Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia
This thread just made me realize that it hasn't been implemented yet and that what I have been using is yet another Magnus gadget, which, btw, I can highly recommend! When I search in Wikipedia, I see a subsection at the bottom which begins with Wikidata search results. It's great and I use it all the time to find images, articles, and other links On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 12:15 AM, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: If it's that trivial to implement, implement it. That's a very compressed way of saying; I think it's fine for us to disagree on this list. But, really? Pine's email made you despair? It, by inference, made you conclude he doesn't accept new things? You find the absence of a feature actively irrational? It's okay for Pine's vision to be different from yours, or mine, or Aaron's, or anyone else's. Wikimedia's ethos is not built on any one person's vision: it is built on the sum of all of our hopes (in an ideal universe). It's not a one-in, one-out system where ideas must be harshly and actively countered so that yours can take primacy. So let's try and stay non-hyperbolic and civil on this list, please. As a heuristic; if even /you/ feel a need to write an apology for your email into an email, don't hit send. On 27 October 2014 17:14, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, I read your mail again. It makes me despair. Wikimedia research is NOT about Wikipedia, not exclusively. When I read what is an inspiration to you I find all the reasons why Wikipedians do not accept anything new. Why we still do not have a search that also returns information on what is NOT in that particular Wikipedia. It is only one example out of many. It is however so easy to implement, it defies logic that it has not happened on all Wikipedias. It is just one example that demonstrates that we do not even share the sum of all information that is available to us. ... Sorry, GerardM On 20 October 2014 08:23, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Both of the presentations at the October Wikimedia Research Showcase were fascinating and I encourage everyone to watch them [1]. I would like to continue to discuss the themes from the showcase about Wikipedia's adaptability, viability, and diversity. Aaron's discussion about Wikipedia's ongoing internal adaptations, and the slowing of those adaptations, reminded me of this statement from MIT Technology Review in 2013 (and I recommend reading the whole article [2]): The main source of those problems (with Wikipedia) is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase partipcipation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage. I would like to contrast that vision of Wikipedia with the vision presented by User:CatherineMunro (formatting tweaks by me), which I re-read when I need encouragement: THIS IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of our past, in which we must delve The well of our future, The clear water we must leave untainted for those who come after us, The fertile earth, in which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands, And the broad fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not know. How can we align ouselves less with the former vision and more with the latter? [3] I hope that we can continue to discuss these themes on the Research mailing list. Please contribute your thoughts and questions there. Regards, Pine [1] youtube.com/watch?v=-We4GZbH3Iw [2] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/ [3] Lest this at first seem to be impossible, I will borrow and tweak a quote from from George Bernard Shaw and later used by John F. Kennedy: Some people see things as they are and say, 'Why?' Let us dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?' ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia
Hoi, I agree when it is the only thing I said. Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them and several times) and I always hear good idea, should be easy, we ill look into it and we get back to you. But as I said, your reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not. Thanks, GerardM On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfa...@gmail.com wrote: Gerard. Did you file the feature request? If not, you are ranting at the wrong mailing list. On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Despair is a personal emotion. What makes you think that despair is an attack on a person? It is not. Oliver, I despair about what the Research list has become and, I will explain why. What I despair about is the overwhelming amount of Wikipedia related noise. Noise because it feels to me like the same subjects are covered in endless similar ways. I despair because when something new happens OUTSIDE of this, the English Wikipedia it is completely ignored. Much of what I hear feels like noise because it lacks practical relevance. Research, statistics could show What are people looking for most in Wikipedia but cannot find. We do not have that because of no reason I can think of and, it has been promised often enough for years now. The Swedish Wikipedia finds that their bot generated articles has rejuvenated their Wikipedia but the research community is quiet about it.. Ignores it ? Wikidata has statistics [1] its data has a real meaning about Wikipedia, about Wikidata and about the sum of all information AVAILABLE to us. The consequence of all this self promotion is that there is no attention for anything else.. Yes, we know there is a gender disparity but what about people with a mental health problem.. We have way more people editing who are enriched with a diagnosis than is average. What do our projects mean for them, does it help them with their self awareness, does it help them recover, is our community aware of it and how does it cope or fail to cope. What practical steps can we take to make these valuable contributors more secure, less anxious? Researching the same things over and over does not help us understand WIkipedia, our other projects, our communities. It does not help us achieve our aim; it is share in the sum of all knowledge, we do not even share all the knowledge that is available to us. Why not? How can we do this? Jane knows the tool that provides a selection of Wikipedias with search results from Wikidata. It works, Ori looked at it from a performance point of view. NOTHING NEEDS TO BE DONE TO IMPLEMENT IT. It does not happen. A research question would be Why. The statistics for Wikidata are not up to date because the dumps are faulty. It is not clear, obvious that it is of real concern to the people responisble. However this data IS used to run specific bots based on what the numbers show. The numbers matter, the statistics matter they have a real demonstrable impact. What I am looking for is relevance and I find only research for more