Wikimedia-l March 2012

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145 participants
130 discussions

[Foundation-l] Improving search in Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery
by Brian J Mingus 10 Sep '22

10 Sep '22

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…>

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
by GerardM 09 Aug '22

09 Aug '22

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

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[Foundation-l] Still wikipediocentric
by Luiz Augusto 19 Jun '12

19 Jun '12

Dear all, I was the [[:m:User:555]], mainly active on the last years of my volunteers actions on Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. I've left the Wikimedia projects mainly because the lack of energy from my side to keep trying to get free time to work in projects fully neglected by the Wikimedia staff, developers team and some volunteers in the core of the Foundaction acts. A friend told me about the http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/ . I've checked http://labs.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrixand... surprise! no Wikisource wikis with blue color links! I asked myself random things about the [[bug:21653]] lasted for 26 months until gets PARTIALLY fixed and decided to check some 'Recent changes' pages and found this: http://pt.wikisource.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=233269 Come on guys! What is the point to run a bot spamming on all wikis if the tests are only to the Wikipedias? Attempt of a 'politically correct' action to these worse guys from others projects get's 'socially included'? Like in the real life, those worse guys aren't in need of assistencialism [1] actions... Well, I don't expect any change on the Wikipediocentric actions in short, medium or long time (in fact the Foundation and some local chapters are trying to make things for the Wikimedia Commons project, but only because that project is the central media source for Wikipedias), this was only a mutter. Despite my apparently hatred on this message, I really hope that the 3-4 extensions only enabled on Wikisources wikis don't get's any aditional bugs than the current ones in the new version of MediaWiki in the same intensity that your guys hopes that focusing in a project that only describes the knowledge in an encyclopedic way fully meets the http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement [1] - wow, a concept from social sciences yet not defined neither on en.wikpedia or en.wiktionary? O_O As on all of my previous messages, sorry for my limited English skills. Best regards, [[:m:User:555|Lugusto]]

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[Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?
by Marcin Cieslak 12 May '12

12 May '12

[ Please excuse me if the subject has already been beaten to death here; I am not a regular visitor to this mailing list I tried to search for this stuff here & on strategywiki, but feel free to point me to the archives! ] I researched recently some material related to a recent catastrophic event in Polish railway history[1] and I found out that volunteers who traditionally dealt with railway matters on Polish Wikipedia have virtually disappeared. I remember that community being strong few years ago, and now we found out that even some basic information about infrastructure is left unchanged. Few people who still maintain that stuff on the Polish Wikipedia showed me that at least two other MediaWiki-based projects have been started to fill the gap: [2][3] The latter greets you even with a very nice shot of *the* railway junction that was instrumental in a recent railway crash. One of the projects got started by experienced Wikipedia editors. They still copy some of their content to the Polish Wikipedia, but only after it matures; I asked them about the reasons to go outside of the Wikipedia and they said: * They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible to follow development of the railway infrastructure and operations using only high quality published sources; * They got bitten a bit by the "notability" discussions in their field; they want to document every track, every junction and every locomotive and they are tired of discussing how "notable" a particular piece of railway equipment really is. I would have said it's just a single case, but I've seen some successful web portals being launched by people interested in history; what is different from many history research and fan pages is that I've also seen some active members of Wikipedia community becoming more and more active on those independent sites. It might be that (unproven theory) really valuable authors are living on a verge of original research; at some point they might prefer to turn over to indepedent sites. There may be other factors too: smaller, friendlier community; possibility to start anew and so on. As few of those sites are using MediaWiki software I started to call them "pre-wikis". Some of them might become a sort of a "waiting rooms" for the content to be published on "mature" Wikipedia. To me, analogy to the Wikipedia-Nupedia story is striking. What's interesting is that people are not afraid to use MediaWiki *again* (with all its well-known deficiencies). In general, I think this is nothing new. There are thousands of fan wikis on places like Wikia, where certainly some contributors copy over some mature content to Wikipedia, should licensing allow that. But maybe there is some trend that could probably be better researched, and here are my questions to you: (1) Do you see similar trend in your respective communities (preferably not only English-speaking ones)? (2) Is there a legitimate need for multi-tiered development of the knowledge-related content (test wikis, "pre-wikis", sighted revisions) or shall we pursue "flat development space" ideal? (3) Assuming we find the abovemetioned trend to be generally a good thing, shouldn't we try to research some methodologies to find out whether there is sizeable effort supporting our goals outside of the core Wikimedia movement? (4) Assuming we don't like what's going on, shouldn't we revisit some of Wikipedia core values (like "no original research", but not only) and try to address the issue there? (5) Has Wikipedia as a "product" achieved some maturity in a way that the real growth and innovation needs to go somewhere else, as no product/project lasts forever? Maybe it's something around the question that Kim Bruning asked on strategywiki [4] and also [5]: "we need to find some way to infuse new life into wikis that are coming to the end of the WikiLifeCycle. Wiki-communities can, do and will blow up, and we need to learn how to prevent it, or have plans on what to do and how to pick up the pieces." //Marcin Cieślak User:Saper from plwiki [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szczekociny_rail_crash [2] http://enkol.pl/ [3] http://semaforek.pl/wiki/index.php/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna [4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=942&oldid=931 [5] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=1075

