I am a bureaucrat in Bengali wikipedia. We need to change the spelling
of our Wikipedia namespace, from উইকিপেডিয়া to উইকিপিডিয়া. I am a bit
confused as to who should be able to do this. I've posted this message
at meta wiki, a week ago, but haven't got a reply yet. Messages to
several developers were also not replied (I might have posted to wrong
contact pages).
Anyway, I'd appreciate if someone can explain the proper procedure to me.
Thanks
Ragib
--
Ragib Hasan
PhD Student
Dept of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
201 N Goodwin Avenue
Urbana IL 61801
Website:
http://www.ragibhasan.comhttp://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/www
Wikipedia is no longer a project or a club. It is a society and a
component of society, a supporting beam in a new addition to the
castle of civilization. Soon -- and for a long time to come[1] -- it
will touch every structure, every window, wall and fixture, from pipes
to minarets. It will influence decisions about community-building and
knowledge production, publishing and broadcasting, by proxy if not
directly.
Brief discussions about the future surfaced at Wikimania, last year
and last month. Other discussoins have surrounded the board
elections. The latter have a very particular flavor; and are likely
to end once the elections do. Other discussions have surfaced before,
largely in meta-space, and rarely with deep collaboration. It is a
shame that introspection, statistics about our communities and
ourselves, internal research efforts, have not been a larger part of
recent years' growth. It would be a further shame if the projects did
not find guidance in lessons of the distant past, in similar
organizations and initiatives of the recent past, or in similar trends
of the present.
We are doing the impossible, at a very rapid rate -- too rapid at
times for us to stop and collect our thoughts. Today it was suggested
that spending too much time discussing or thinking about priorities
and future direction is a distraction from building the projects or
writing an encyclopedia. In counter, here are three areas in
particular which deserve ongoing attention, and which will help the
projects scale another few orders of magnitude:
1. Discussion of the dreams, goals, and milestones for the projects,
foundation, and community
2. Discussion and launching of communal research projects to find out
more about the projects, communities, users and reusers
3. Identification and investigation of parallel projects and
organizations, now and in the past, to offer perspective
Three emails follow on the above topics. I hope the aftertaste of the
elections and the upcoming foundation retreat will encourage
addressing these issues in earnest.
SJ
Please help.
In a message dated 22-Sep-06 11:05:20 Pacific Daylight Time, Kutahopia
writes:
I have repetitively attempted to convert to
"digest"; however, it's, ostensibly, stuck.
Thank You.
In a message dated 21-Sep-06 09:23:06 Pacific Daylight Time,
dgerard(a)gmail.com writes:
On 21/09/06, Raphael Wiegand <rdb_wikipedia(a)gmx.de> wrote:
> Yes, of course it's important to improve quality, espacially now when
> en: has reached an unbelievable high number of articles, but I don't
> think you'll reach 100k of FAs without easing the requirements for an
> article to be featured, even if you go for it for three years. Let's
> explain:
> English WP has now exactly 1118 featured articles on 1,395,220 total
The current FAC process is known not to scale and is not expected to
scale, which is why I'm not assuming it. Also, its requirements have
been deliberately tightened - the Featured Article Criteria haven't
changed, but the FA process's expectations have been ramped *way* up
specifically to keep the numbers down.
(This is about the fourth time I've said this in this thread, isn't it?)
- d.
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dgerard(a)gmail.com
I have repetitively attempted to convert to
"digest"; however, it's, ostensibly, stuck.
Thank You.
Thank You,
DonFphrnqTaub Persina
DONFPHRNQTAUB PERSINA
Thank You,
DonFphrnqTaub Persina
DONFPHRNQTAUB PERSINA
The English Wikipedia is littered with many "big ideas" and longterm plans
that have evoked lively debate and high emotion at the time, but most of
these ideas die out when it becomes apparent that they lead nowhere. That
does not mean that big ideas are bad, I happen to strongly agree with SJ,
it's just that we need to have processes to bring ideas forward into reality.
