yair Rand
[1]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikimedia_Foundation…
Hello all,
As many of you know, Katherine Maher, the ED of the Wikimedia Foundation,
will be stepping down next month. Her last day is April 15.
While Katherine will continue to be a part of our movement, we wanted to
find a way to celebrate her and send her off. We’ll be putting together a
video montage of farewell wishes from the movement. For anyone that would
like to participate, you can record a short video with your message for
Katherine via your phone or computer by going to the Tribute webpage [1].
Please keep your message under 30 seconds! The deadline to submit a video
is Monday, April 12.*
If you have questions, please reach out.
Best,
Nadee Gunasena
[1] https://www.tribute.co/katherine-maher/
*Tribute is a third party service based in the United States, with its
own terms
of service <https://www.tribute.co/termsofservice/> and privacy policy
<https://www.tribute.co/privacy/>. Please review their terms and privacy
policy before submitting your video. In order to submit your video, you may
need to provide Tribute with a name and email address. If you are not
comfortable submitting your real name or email, we recommend using a
username or pseudonym instead. By submitting a video, you are giving the
Foundation consent to include your segment in a video montage that will be
shared with Katherine.
--
*Nadee Gunasena*
Executive Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
ᐧ
Hi.
Please, help protect the trustworthiness of the Wikimedia movement in
Slovakia - help WUG WMSVK to do a mass fundraising only after it will have
solved its governance issues (and stop it from using Wikipedia's site
notices until that).
The Wikimedia User Group Wikimedians of Slovakia (WUG WMSVK) is currently
using Sitenotice and Anonnotice of Slovak Wikipedia for local fundraising.
While I appreciate the effort for a non-WMF revenue source, it is not a
good timing right now. Currently, WUG WMSVK is still under investigation of
AffCom for their governance issues and is recovering too slowly from
repeated bylaws violations done in the past under lead of current Chair
Matej Grochal and current Vice-Chair Radoslava Semanová. Much of it is
published on [1]. Some non-public violations will be published after a 6
months period of AffCom investigations (which is going to end sometime
before 16th of June).
The use of Sitenotice and Anonnotice is based on skwiki Village Pump
request from the Vice-Chair Dávid Štefan done 23th March 2021 [2] and
executed by WUG WMSVK's Chair himself less than 3 day later [3]. This is a
clear example of Conflict of Interests - Matej Grochal mixing his role of
WUG WMSVK's Chair and skwiki's admin (that part would be OK, according to
me, if the activation of site noticies would be done by some other admin).
The time for Community reaction was very little (less than 3 days). The
community reaction is very weak, but at this point clearly against such use.
I have right now contacted AffCom. But they are a volunteer based committee
with meetings once in a month, so it is probable that they would react too
slowly (like, AffCom haven't reacted until now to my message about probable
bylaws violation of WUG WMSVK from 3 weeks ago, even despite my personal
calls).
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_of_Slovakia/history#2019
[2] https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/7180661
[3] https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/7182017
I hope for quick reaction
Best regards
KuboF Hromoslav
As a consequence of the promotion of a Google forms based survey this
week by a WMF representative, a proposal on Wikimedia Commons has been
started to ban the promotion of surveys which rely on third party
sites like Google Forms.[1]
Launched today, but already it appears likely that this proposal will
have a consensus to support. Considering that Commons is one of our
largest Wikimedia projects, there are potential repercussions of
banning the on-wiki promotion of surveys which use Google products or
other closed source third party products like SurveyMonkey.
Feedback is most welcome on the proposal discussion, or on this list
for handling impact, solutions, recommended alternatives that already
exist, or the future role of the WMF to support research and surveys
for the WMF and affiliates by using forking open source software and
self-hosting and self-managing data "locally".
Links
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Proposals#Use_of_of…
Thanks
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
#WearAMask
Hello,
After more than one year of design, discussion, vote, iteration, and months
of legal work, I’m happy to announce that the logo of MediaWiki has been
officially changed. This applies to both the software and logo of
https://mediawiki.org.
The old logo of MediaWiki was adopted slightly more than fifteen years ago.
This logo was featuring the nice concept of a sunflower representing
diversity, constant growth and also wilderness.
However, with years, the logo became outdated and we realized that it had
several problems, including but not limited to:
- It was a bitmap picture so it’s unusable in large sizes
- Its high details (“too realistic”) made it unusable in small sizes
- Its fixed and realistic style made it hard to have variations or
adaptations
Most, virtually all, software products use a simpler and more abstract form
following basic logo design guidelines and best-practices to avoid above
(and more) issues. For example, docker, kubernetes, Ubuntu, Vue.js, React,
Apache Kafka and many more.
You can find the discussion of changing the logo in
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaW…
. As you can see on this page, a lot of interesting practical and
theoretical exchanges happened, leading to the final vote and decision.
The new logo represents a collection of projects built on our engine: each
petal is one of the many wikis that we support, and the lack of an explicit
core shows that we are part of these projects, as well as and they are part
of MediaWiki. The new logo also reflects the fact that evolution never
stops, and like the petals of a flower, the development of each project,
the growth of each community built on our engine allows everyone else to
grow.
The designer of the new logo is [[User:Serhio Magpie]]. With the nice
abstraction baked-in, you can use it in large or small sizes or you can
adapt it for different usecases (there’s one already for mediawiki on
docker: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T274678). There is a logo
guideline for MediaWiki now:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MediaWiki_logo_guidelines
We already deployed changes to mediawiki.org and landed related patches on
master, meaning from 1.36 release onwards, it’ll come with the new logo.
You can follow the work of rolling it out in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T268230.
I humbly ask Wikimedians to update their wikis, for example usages on the
main pages, Wikipedia articles, templates, and more. You can use the logos
in this category on Commons. The files are already protected against upload
vandalism. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MediaWiki_logo_(2020)
A big thank you to all who helped this project to finish. From designers,
community members, people who voted and discussed it intensively for
months, Wikimedia Legal for doing all the necessary work for transferring
the rights, clearing it and filing it for trademark. And many many more
people.
Best
--
Amir (he/him)
Hi folks,
I wanted to share the link to a report covering grants given out by the
Wikimedia Foundation during the 2019−2020 fiscal year. This was inspired by
the Fundraising reports that fundraising teams have prepared for many
years. The intent is to publish similar yearly reports for grantmaking
going forward.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking/Reports/2019-2020
Questions and comments are welcome, preferably on the talk page.
--
Guillaume Paumier
(he/him)
Hello,
Greetings!
I hope you're doing well. I would like to introduce 'Wiki for X', a
new general format for naming various sorts of Wikimedia community events
and outreach campaigns; For instance, we have 'Wiki Loves X' as such 'Wiki
for X', where X is whatever the coordinators wish to call the campaign.
This is because i believe change is necessary. I hope we can create some
brand new impactful ideas for outreach campaigns across the globe with this
new general format.
With regard to, I've organized Wiki For COVID-19
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_For_COVID-19> on Jun 01-Sep 30 2020
and I see there's another event WikiForHumanRights
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights> starting on
April 15-March 15 2021 to celebrate Earth Day.
Can we please give continuity to this new general format? I really
appreciate your input and opinions on this. Thank you for your
consideration!
Kind regards,
Tulsi