Hi all,
You might have seen that Facebook announced a test of a new feature today that uses English Wikipedia content.[1] The new feature provides more context about the source of news articles users see in their News Feed on Facebook by pulling information about publishers from Wikipedia.
We got a heads up about this feature late last week and have been talking to Facebook since then to better understand how it works.
Here is what we know so far: The feature is an “i” link which Facebook users can click on to get more context about a news article's source. The information provided includes Wikipedia content in addition to other resources. The feature will pull the first three sentences (approximately 300 characters) of an English Wikipedia article about a given news publication with a link to “continue reading” on Wikipedia, with attribution to Wikipedia and Creative Commons licensing information. If no article exists for that news publication, it will note that instead.
The feature will be made available to a limited number of users based in the United States starting today as a part of their product testing. We don’t have information on the roll-out plan, which will depend on the results from the testing.
On a technical basis, this test is utilizing (and regularly updating) XML dumps to get the Wikipedia content. This does not put as much load on our servers, but also leaves the content slightly outdated. This is an issue we are discussing with their technical folks alongside other issues like content in other languages.
While this new feature did not come from any partnership with a Wikimedia organization and our open access model means this is something they are able to do without engaging with us, we appreciate them contacting us before it went live. We are also always happy to see Wikipedia content being used to inform more people. We hope to continue to have conversations with Facebook about the impact of this feature on Wikipedia and will continue to share relevant updates with Foundation staff and community.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, here is some press:
http://mashable.com/2017/10/05/facebook-wikipedia-context-articles-news-feed...
https://www.fastcompany.com/40477586/facebook-thinks-the-answer-to-its-fake-...
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/05/facebook-article-information-button/?ncid=...
--Toby
[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/news-feed-fyi-new-test-to-provide-conte...
Thanks for the heads up. Cool initiative. This will likely mean we will see conflicted editors in greater numbers trying to adjust the articles in question. So something to keep an eye on.
James
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 1:54 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
You might have seen that Facebook announced a test of a new feature today that uses English Wikipedia content.[1] The new feature provides more context about the source of news articles users see in their News Feed on Facebook by pulling information about publishers from Wikipedia.
We got a heads up about this feature late last week and have been talking to Facebook since then to better understand how it works.
Here is what we know so far: The feature is an “i” link which Facebook users can click on to get more context about a news article's source. The information provided includes Wikipedia content in addition to other resources. The feature will pull the first three sentences (approximately 300 characters) of an English Wikipedia article about a given news publication with a link to “continue reading” on Wikipedia, with attribution to Wikipedia and Creative Commons licensing information. If no article exists for that news publication, it will note that instead.
The feature will be made available to a limited number of users based in the United States starting today as a part of their product testing. We don’t have information on the roll-out plan, which will depend on the results from the testing.
On a technical basis, this test is utilizing (and regularly updating) XML dumps to get the Wikipedia content. This does not put as much load on our servers, but also leaves the content slightly outdated. This is an issue we are discussing with their technical folks alongside other issues like content in other languages.
While this new feature did not come from any partnership with a Wikimedia organization and our open access model means this is something they are able to do without engaging with us, we appreciate them contacting us before it went live. We are also always happy to see Wikipedia content being used to inform more people. We hope to continue to have conversations with Facebook about the impact of this feature on Wikipedia and will continue to share relevant updates with Foundation staff and community.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, here is some press:
http://mashable.com/2017/10/05/facebook-wikipedia-context-articles-news-feed...
https://www.fastcompany.com/40477586/facebook-thinks-the-answer-to-its-fake-...
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/05/facebook-article-information-button/?ncid=...
--Toby
[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/news-feed-fyi-new-test-to-provide-conte... _______________________________________________ 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
On 5 October 2017 at 20:54, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
You might have seen that Facebook announced a test of a new feature today that uses English Wikipedia content.[1] The new feature provides more context about the source of news articles users see in their News Feed on Facebook by pulling information about publishers from Wikipedia.
Sounds good - does anyone know of any screen-shots. or video, showing this in action?
2017-10-05 23:14 GMT+03:00 Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk:
On 5 October 2017 at 20:54, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
You might have seen that Facebook announced a test of a new feature today that uses English Wikipedia content.[1] The new feature provides more context about the source of news articles users see in their News Feed on Facebook by pulling information about publishers from Wikipedia.
Sounds good - does anyone know of any screen-shots. or video, showing this in action?
Check out the video in the original announcement that Toby linked to.