Let's consider one of the old chestnuts, article assessment. One year ago,
I printed off 36 pages of discussion and ideas on article assessment,
produced over about two years. But only one article had actually been
assessed. Now just one year later, thanks to the efforts of thousands of
people, we are in a situation where over 100,000 articles have been
assessed, with over 50,000 done in the last month alone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Indexhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team
What lessons can be learnt from this to help us get ideas off the drawing
board and into Wikipedia? I've drawn the following conclusions:
1. Set some specific goals: Some may be vague like "Write 100,000 featured
articles" but other goals should be very specific like "Write an FA from
this list of 100 articles by the end of the month" and perhaps a signup
that says "I have agreed to work on this specific articles". Without
something tangible, the idea will remain pie in the sky forever. At WP:1.0
we focussed initially on getting a system of article assessment up and
running, as a prerequisite to making CDs or DVDs.
2. These goals should visibly lead to a larger goal in the medium term: If
you want people to keep committing their time to your big idea, you have to
be able to see some serious progress towards the grander goal. If you say,
"One FA done this month, only another 99,999 to go!" everyone will get
discouraged. If you say, "Let's get every country in the world be an FA"
and you plot a graph of your progress, and you celebrate the halfway point
after 3 months, some people will probably stay involved. When you finish
the project, celebrate and tell the Signpost - people will be proud that
they were part of it.
3. Lead by example: You can't expect others to do work for you - you have
to expect to do the lion's share of the work to get a big idea off the
ground. If you think it's reasonable for an active Wikipedian to write one
FA per week, then you need to write three per week yourself. When you've
done 100 FAs yourself in 30 weeks, people may start noticing you and trying
to emulate what you are doing. Keep doing it - some who join you may move
on - you can only begin to back off once it's become an established part of
Wikipedia that many Wikipedians are writing an FA every week or two.
4. Find a way to scale it up: Just putting your idea on Wikipedia alongside
1000 other big ideas won't mean that everyone will stop writing articles on
their favourite sitcom and start helping you. You have to set up a
mechanism for implementation, then find a way to scale that up. There are
two ways I know of to scale things - delegate the work to others, and
automate the work. The mechanisms that work best do both, of course - the
article assessments are done by WikiProject members (that's the delegation
part), while the data handling and compilation is done by templates,
categories and a bot (the automation). Of course you can only delegate
work that falls within people's area of interest; I might be willing and
able to work on an FA on an organic chemical reaction (I'm an organic
chemist), but not on much outside chemistry. You can really only delegate
work well if the work helps the person who does it reach their own personal
goals. Finding the right infrastructure and process to do that may be hard
- you need (a) to get person X to hear about the project, (b) get them to
work on their little piece of it and (c) get some automation to put
together all the little pieces into a big piece. Then (d) tell everyone
about the big piece you've made so they get excited about doing more and
get their friends to help.
5. Listen to others: I think sometimes we're so busy pushing our own big
ideas we don't bother to listen to others. Often we can put several big
ideas together to make one big idea that works. Then you have a core of
people with ownership of the idea who can get the idea started. One
person may have a good knowledge of process, another some technical skills,
so having a team helps. If we let our big idea evolve through the input of
others it will probably get implemented - if we don't, it will probably
join the masses of "ideacruft" that lurk in many dusty corners of Wikipedia.
So I hope we come up with a vision for the future, and some big ideas to
help us get there, but we won't build a new networked society by simply
talking about it. As Harvard chemist George Whitesides says (paraphrased),
until you get your big breakthrough into a paper - into reality - it means
nothing. So by all means let us dream some dreams, but let's then
carefully design some targeted projects with real, tangible goals, and get
to work!
Martin Walker (User:Walkerma)
I have repetitively attempted to convert to
"digest"; however, it's, ostensibly, stuck.
Thank You.
