Wikimedia-l August 2016

86 participants
55 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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Fresh data on the gender gap in content
by Asaf Bartov 10 Feb '20

10 Feb '20

Hullo everyone. I was asked by a volunteer for help getting stats on the gender gap in content on a certain Wikipedia, and came up with simple Wikidata Query Service[1] queries that pulled the total number of articles on a given Wikipedia about men and about women, to calculate *the proportion of articles about women out of all articles about humans*. Then I was curious about how that wiki compared to other wikis, so I ran the queries on a bunch of languages, and gathered the results into a table, here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ijon/Content_gap (please see the *caveat* there.) I don't have time to fully write-up everything I find interesting in those results, but I will quickly point out the following: 1. The Nepali statistic is simply astonishing! There must be a story there. I'm keen on learning more about this, if anyone can shed light. 2. Evidently, ~13%-17% seems like a robust average of the proportion of articles about women among all biographies. 3. among the top 10 largest wikis, Japanese is the least imbalanced. Good job, Japanese Wikipedians! I wonder if you have a good sense of what drives this relatively better balance. (my instinctive guess is pop culture coverage.) 4. among the top 10 largest wikis, Russian is the most imbalanced. 5. I intend to re-generate these stats every two months or so, to eventually have some sense of trends and changes. 6. Your efforts, particularly on small-to-medium wikis, can really make a dent in these numbers! For example, it seems I am personally responsible[2] for almost 1% of the coverage of women on Hebrew Wikipedia! :) 7. I encourage you to share these numbers with your communities. Perhaps you'd like to overtake the wiki just above yours? :) 8. I'm happy to add additional languages to the table, by request. Or you can do it yourself, too. :) A. [1] https://query.wikidata.org/ [2] Yay #100wikidays :) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/100wikidays -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org> Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org

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Arbital, another Wikipedia competitor/complement
by David Gerard 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Being put together by Eliezer Yudkowsky of LessWrong. Content is cc-by-sa 3.0, don't know about the software. https://arbital.com/p/arbital_ambitions/ Rather than the "encyclopedia" approach, it tries to be more pedagogical, teaching the reader at their level. Analysis from a sometime Yudkowsky critic on Tumblr: http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/140995096534/a-year-ago-i-remember-be… (there's a pile more comments linked from the notes on that post, mostly from quasi-fans; I have an acerbic comment in there, but you should look at the site yourself first.) No idea if this will go anywhere, but might be of interest; new approaches generally are. They started in December, first publicised it a week ago and have been scaling up. First day it collapsed due to load from a Facebook post announcement ... so maybe hold off before announcing it everywhere :-) - d.

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New tools: pronuncify and pronuncify.net
by Asaf Bartov 27 Jan '17

27 Jan '17

Hello, everyone. (this is an announcement in my capacity as a volunteer.) Inspired by a lightning talk at the recent CEE Meeting[1] by our colleague Lars Aronsson, I made a little command-line tool to automate batch recording of pronunciations of words by native speakers, for uploading to Commons and integration into Wiktionary etc. It is called *pronuncify*, is written in Ruby and uses the sox(1) tool, and should work on any modern Linux (and possibly OS X) machine. It is available here[2], with instructions. I was then asked about a Windows version, and agreed to attempt one. This version is called *pronuncify.net <http://pronuncify.net>*, and is a .NET gooey GUI version of the same tool, with slightly different functions. It is available here[3], with instructions. Both tools require word-list files in plaintext, with one word (or phrase) per line. Both tools name the files according to the standard established in [[commons:Category:Pronunciation]], and convert them to Ogg Vorbis for you, so they are ready to upload. In the future, I may add OAuth-based direct uploading to Commons. If you run into difficulties, please file issues on GitHub, for the appropriate tool. Feedback is welcome. A. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2015/Programme/Lightn… [2] https://github.com/abartov/pronuncify [3] https://github.com/abartov/Pronuncify.net -- Asaf Bartov

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Wikiobject - Project Proposal
by Quico Prol 29 Oct '16