It's pretty cool indeed, but might put pressure on smaller communities whenever extended to other languages.
Strainu
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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Couple of scenarios come to mind:
If this succeeds, and is launched more widely, we might have a lot of preparation to do, and this might not be obvious to Facebook or even to us. Facebook has a huge audience and is currently extremely fertile ground for fake news. Diverting some of that audience to fact-checking, and perhaps fake news arguing, on Wikipedia, has the potential to rapidly grow our editing population. This is probably a good thing in the long term but, if it happens, it could be a big challenge in the short term. Everything from our safety and support teams to our infrastructure architecture are not set up to scale with rapid editing growth. I think some preparatory brainstorming here could be useful. Just for context, our editing population is on the order of hundreds of thousands of people on any given month. Facebook's news reading population is in the hundreds of *millions*. If even 0.1% of them start chatting on our talk pages we would double our editing traffic. Think of the way this affects bots, the job queue, anti-harassment efforts, etc.
On the other hand, if this "fails" from Facebook's point of view, and it's rolled back, I would hope we stay engaged with them to learn from the effort. And I'm sure the communications department is already thinking of this, but we should prepare for the potential "Facebook finds Wikipedia too volatile to check facts" or whatever the press decides to do to bait clicks that day.
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 4:20 PM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
[snip]
It's pretty cool indeed, but might put pressure on smaller communities
whenever extended to other languages.
Strainu
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On 5 October 2017 at 21:20, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
2017-10-05 23:14 GMT+03:00 Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk:
Sounds good - does anyone know of any screen-shots. or video, showing this in action?
Check out the video in the original announcement that Toby linked to.
I saw that video, but it neither mentions nor shows content from Wikipedia.
Hi Andy -- at about 18 seconds into the video, you can see content that's identified, albeit in light gray font, as being from Wikipedia with links to the article and the license.
-Toby
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 3:13 PM, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
On 5 October 2017 at 21:20, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
2017-10-05 23:14 GMT+03:00 Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk:
Sounds good - does anyone know of any screen-shots. or video, showing this in action?
Check out the video in the original announcement that Toby linked to.
I saw that video, but it neither mentions nor shows content from Wikipedia.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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
wonderful concept, and yes we need to do more about Newspapers on Wikipedia. Fortunately for Australia there has been a number of state libraries working on creating articles about all newspapers, so we had links in referencing to the source details in each state so Australian newspapers are at least ahead of the curve on the information. It may be something that can be suggested libraries, beside these two examples we have Northern Territory, Queensland and Victorian libraries also working on the project thanks to support from the Australian National Library which is another one of those projects to grow from seeds scattered by Liam Wyatt some years ago.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/State_Library_of_Western_Austra... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/State_Library_of_New_South_Wale... -
On 6 October 2017 at 07:15, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Andy -- at about 18 seconds into the video, you can see content that's identified, albeit in light gray font, as being from Wikipedia with links to the article and the license.
-Toby
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 3:13 PM, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
On 5 October 2017 at 21:20, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
2017-10-05 23:14 GMT+03:00 Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk:
Sounds good - does anyone know of any screen-shots. or video, showing this in action?
Check out the video in the original announcement that Toby linked to.
I saw that video, but it neither mentions nor shows content from
Wikipedia.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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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I am somewhat concern that we will need to take even greater effort in double-check those first three sentences than we normally do in ledes. .
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 11:06 PM, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
wonderful concept, and yes we need to do more about Newspapers on Wikipedia. Fortunately for Australia there has been a number of state libraries working on creating articles about all newspapers, so we had links in referencing to the source details in each state so Australian newspapers are at least ahead of the curve on the information. It may be something that can be suggested libraries, beside these two examples we have Northern Territory, Queensland and Victorian libraries also working on the project thanks to support from the Australian National Library which is another one of those projects to grow from seeds scattered by Liam Wyatt some years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/State_Library_ of_Western_Australia/The_Newspaper_Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/State_Library_ of_New_South_Wales/The_Newspaper_Project
On 6 October 2017 at 07:15, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Andy -- at about 18 seconds into the video, you can see content that's identified, albeit in light gray font, as being from Wikipedia with links to the article and the license.
-Toby
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 3:13 PM, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
On 5 October 2017 at 21:20, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
2017-10-05 23:14 GMT+03:00 Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk:
Sounds good - does anyone know of any screen-shots. or video,
showing
this in action?
Check out the video in the original announcement that Toby linked to.
I saw that video, but it neither mentions nor shows content from
Wikipedia.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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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