Dear Erik,
Many thanks for all the help and support you gave Wikimedia Nederland and
myself over the past years. Whenever we had tricky stats-related questions,
we knew we could turn to you.
I hope to see you at many WMNL-events in the future.
Enjoy the freedom!
Best,
Sandra
Sandra Rientjes
Directeur/Executive Director Wikimedia Nederland
tel. (+31) (0)30 3200238 (ma, di, do)
mob. (+31) (0)6 31786379 (wo, vrij)
Mariaplaats 3
3511 LH Utrecht
Op do 7 feb. 2019 om 11:22 schreef rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com
Many thanks erik and all the best!! One sentence in
eriks blog post cited i
found surprising. What type of modesty you guys were talking about?
"At Wikimania London (2014) I talked about how we should err on the side of
modesty. That message never came across. I started to have a discussion on
this within WMF but failed to bring this to fruition. My bad."
On Wed, Feb 6, 2019, 22:18 Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
“[R]ecent revisions of an article can be peeled
off to reveal older
layers,
which are still meaningful for historians. Even
graffiti applied by
vandals
can by its sheer informality convey meaningful
information, just like
historians learned a lot from graffiti on walls of classic Pompei.
Likewise
view patterns can tell future historians a lot
about what was hot and
what
wasn’t in our times. Reason why these raw view
data are meant to be
preserved for a long time.”
Erik Zachte wrote these lines in a blog post
<
https://web.archive.org/web/20171018194720/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/…
almost
ten years ago, and I cannot find better words to describe the gift he
gave
us. Erik retired
<http://infodisiac.com/back_to_volunteer_mode.htm> this
past Friday, leaving behind an immense legacy. I had the honor to work
with
him for several years, and I hosted this morning
an intimate, tearful
celebration of what Erik has represented for the Wikimedia movement.
His Wikistats project <https://stats.wikimedia.org/>—with his signature
pale yellow background we've known and loved since the mid 2000s
<https://web.archive.org/web/20060412043240/https://stats.wikimedia.org/
—has
been much more than an "analytics
platform". It's been an individual
attempt he initiated, and grew over time, to try and comprehend and make
sense of the largest open collaboration project in human history, driven
by
curiosity and by an insatiable desire to serve
data to the communities
that
most needed it.
Through this project, Erik has created a live record of data describing
the
growth and reach of all Wikimedia communities,
across languages and
projects, putting multi-lingualism and smaller communities at the very
center of his attention. He coined metrics such as "active editors" that
defined the benchmark for volunteers, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the
academic community to understand some of the growing pains and editor
retention issues
<
https://web.archive.org/web/20110608214507/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/…
the movement has faced. He created countless reports—that predate by
nearly
a decade modern visualizations of online
attention—to understand what
Wikipedia traffic means in the context of current events like elections
<
https://web.archive.org/web/20160405055621/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/…
or
public health crises
<
https://web.archive.org/web/20090708011216/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/…
.
He has created countless
<https://twitter.com/Infodisiac/status/1039244151953543169>
visualizations
<
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/10/27/new-interactive-visualization-wikiped…
> >
> that show the enormous gaps in local language content and representation
> that, as a movement, we face in our efforts to build an encyclopedia for
> and about everyone. He has also made extensive use of pie charts
<
https://web.archive.org/web/20141222073751/http://infodisiac.com/blog/wp-co…
> >,
> which—as friends—we are ready to turn a blind eye towards.
>
> Most importantly, the data Erik has brougth to life has been cited over
> 1,000 times
<
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=stats.wikim…
in
the scholarly literature. If we gave credit to open data creators in
the
same way as we credit authors of scholarly
papers, Erik would be one of
the
most influential authors in the field, and I
don't think it is much of a
stretch to say that the massive trove of data and metrics Erik has made
available had a direct causal role in the birth and growth of the
academic
field of Wikimedia research, and more broadly,
scholarship of online
collaboration.
Like I said this morning, Erik -- you have been not only an invaluable
colleague and a steward for the movement, but also a very decent human
being, and I am grateful we shared some of this journey together.
Please join me in celebrating Erik on his well-deserved retirement, read
his statement <http://infodisiac.com/back_to_volunteer_mode.htm> to
learn
what he's planning to do next, or check this
lovely portrait
<https://www.wired.com/2013/12/erik-zachte-wikistats/> Wired published a
while back about "the Stats Master Making Sense of Wikipedia's Massive
Data
Trove".
Dario
--
*Dario Taraborelli *Director, Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
research.wikimedia.org •
nitens.org • @readermeter
<http://twitter.com/readermeter>
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