In a message dated 21-Sep-06 09:23:06 Pacific Daylight Time,
dgerard(a)gmail.com writes:
On 21/09/06, Raphael Wiegand <rdb_wikipedia(a)gmx.de> wrote:
> Yes, of course it's important to improve quality, espacially now when
> en: has reached an unbelievable high number of articles, but I don't
> think you'll reach 100k of FAs without easing the requirements for an
> article to be featured, even if you go for it for three years. Let's
> explain:
> English WP has now exactly 1118 featured articles on 1,395,220 total
The current FAC process is known not to scale and is not expected to
scale, which is why I'm not assuming it. Also, its requirements have
been deliberately tightened - the Featured Article Criteria haven't
changed, but the FA process's expectations have been ramped *way* up
specifically to keep the numbers down.
(This is about the fourth time I've said this in this thread, isn't it?)
- d.
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
_http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l_
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l)
_wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org_ (mailto:wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org) ,
_wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org_ (mailto:wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org)
dgerard(a)gmail.com
I have repetitively attempted to convert to
"digest"; however, it's, ostensibly, stuck.
Thank You.
Thank You,
DonFphrnqTaub Persina
DONFPHRNQTAUB PERSINA
Wikipedians speculate about the future all the time. And yet I say we
rarely engage serious discussion of priorities, dreams, timelines,
goals, and opportunity costs. Why is this? In part, it is because we
don't have detailed comparisons with other similar organizations and
situations; only hearsay and vague rules of thumb.
Threads and policy subpages about what should or should not happen,
with hypotheses about the results of community or policy or
organizational change, often go on for months and hinge on unknowns.
But people are far more willing to speculate absently about human
nature than they are to research what has happened to similar efforts
in the past.
Reading and learning about how other projects and international
volunteer efforts work, and how similarly bold historical efforts have
grown and transformed, can help turn these discussions from circular
arguments to analytical collaborations. This can also help avoid
"reinventing the flat tire".
These comparisons *should* be made. Fundraising; volunteer
attraction, empowerment, and retention; administration; handling of
software and article bounties; multilingualism; logo and trademark
licensing; partnership and promotion; selection of advisors -- these
are all general problems. Wikipedia is different in details, but
shares a great deal with the thousands of thoughtful institutions that
have dealt with these issues in countless contexts, since before the
first Wikipedia logo was a twinkle in the Cunctator's eye.
Unfortunately, these discussions tend to peter out and get lost.
Mailing list threads are dropped and never wikified -- as happened
with the "Wikimedia in five years" thread from last August, and with
the interesting Apache Foundation thread. Wiki pages are abandoned
and forgotten.
Help keep these discussions alive, and give them shared context. Here
is a page for gathering links to these discussions, and for
encouraging investigations into groups (such as the Red Cross) that
have been suggested many times for comparison:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Parallels
Do you know someone who works at a multinational volunteer collective?
At a major political campaign, grassroots news foundation, or a
branch of the UN? At a global NGO? Find out what they think the
parallels are between their organizations or projects and ours. Ask
them for documents and essays, or even for their take on the greatest
obstacles our projects will face in the near future. As with the
NetBSD essay, you may be amazed to discover how much of existing
discussions apply to our communities.
++SJ
ps - Reading over the discussions about Wikipedia's future that have
inspired or provoked me over the past few years, I noticed that
Anthere and Erik Zachte have been involved in, if not the initiators
of, a majority of them. Rock on.
pps - this is thread 3 in a 3-thread microseries. see also
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/010247.html
--
A number of Wikipedians have advocated for a user survey for a very
long time. Erik Zachte has been the most vocal and persistent.
Realizing a user survey was one of the top items on the agenda of the
Wikimedia research network before it stopped holding meetings. It has
been the subject of long debates and conversations on IRC, has come up
this summer in Special Projects Committee discussions, and has been
the bugbear of dozens of student and professorial research projects.
Today I attended the wrapup discussion of a three-day conference on
open content and public broadcasting, with gathered luminaries from
WGBH, PBS, the Hewlett Foundation, the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, Yale law school, the Federation of American Scientists,
and so forth. Of great relevance to them : good information on the
demographics of Wikipedians, segmented by activity in various areas of
the community and the projects. Are we dominated by people with no
full-time jobs and no children? The question was not posed to me, but
I could not have answered with certainty.
