Hoi, I have some notions about language and if anything there are some things that we can do technically but with over 280 languages technique will not serve us well. At best it will be a partial solution. When you look at the team of Amir, they are doing splendid work and I do salute their latest effort where they now support collation for a language ahead of its support in standards.
The problem with Wikipedia is that when we want to grow content in a small language, we have to forget much of what English Wikipedia is, what the bigger Wikipedias are and certainly not get stuck in academia. When we do not have articles for their cities, important people when we largely do not even know them in Wikidata, the first thing is for them to be bold and write stubs, stubs that are connected. Stubs for their current affairs as I described in my blog for lessons around newspapers and Wikipedia [1].
The point is that it is not about knowledge delivery. We do not have the pertinent knowledge; it is first about knowledge acquisition. Sources may be required for English Wikipedia but when you want to nurture a project in its infancy, we do not need the overhead. It is detrimental to primary requirements. Primacy is to be given to content in the first place, interlinked content.
We have to appreciate what it is what we can achieve. For instance, the Bangla Wikipedia has been the biggest resource in modern Bangla for a number of years now. Bangla is spoken by a few hundred million people. This can be achieved for many languages and we have to consider the state of a language on the Internet and nurture the necessary effort.
We can leverage Wikidata for wiki links, red links and even black links. This is the lowest hanging fruit for making Wikidata more relevant. I have written about it before [2]. Including Wikidata in search results will make search more robust [3]. Once we start making this connection between links and Wikidata, it becomes easier to assess one aspect of quality because articles on the same subject share similar links.
Anna, my point is that so far English Wikipedia has been given preferential treatment and all the other projects have suffered as a consequence. Another point is that we should not impose on the other projects with an English Wikipedia vision. This is one aspect that is not acknowledged nor understood by my peers as far as I am aware and, I know that my position is not welcomed by most if at all. Thanks, GerardM
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2017/05/teaching-wikipedia-using-local-ne... [2] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2016/01/wikipedia-lowest-hanging-fruit-fr... [3] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2017/06/wikipedia-sister-projects-in-sear...
On 25 June 2017 at 22:33, Anna Stillwell astillwell@wikimedia.org wrote:
Gerard,
Happy Sunday to you. I hope you're well.
I'm curious... have you heard one of the ideas emerging in discussions is "beyond the encyclopedia"... an idea that includes and goes beyond the encyclopedia? You'd likely resonate with the idea. It describes the multiplicity of what we already are and the desire to grow that.
Additionally, we are hearing from "New Voices" that we can't expect to deliver knowledge the same way everywhere. Clearly, we are going to have to mix it up. You might enjoy some of the insights coming out of New Voices. They are published on the meta page as soon as each event ends and as quickly as they can coherently write it up.
There has also been a good deal of discussion around language (and the subsequent technical need to explore machine learning for predictive, contextual search and natural language processing to support better translation).
Most of the ideas I've mentioned here are housed under "Truly global movement" | "Community health" | or "Augmented age". Augmented age is a technical vision which increasingly seems like the technical means to support some other end(s).
You might be surprised where the discussions are going. It's built by your peers. We offered the resources and structure and we realize that there are constraints and biases that come with that. We've tried to account for our biases (the foundation's and the movement's) with entire streams of work: New voices, for example. That was intentional in the design.
I've responded here to let you know that you are not alone. Your peers have voiced these issues and they are heavily influencing the discussion and everyone is listening.
Warmly, /a
On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 10:59 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, The one serious flaw of the current practice is that English Wikipedia receives more attention than it deserves based on its merits[1]. This
bias
can be found in any and all areas. There is for instance a huge
educational
effort going on for English and there is no strategy known, developed, tried to use education to grow a Wikipedia from nothing to 100.000 articles.. the number considered to be necessary by some to have a viable Wikipedia. When you consider research it is English Wikipedia because otherwise it will not get published [2].
A less serious flaw is that the WMF is an indifferent custodian of
projects
other than Wikipedia. When it provides no service to Wikipedia like Wikisource, its intrinsic value is not realised to the potential readers that are made available. There is no staff dedicated to these projects
and
there is no research into its value.
The angst for the community means that there is hardly any collaboration between the different Wikipedias. Mostly the "solutions" of English Wikipedia are imposed. There are a few well trodden paths that habitually get attention. When it comes to diversity, the gender gap is well served but the global south is not. A lot of weight is given to a data driven approach but there is hardly enough data relevant to the global south in English Wikipedia to make such an approach viable.
Yes, I have tried to get some attention for these issues in the process
so
far but <grin> as bringer of the bad news I am happy that it is the
message
and not the messenger who is killed </grin>.
Please tell me I am wrong and proof it by using more than opinions. Thanks, GerardM
[1] less than 30% of the world populace and less than 50% of the WMF traffic. [2] comment by a professor whose university does a lot of studies on Wikipedia..
On 24 June 2017 at 12:33, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 10:32 AM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
2017-06-23 23:48 GMT+03:00 Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com:
Could you elaborate on the benefits of this timetable change for
people
who
are not involved with affiliates?
Starting from this assumption, and considering the fact that even the most active wikimedians (not involved in a chapter) have real life commitments that do not allow them to follow this process carefully, it is obvious that the main responsibility of the team that coordinates the process should have been outreach. In my particular geographic area, Track B contributors were engaged with only 2 weeks prior to the end of the last cycle, which is hardly enough time to read, understand, and think about the vast quantity of material available in the strategy process.
I am an active Wikimedia not involved in a Chapter. In Round 1, I was
pretty active, and in the Russian Wikivoyage we collected quite some feedback and translated it into English. It was essentially ignored.
None
of us participated in Round 2 since we thought it is a waste of time.
Round
2 was organized in the same way as Round 1 (many discussions opened i n different places, meaning there is no possibility to really discuss anything, merely to leave one's opinion). I have corresponding pages
on 3
projects on my watchlists (with is 15 pages, and this is a lot), but I
have
not seen in these discussions anything new not said before in Round 1.
May
be smth useful would come out from other tracks, but I am not really looking forward to Track B Round 3 either. I believe it is completely failed, and individual contributors did not have a chance to form a considated opinion. The message for me is essentially: If you want to
be
heard, find a chapter or a thematic organization first. I hope the next process will be organized differently in 10 years from now.
Cheers Yaroslav _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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