fine grained explanations not for solutions. It is why I despair, it is because it feels so much like a colossal waste of time when you consider that researching subjects with a different objective would help us forward so much. Maybe my expectations are unrealistic and people doing research are just another incrowd doing their own thing. Thanks, GerardM [1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php?reverse On 28 October 2014 00:15, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: If it's that trivial to implement, implement it. That's a very compressed way of saying; I think it's fine for us to disagree on this list. But, really? Pine's email made you despair? It, by inference, made you conclude he doesn't accept new things? You find the absence of a feature actively irrational? It's okay for Pine's vision to be different from yours, or mine, or Aaron's, or anyone else's. Wikimedia's ethos is not built on any one person's vision: it is built on the sum of all of our hopes (in an ideal universe). It's not a one-in, one-out system where ideas must be harshly and actively countered so that yours can take primacy. So let's try and stay non-hyperbolic and civil on this list, please. As a heuristic; if even /you/ feel a need to write an apology for your email into an email, don't hit send. On 27 October 2014 17:14, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, I read your mail again. It makes me despair. Wikimedia research is NOT about Wikipedia, not exclusively. When I read what is an inspiration to you I find all the reasons why Wikipedians do not accept anything new. Why we still do not have a search that also returns information on what is NOT in that particular Wikipedia. It is only one example out of many. It is however so easy to implement, it defies logic that it
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)
Hey folks, I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really relevant to the thread it appeared in. Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia. I'm studying the nature of socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems work break down. When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata will benefit from what I have learned. -Aaron On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, I agree when it is the only thing I said. Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them and several times) and I always hear good idea, should be easy, we ill look into it and we get back to you. But as I said, your reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not. Thanks, GerardM On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfa...@gmail.com wrote: Gerard. Did you file the feature request? If not, you are ranting at the wrong mailing list. On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Despair is a personal emotion. What makes you think that despair is an attack on a person? It is not. Oliver, I despair about what the Research list has become and, I will explain why. What I despair about is the overwhelming amount of Wikipedia related noise. Noise because it feels to me like the same subjects are covered in endless similar ways. I despair because when something new happens OUTSIDE of this, the English Wikipedia it is completely ignored. Much of what I hear feels like noise because it lacks practical relevance. Research, statistics could show What are people looking for most in Wikipedia but cannot find. We do not have that because of no reason I can think of and, it has been promised often enough for years now. The Swedish Wikipedia finds that their bot generated articles has rejuvenated their Wikipedia but the research community is quiet about it.. Ignores it ? Wikidata has statistics [1] its data has a real meaning about Wikipedia, about Wikidata and about the sum of all information AVAILABLE to us. The consequence of all this self promotion is that there is no attention for anything else.. Yes, we know there is a gender disparity but what about people with a mental health problem.. We have way more people editing who are enriched with a diagnosis than is average. What do our projects mean for them, does it help them with their self awareness, does it help them recover, is our community aware of it and how does it cope or fail to cope. What practical steps can we take to make these valuable contributors more secure, less anxious? Researching the same things over and over does not help us understand WIkipedia, our other projects, our communities. It does not help us achieve our aim; it is share in the sum of all knowledge, we do not even share all the knowledge that is available to us. Why not? How can we do this? Jane knows the tool that provides a selection of Wikipedias with search results from Wikidata. It works, Ori looked at it from a performance point of view. NOTHING NEEDS TO BE DONE TO IMPLEMENT IT. It does not happen. A research question would be Why. The statistics for Wikidata are not up to date because the dumps are faulty. It is not clear, obvious that it is of real concern to the people responisble. However this data IS used to run specific bots based on what the numbers show. The numbers matter, the statistics matter they have a real demonstrable impact. What I am looking for is relevance and I find only research for more fine grained explanations not for solutions. It is why I despair, it is because it feels so much like a colossal waste of time when you consider that researching subjects with a different objective would help us forward so much. Maybe my expectations are unrealistic and people doing research are just another incrowd doing their own thing. Thanks, GerardM [1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php?reverse On 28 October 2014 00:15, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: If it's that trivial to implement, implement it. That's a very compressed way of saying; I think it's fine for us to disagree on this list. But, really? Pine's email made you despair? It, by inference, made you conclude he doesn't accept new things? You find the absence of a feature actively irrational? It's okay for Pine's vision to be different from yours, or mine, or Aaron's, or anyone else's. Wikimedia's ethos is not built on any one person's vision: it is built on the sum of all of our hopes (in an ideal universe). It's not a one-in, one-out system where ideas must be harshly and actively countered so that yours can take primacy. So let's try and stay non-hyperbolic and civil on this list, please. As a heuristic; if even
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia