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[Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not "Foundation") matters
by Erik Moeller 08 Apr '12

08 Apr '12

Hi all, We currently have this public list for Wikimedia Foundation matters, as well as a private list called "internal-l" which in practice is in large part used for WMF/chapters discussions, because chapter board members are added to it by default. The latter is often used for discussions that impact community members, but neither the discussions nor the results are always a matter of public record. Unfortunately, the name foundation-l is also one which signals exclusion; it pre-dates the very complex and large network of organizations and individuals that we are today. Others have made this suggestion before me, and I like it, so I've tried to put it into a proposal: Let's have a public list that's clearly named and scoped to be relevant to all Wikimedia matters. We're too big and too complicated to fit comfortably under the "Foundation" umbrella any longer. That new list wouldn't be intended to replace foundation-l (which would continue to be used for matters strictly related to the Wikimedia Foundation) or to internal-l (which may have some legitimate uses, although I personally find it unnecessary and unsubscribed from it). The full proposal is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l_proposal I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments here or on-wiki. All best, Erik

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[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
by Sue Gardner 06 Apr '12

06 Apr '12

Hey folks, I sent the note below to the staff and board a few hours ago: sharing now with everyone :-) Thanks, Sue ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> Date: 20 March 2012 19:17 Subject: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team! To: Staff All <wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Hey folks, A couple of changes at the Wikimedia Foundation that I want you to know about. Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia’s projects is our top priority. To make better progress, as of April 16 we're going to bring together resources from the Community and Engineering/Product departments into a new cross-functional team tasked specifically with conducting small, rapid experiments designed to improve editor retention. We already know some of the fixes that will solve the editor retention problem, and we're working to put them in place. The purpose of *this* team will be to identify the fixes we don't yet know about. Separately, Zack has to move back to Missouri for family reasons. When Zack told me about that, we agreed that it’s an extra impetus for this new team to be launched now. This means that going forward, Zack’s department will focus solely on fundraising, and some members of his department will move permanently into other groups. There have been lots of conversations about this over the past few weeks, which have included everyone affected. So here’s what we’re going to do: FUNDRAISING: Zack will manage fundraising remotely. He’ll continue to be part of the C-level team, but he’ll do it from Missouri. He’ll travel back to San Francisco frequently, and he’ll probably be here throughout the fundraising campaign every year and spend other longer chunks of time here when needed. We don’t yet know what the title of Zack’s department will be, or what Zack’s title will be. Neither Zack nor I care very much about titles, and we are in the happy position of not particularly needing to impress anyone -- so, we do not need fancy euphemistic titles. It would be nice to have titles that are clear and direct and understandable, and also to have ones that reflect the creative/storytelling/community aspect of the fundraising team’s work. So, we are leaving this piece open for the time being, and we’ll just call the department “fundraising” until and unless we think of something better. Folks with suggestions should talk with Zack. :-) EDITOR ENGAGEMENT EXPERIMENTATION: Reflecting the importance of editor engagement in the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy, we will have the following teams directly focused on it: **the Visual Editor group (led by Trevor as lead developer, and by the soon-to-be hired Technical Product Analyst) which is making the visual editor; **the Editor Engagement group (led by Fabrice Florin as Product Manager and Ian Baker as ScrumMaster) which is working on medium-term projects improving Wikimedia’s handling of reputation/identity and of notifications; **the new team focused on rapid experimentation, led by Karyn as Product Manager and a to-be-hired engineering lead/ScrumMaster, tentatively titled something like Research & Experimentation, Editor Engagement Innovation Lab or the Rapid Experimentation Team. Our thinking is basically this: we know the Visual Editor will help with editor retention. We know that improving notifications, messaging, identity and other core features of MediaWiki will help with editor retention. But there are a handful of other smaller projects --maybe just simple tweaks, maybe ideas that should become fully-fledged new features-- that will also help. The purpose of the new experimentation team will be to conduct many quick experiments, which will identify a handful of small changes that can either be accomplished by the team itself, or be queued up as part of our overall product backlog. Staff moving from the Community Dept to Engineering and Product Development (AKA Tech) are: Karyn Gladstone, Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling, and Ryan Faulkner. They will form a team tasked with rapid