Noone outside of the projects can run a survey that ties reliably to
user login authentication. Important sociology and technology
projects going on every month, talks given by Wikipedians and
Wikimedians every week, and literally thousands of third parties
making decisions about communities and creativity, wish they could be
informed by the results of such surveys.
With a brief discussion about preserving privacy in aggregate data,
randomizing test and control samples, and a tweak to allow web forms
on pages that are aware of your wikipedia userid, we could have a
simple projects-wide survey completed within a month. Let's make this
a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to
optimize future iterations.
The latest discussions on meta are here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey
I recall other pages on en:wp and other language wp's that are not
currently linked from there; if you were part of one of those efforts,
please add a link to your work.
SJ
--
ps - while looking for the link to the user survey on meta, I ran
across this: a poll applet that seems to be working as of last month.
Nice.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Poll
(thread 2 in a 3-thread microseries. see also
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/010247.html
)
(thread 1 in a 3-thread microseries)
The long-term discussion about planning for, devotion to, and passing
on the message and goals of the projects falls to all of us -- not
just the 700 people subscribed to this list, nor the 2000 contributors
to Meta, nor just the 100,000 active editors across all the
projects... but also those who care enough to donate money or critical
rants or expert advice, readers who would not dare contribute to an
encyclopedia but have relevant experiences in other areas of life to
add to planning discussions, and the friends and colleagues and family
of the above, interested enough to participate in such discussions if
they knew about them but not yet aware they exist.[2]
Questions: what are the most important goals over the next few years
a) for Wikipedia,
b) for Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Commons and any further media
repository, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, Wikiversity
[I would forward to the other lists but for some of them it might
double their annual list traffic]
c) for Wikipedia and its sister projects in their secondary
capacities of language preservation, debate facilitation, education,
archiving
d) for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a supportive entity and as an organization
e) for each of us individually as community members
[forgive me for lumping together all of the smaller projects; and all
languages, large, small, living, and dead]
Let us seed a longer discussion about planning for the future. To
begin with, it would be helpful to gather together the many places
where related discussions have already been held.
For instance, here is a new page on the subject:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_projects_committee/strategic_goals
And an older page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Three-year_plan
And a series of essays:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads
There are similar pages on individual projects and mailing lists, and
in many languages other than English. Perhaps you have run across one
before. I've started an Yet Another MetaMeta page on meta. Please
contribute links to it and translate it:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planning_for_the_future
++SJ
[1] Perhaps a very long time.
http://community.livejournal.com/wikipedians/17778.html
[2] For those who feel broad-based discussions are criminal, or wastes
of time: the process of discussing plans for the future helps
strengthen shared purpose and naturally passes on the message of the
projects. And we don't have enough people talking about these ideas
now; even excellent suggestions for investigation and research are
allowed to lie fallow. We are very far from having too many voices
offering their pearls of wisdom.
On 9/16/06, Stephen Streater <sbstreater(a)mac.com> wrote:
>
> On 16 Sep 2006, at 08:01, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > I invite an open discussion here of the candidates. This is your
> > community, speak openly of who you trust and why.
>
> Well, I'll start off then.
I've missed a week of mail. What was the spur for this thread? Was
there a sudden drop in candidate discussions online? A rise in
disendorsement? An announcement of election results?
I recall discussions of a more general nature -- involving input from
the candidates -- the week that voting started. Those never quite got
off the ground... I suppose we could start building ad-hoc trust
networks now to identify statistically-sound community reps for the
future, but is this the way to go? (are trust nets in use anywhere
any more on de:wp?)
I do wish that more wikimedians -- candidates and community members,
in and out of election-time -- would write more often about their
interests and concerns, in ways that support direct comparison and
editing of one anothers' writing. One of the strengths of wikis as
media for conversations is how powerfully they allow subtle
point-by-point disagreement without requiring* the rhetorical dance of
ad hominems and clashing sweeping statements.
SJ
* ad hominems and sweeping statements are still allowed, but not
required; and regularly lose out to persistent subtle discourse. Of
course more memorable cases may be those where they do not...
--