29 Oct '16

Hi, how about a wikipedia about objects? Instead of generic articles of , for example, "Ballpoint pen" or "Bic cristal" it would be "Ballpoint pen Bic cristal 2014" Doing these for millions of objects would allow people to have an open, free, universal and central place to refer specific objects. *Some possible applications:* - Creating neutral and standard lists: Nowadays if anyone create, for example, a tutorial for building something (DIY projects, receipts, ...) they have to link all items to a comercial or no-neutral web which could change its url in the future or redirect it to adds or whatever. Lists could be created in external webpages linking wikimedia objects webpage or/and could be created as category pages in Wikipedia. For example, currently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_of_the_Year article lists cars which won COTY award but not links to the specific car (AUDI A3 Hatchback 2012 - Present) but generic serie (Audi A3). The good thing at this point it's that to start creating object lists only item name is necessary, no infoboxes or description needed. - Universal repository for inventories: Lot of business fill their inventories again and again with same data ("cardboard box 50x30x15", "step by step nema motor 17", ... ) they should be able to import this data from a open website with their corresponding info like GTIN , SKU , Barcode... and more in the future weight, size, ... - Encourage Recycling and Reutilitation: Imagine if we use wikidata properties ( https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:List_of_properties/Generic) like "has part" and "part of" , people will find other uses for objects, or discover were to find - Social activism and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Companies have info and metrics about their costumers (habits, location, ...) why not costumers have info about companies products, who manufacture what?, what products have a good carbon footprint <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint>?, what products have been retired from some problem?, what are Fair Trade?. This also can moved companies do better. *Very rough roadmap*: 1. At the very begining, using wikidata infrestructure, objects would only have common info like "name", " image", "related links" (datasheets?), GTIN. First use cases could be doing lists or grouping objects by categories. 2. Step by step new fields could be added like "manufacturer" , "tags", ... 3. A separated website could be created. wikiobject.org isn't availiabe so url could be something like objects.wikpedia.org 4. In a long-term in order to explote all the possibilities of this project more complex fields and relations would have to be managed, like for example "fridges with energy class A+++ and width less than 80 cm", which could be easy if all always were similar but nothing further from reality A friend of mine and me tried to build a demo version in an home-made apache cassandra cluster four years ago, but we don't have enough resources and knowledge for that. *Funding* In my humble opinion, problem with wikipedia funding It's that most part of its users don't see culture as a need (sorry for that, I am a sporadic donor). In Wikiobject case I think it could rather be different. If part of companies business lies on this project, companies will be very inclined to donate to improve performace, usability, etc.. maybe similar to what happens in Linux. Where came this need from? Data needed for some software to run, product vissibility, costumer requests, etc ... , no advertisement needed, It could be a need and standart. I trully believe that world need something like this, and the correct people to do it, to warranty openness and independence, are you. thanks for your time and attention, grettings

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Fundraising Update - Japan - Focus Group and Survey Findings
by Joseph Seddon 10 Sep '16

10 Sep '16

Hello wikimedia-l! Back in February of 2015, the fundraising team engaged Lake Research Partners (LRP) to conduct a detailed survey of English language Wikimedia readers <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/c2/Wikimedia_Survey_201…>. As we look to continue to improve our efforts fundraising in non-EN languages we decided to conduct a similar fact finding exercise in one of our larger fundraising countries. Japan, being an affluent country with a large population and where our projects have had a large reach, has in some ways under-performed and seemed ripe to deliver the greatest impact for such efforts. With that in mind we again partnered with Lake Research Partners to run two focus groups consisting of readers and donors, and an online survey of 1000 Wikipedia readers and I am pleased to provide the findings of these <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/ef/Report.WikimediaJapa…> . We found the results show mostly favorable attitudes toward Wikipedia, with positive ratings on quality, look and feel, and readability, while accuracy is rated lower and mentioned as a concern among focus groups participants. We found a more urgent, direct translation was perceived as better than a more natural translation. This may be because Japanese readers are less likely to donate spontaneously than some of our Western audiences; donors are generally motivated by significant events like natural disasters. We will have to balance an urgent tone with frank politeness when crafting our appeals, and are still working to find the right balance of direct and natural translation. Soon there will be a follow up survey of the Japanese Wikimedia community to help further our understanding and one of several means by which we are improving and strengthening the community involvement in movement fundraising. Regards -- Seddon Advancement Associate (Community Engagement) Wikimedia Foundation

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New Elections Committee
by Dariusz Jemielniak 02 Sep '16