experimentation to find policy, product or other changes that will increase editor retention. Karyn will head product thinking and maintain the experimentation backlog, reporting to Howie. Alolita will hire and manage the engineers for this team, and will help interface them with the rest of the engineering organization. The important thing to know about this team is that they are being tasked with one of our absolutely most important objectives: to figure out new ways to increase editor engagement and retention. Karyn will report to Howie. Maryana, Ryan Faulker, and Steven will report to Karyn. The group has never had engineering resources assigned to it, and it’s clear they need engineering resources. Therefore, Alolita will work in close partnership with Karyn to recruit an engineering team --mostly developers but also UI/design people-- to support the new group. If you have ideas for people we should be recruiting for this, please tell Alolita or Karyn! Dario Taraborelli will join the editor engagement experimentation team as senior researcher and help design the roadmap and the individual experiments the team will run. We don’t yet have a firm title for the experimentation team, nor do we know yet what Karyn’s title will be, or whether other people’s titles (like, Steven or Maryana’s) will change. The team will figure this out, and to that end they’re kicking it around with other staff and with some folks in the community. FELLOWSHIPS: As most of you know, Siko runs our fellowship program. The fellowship program has lots of similarities to Asaf’s work on the grants program -- they are both, at heart, about giving funding and other support to members of the Wikimedia community to enable people to do useful work. The community-building projects that fellows often take on line up with some of Global Dev’s work, particularly as the fellowship program expands its global reach. So as we’ve been talking through Zack’s move and the implications for the Community department, it makes sense to shift Siko to Global Development. Siko’s title remains Head of Community Fellowships for now and she will report to Barry. Fellows and fellowship projects are continuing as planned, and you are still highly encouraged to keep an eye peeled for community members with good fellowship ideas. :) EDITOR RETENTION OVERALL: Finally, I want to talk for a minute about editor retention overall. As you know, we started the year with two major goals: the increase the number of mobile pageviews to two billion, and to push up the number of active editors to 95K. We’re doing fine on mobile reach (yay!) but we are completely failing to move the needle on the number of active Wikimedia editors. That doesn’t reflect poorly on the people who work on editor retention. It’s a complex problem that took a decade to develop, and the team doesn’t control all the variables affecting it. It makes sense that it will take time to fix. But it does mean that we need to increase the resources focused on it, so we can get more done faster. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re reorganizing to focus our existing resources more tightly, and we’ll also be adding new resources -- starting now, and continuing through the 2012-13 financial planning process. And, we’re going to move many/most of the editor-retention related people up to the 6th floor by the collab space. I really love the model Zack developed for the annual campaign -- the war room in Yongle, work visible on the walls for everyone, the buzz of people working hard towards a common purpose. I want us to have that same energy and momentum and focus for the editor retention work. Sorry for this long note, but I figure you will all be curious about this and have questions, so the goal here was to anticipate everything and get it answered up-front. This note was crafted collectively by many people :-) If questions remain, please feel free to ask them, or to talk with any of the individuals involved. And thanks to everyone who contributed to creating this plan: I very much appreciate everyone’s single-minded focus on attacking the editor retention problem, and I look forward to future success moving the needle on it. Everything I talk about in this mail will take effect April 16. Once it’s in your in-box, it’s no longer confidential, and you can feel free to talk about it publicly. I will forward it to announce-l, after I give you a couple of hours to read it yourselves. And please join me in congratulating the folks who are going to work on this important new team :-) Thanks, Sue Q What’s the impetus behind these changes? A Two things. Mainly, we want to redouble our focus on attacking the editor retention problem, and it makes sense for us therefore to consolidate our efforts into a single focused mega-team. Secondarily, Zack has decided he needs to relocate to Missouri. We had already been talking about whether consolidation made sense -- with Zack moving, that accelerated those conversations. Q What’s happening to Zack? A Zack will lead our fundraising remotely, as a C-level employee. His title and the title of his team will change to reflect that, but no final decisions have been made yet about what those titles will be. Ideally we’d like to have a title for that department, and for Zack, that reflects the storytelling aspect of their work, telling the community’s stories to the world. But in the end we may settle for just calling it Fundraising, if we don’t think of anything better. Q What’s happening to the Community Department? A We initially created a community department because it made sense to have focused resources dedicated to understanding the community and being a centre of expertise about it for the Wikimedia Foundation. At the time that was the right thing to do, because although some individual staff members had lots of community understanding, the organization as a whole did not -- which meant it made sense for us to focus our energy, for a time, on researching and documenting and analysing the community. But having a Community Department was never a perfect fit for the Wikimedia Foundation the way it is for other internet companies, because community is not a small subset or a single aspect of what we do at the Wikimedia Foundation --- all our departments have interactions with community members for multiple different purposes, and over time we have been growing specific community expertise and responsibilities in multiple departments throughout the organization. As expertise grew elsewhere, having a community department became a less-good fit for us. Basically: it made sense to have a Community Department at the time when we did it, and it makes less sense now as the organization has matured and evolved. Q Why are you integrating the Karyn/Ryan/Steven/Maryana group into Engineering and Product Development? A The goal is to create a better model for rapid experimentation/innovation, with minimal hindrance to the work of our active editors and maximal gain in new community members. That group is not necessarily a perfect fit with Engineering and Product Development, but we think that’s okay: it’s a good fit, and being in that department will enable the team to increase its impact overall, by giving it better access to UI/design and engineering resources. Q How is the new product team different from Fabrice’s team? A The new team won’t focus on critical major changes to the platform (like the Visual Editor) or critical but equally complex projects like improving the mechanisms by which editors communicate and collaborate on the projects. This team will be much more fast-paced and experimental, identifying small-scale interventions that might make an impact on editor retention and quickly iterating through them on a weekly (or even daily) basis. Unlike Fabrice’s team, which has a list of projects that are known to be important and impactful, this team will quickly cycle through a large number of ideas that have not yet been tested in order to identify what does and doesn’t work, and what can be integrated into existing product roadmaps. Q Will this new team be building new features? A No. Ideas for new features that come out of successful experiments will be handed off to Fabrice’s team or elsewhere in engineering/tech as is appropriate for the task. Q What kinds of projects will this new team be working on? A Some of our projects will be similar to the template A/B testing conducted by Steven, Maryana, and Ryan Faulkner: small tweaks to existing community-built systems like template messaging. Others will focus on more innovative ways to engage new and current editors, using notifications, task assignment, and different kinds of incentives to keep editing. All of the projects will be temporary tests, not permanent large-scale changes, and focus on measuring effects to inform further decisions. Q How can volunteers give input on this work? A Ping Steven or Maryana. Q Who will be in charge of this work? A The C-level in charge of this team is Erik Moeller. The team reports to Karyn Gladstone. Q Where will fellowships live and how do fellows fit with other teams? A The fellowships program will move to Global Development, but the structure and scope of current and planned fellowships will not change. Fellows will continue to be recruited from the community to work on their own projects, supported by Siko Bouterse, Head of the Fellowships Program. Q Where will other community projects live (e.g., summer researchers/analytics, community convenings)? A Current community department projects will be integrated into either the new team or other teams in the organization, depending on their purpose. Convenings of various kinds will be staged on an ad hoc basis by multiple groups, including this one. Q What’s happening to fundraising and storytelling? A The fundraising team, which includes storytelling, will be managed by Zack and will continue to operate as planned. Q Why is this all so confusing? The Wikimedia Foundation changes people’s titles and reporting lines all the time! A Yes, we do :-) The Wikimedia Foundation is a pretty young organization: it’s growing, and doing lots of experimentation. We learn new things all the time, and we want to be able to apply what we’re learning, which includes restructuring/reinventing ourselves. If we were a hundred-year-old organization, or if we had tens of thousands of employees, it would be hard for us to adapt and change, because there would be too many layers of people who would need to be involved, and the downstream implications of even small changes would be serious. That’s a problem for big/old organizations, because it limits their adaptability. Luckily, at this point the Wikimedia Foundation is still small enough and young enough that we can afford to be reasonably flexible. That said, we know that this kind of change can be confusing for people who aren’t involved (at a minimum, it’s one more long e-mail to read), so we appreciate everybody’s patience :-) Q How can I join this team? A We’re hiring! We’re looking for more experienced editors to help us design experiments, track results, and communicate what we’re doing. We are also looking for strong front-and back-end developers to deploy experiments. If you’re interested in working with us, please check out available positions on the Wikimedia Foundation jobs page: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l