02 Sep '16

Dear members of the Wikimedia community, As you know the board passed a resolution allowing for the creation of a standing Elections Committee in November of last year [1]. Per the implementing resolution, the Board Governance Committee (BGC) has appointed the initial members from the recommendation of the Executive Director and her staff. We will be starting with 6 committee members: - User:Ajraddatz <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Ajraddatz> - User:Mardetanha <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Mardetanha> - User:Ruslik0 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Ruslik0> - User:Philippe <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Philippe>slate - User:KTC <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/KTC> - User:Atropine <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Atropine> They will be joined by two official advisors from the Wikimedia Foundation: - James Alexander (Manager, Trust & Safety) from Community Engagement - Stephen LaPorte (Senior Legal Counsel) from the WMF Legal team They will also be working closely with the BGC as a whole and especially Nataliia and me. Because I may consider applying as a candidate in the upcoming community-selection process I will be recusing for any discussions involving that election[2]. The new committee, along with the BGC, will, of course, be able to choose how many members and advisors they truly need and how to recruit the best candidates. One of the first orders of business for the committee will be to decide on a process for expanding its membership through some form of open call. While there is an enormous amount of work for the committee to do, it can be expected that they will begin looking at: - The selection of a committee Chair - The dates and process for the upcoming community selection process (and consider shortening the terms and having community elections in early 2017, so that the elected members would join the Board at April meeting[3]). - The method of voting for that process both for the upcoming selection and the future and - The composition of the board and how to ensure a steady supply of good candidates (in particular, making sure that the candidates have the skills and expertise matching the Board skill matrix while making sure that the process is still owned by the community[4]). Just as the BGC is committed to greater transparency (see for example our recent minutes[5]), the committee will likely consult with the wider Wikimedia community in developing and revising election procedures within the scope of this charter to the greatest extent possible. This day has been a long time coming and is the result of requests made by multiple different temporary election committees over the years. I'm glad to finally see it come to fruition and hope that it will allow our selection process to continue to expand and improve well beyond the record-breaking election we had in 2015. Before I sign off I also wanted to call out the amazing work of the 2015 temporary Election Committee[6]. They were put together in 2015 to do one thing: run an election. They did that well (with almost 3x the participation of the next largest year) but then they went well beyond the call of duty in serving as an advisory body to the board, offering invaluable feedback on how to fill the empty community selected seats we saw this year. They did not have to do this, but they did it anyway, and I hope that everyone can acknowledge the stress and courage that took. Please join me in thanking the 2015 committee and welcoming the new standing committee! Dariusz Jemielniak ("pundit", current Board member) - [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Elections_Committee - [2] See also my disclosure to the BGC on that matter: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_Governance_Commi… - [3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-June/084592.html - [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_Governance_Commi… - [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_Governance_Commi… - [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Committ…

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UG participation in a TV program in Brasil
by Rodrigo Padula 02 Sep '16

02 Sep '16

Hello all, Yesterday we participated in a TV program at Futura Channel (an important educational tv channel in Brasil) talking about collaboration and Wikipedia, including some information about our scientific event http://ccbwiki.wikimedia.org.br/. The video is published online and listed in our site at http://www.wikimedia.org.br/participacao%20no%20canal%20futura (PT only) That is the first Brazilian participation in a TV program with good local repercussion transmitted to the entire country. Regards! Rodrigo Padula Coordenador de Projetos Grupo Wikimedia Brasileiro de Educação e Pesquisa http://www.wikimedia.org.br 21 99326-0558

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Marketing jobs at the Wikimedia Foundation
by Gerard Meijssen 02 Sep '16

02 Sep '16

Hoi, At the research mailing list two relevant activities were mentioned that do not adequately take place. * *Gamified interfaces for microcontributions à la Wikidata game* ** **Ubiquitous outreach, supported by dedicated technology* The notion exists that it is possible to do all kind of technological things to make things stand out more but the big problem is imho not technological. It is not content, it is the awareness that marketing is more than selling things. A respected Wikimedian made the bold statement that "Wikipedia could absolutely have 100x the number of editors it has now".I would argue that this is correct My question is not could marketing methods make a difference but what objectives do we have that will benefit from a marketing approach. What does it take to be more pro-active towards our objectives? Thanks, GerardM

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Wikimedia-l August 2016