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[Foundation-l] first Wikidata office hour on IRC
by Lydia Pintscher 04 Apr '12

04 Apr '12

Hi everyone! Next week the Wikidata team will be complete and start working at full speed. Finally! \o/ I will be holding the first round of Wikidata office hours next week. You're all invited to ask questions and discuss. If you can't attend there will be logs. * 4. April, German, in #wikimedia-wikidata on freenode, 4:30pm UTC (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikidata+Office+Ho… for different time zones) * 5. April, English, in #wikimedia-wikidata on freenode, 4:30pm UTC (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikidata+Office+Ho… for different time zones) I plan to offer these regularly. My (virtual) door is open outside these office hours as well of course ;-) Cheers Lydia http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Eisenacher Straße 2 10777 Berlin www.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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[Foundation-l] WikiData and Football, WikiData and OpenGovernmentData, 2.9 Mio Eur from European tax payers
by andreas meier 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

Hi, Through reports in the German Television I was made aware of the WikiData project. This sounds really interesting. I could also find the press announcement online. There was a reference to the European Union Project, which seemed to be instrumental to kick this off: http://render-project.eu, and I was surprised that such diverse entities were behind this: Google in Ireland, Telefonica in Spain, KIT University in Germany, SIT University in Austria, JSI University in Slovenia, and Ontotext from Bulgaria. The budget of Render is 4.4 Mio Eur, and the contribution from European taxpayers is 2.9 Mio Eur. I also saw the first year presentation: http://render-project.eu/resources/presentations/project-review-year-1, and am wondering if and how the following use cases fit into the project. 1. Open Goverment Data There is a German Wikipedia article about this: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_Data. And also a website explaining it a little more: http://opengovernmentdata.org/. Will there be any liason of WikiData with Open Goverment Data? 2. Sports Results When I tried to edit Wikipedia first, i wanted to update some sports results of my favoured football club F.C. Barcelona. Unfortunately I failed. I failed as well to copy from another language, the table syntax was too complicated and it somehow seems to differ from one languate version to the other. Will WikiData address current sports results, updating it and make it available for all language versions of Wikipedia? With best regards, Andi.

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Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 96, Issue 95
by Craig Franklin 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

> > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 08:48:55 +0100 > From: Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com> > To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List > <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Board Resolutions from March 30th 2012 > Message-ID: > <CAFche1q0KhJtZK2MyPK1SsKKxK0H3EebfiAf_1uMGaCiV1tbXQ(a)mail.gmail.com > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 5:56 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com > > > > wrote: > > > On 31 March 2012 02:03, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > >> I expect that the minutes will explain the varied positions of the > > >> board. If not, then the board should put in place procedures to > > >> prevent abuse of abstains. > > > > > > Could you elaborate on what you mean by "abuse of abstains"? > > > > An abstention is a refusal to vote. By doing this, a trustee must > > have a good reason, such as conflict of interest, and it should be > > minuted why, or they are refusing the duties of their appointment and > > should be removed. > > > > > I have never heard of this idea before - where did you get it from? > > People with votes on all kinds of bodies abstain on things all the time, > for all kinds of valid reasons. The most prominent recent example I can > think of is that Sivlio Berlusconi's government in Italy was brought down > by MPs he expected to support him abstaining instead. > > We don't know why Arne and Bishakka abstained, or why SJ voted against - it > is only evident they did not feel able to support the motion as it stood. > > Regards, > > Chris > For the record, those who did not vote in favour of the resolutions, this morning explained their reasons for doing so. I'm sure someone more eloquent than I can summarise those reasons, but I think that they were valid. John Vandenberg is correct that if people are consistently abstaining to avoid making hard or unpopular decisions then that is a problem, but I do not think that this is presently the case with the BoT. Cheers, Craig Franklin

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[Foundation-l] (no subject)
by Ferdinando Scala 31 Mar '12

31 Mar '12

http://vdi.pl/drupal/themes/bluemarine/jb6.php nandoscala(a)yahoo.it G Rigoni Make money in the Internet. We show you how it works 3/31/2012 12:02:36 PM

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