(broke Gerard's discussion into a separate thread. See https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2014-October/003900.html ) Kerry's conceptualization of a legitimizing ideology is interesting. It doesn't seem like the ideology itself is a problem though. Quality control is important. However I think the criticism is still well met since ideologies -- even good ones -- have the potential to legitimize bad behavior. One strategy to make some change here would be to find a way to measure the amount of lost quality/productivity caused by aggressive application of rules and a lack of consideration for newcomers. Kerry put forward an idea for a research project exploring trends in editor interactions[1] that I think has the potential for insights in this area. I'm working with Pine to gather datasets that would make analysis of interactions easier to perform[2]. 1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Ideas/Editor_profiles_and_interactions 2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Editor_Interaction_Data_Extraction_and_Visualization On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, I agree when it is the only thing I said. Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them and several times) and I always hear good idea, should be easy, we ill look into it and we get back to you. But as I said, your reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not. Thanks, GerardM On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfa...@gmail.com wrote: Gerard. Did you file the feature request? If not, you are ranting at the wrong mailing list. On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Despair is a personal emotion. What makes you think that despair is an attack on a person? It is not. Oliver, I despair about what the Research list has become and, I will explain why. What I despair about is the overwhelming amount of Wikipedia related noise. Noise because it feels to me like the same subjects are covered in endless similar ways. I despair because when something new happens OUTSIDE of this, the English Wikipedia it is completely ignored. Much of what I hear feels like noise because it lacks practical relevance. Research, statistics could show What are people looking for most in Wikipedia but cannot find. We do not have that because of no reason I can think of and, it has been promised often enough for years now. The Swedish Wikipedia finds that their bot generated articles has rejuvenated their Wikipedia but the research community is quiet about it.. Ignores it ? Wikidata has statistics [1] its data has a real meaning about Wikipedia, about Wikidata and about the sum of all information AVAILABLE to us. The consequence of all this self promotion is that there is no attention for anything else.. Yes, we know there is a gender disparity but what about people with a mental health problem.. We have way more people editing who are enriched with a diagnosis than is average. What do our projects mean for them, does it help them with their self awareness, does it help them recover, is our community aware of it and how does it cope or fail to cope. What practical steps can we take to make these valuable contributors more secure, less anxious? Researching the same things over and over does not help us understand WIkipedia, our other projects, our communities. It does not help us achieve our aim; it is share in the sum of all knowledge, we do not even share all the knowledge that is available to us. Why not? How can we do this? Jane knows the tool that provides a selection of Wikipedias with search results from Wikidata. It works, Ori looked at it from a performance point of view. NOTHING NEEDS TO BE DONE TO IMPLEMENT IT. It does not happen. A research question would be Why. The statistics for Wikidata are not up to date because the dumps are faulty. It is not clear, obvious that it is of real concern to the people responisble. However this data IS used to run specific bots based on what the numbers show. The numbers matter, the statistics matter they have a real demonstrable impact. What I am looking for is relevance and I find only research for more fine grained explanations not for solutions. It is why I despair, it is because it feels so much like a colossal waste of time when you consider that researching subjects with a different objective would help us forward so much. Maybe my expectations are unrealistic and people doing research are just another incrowd doing their own thing. Thanks, GerardM [1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php?reverse On 28 October 2014 00:15, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote: If it's that trivial to implement, implement it. That's a very compressed way of saying; I think it's fine for us to disagree on this list. But, really? Pine's email made you
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)
Hi everyone, I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread: *we need 10K or even 100K new active editors: would it not result in even higher levels of bureaucracy? Internet technologies have certainly allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000 active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise… *English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility. I would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021 on Wikipedia politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…). *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate. The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down http://scoms.hypotheses.org/241 after 2012. This is not because these communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil to greet newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to enhance participation would be to make some global change on society (reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time, creating a basic income, you name it…). That's all, folks PCL Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit : Hey folks, I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really relevant to the thread it appeared in. Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia. I'm studying the nature of socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems work break down. When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata will benefit from what I have learned. -Aaron On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com mailto:gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, I agree when it is the only thing I said. Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them and several times) and I always hear good idea, should be easy, we ill look into it and we get back to you. But as I said, your reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not. Thanks, GerardM On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfa...@gmail.com mailto:aaron.halfa...@gmail.com wrote: Gerard. Did you file the feature request? If not, you are ranting at the wrong mailing list. On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com mailto:gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, Despair is a personal emotion. What makes you think that despair is an attack on a person? It is not. Oliver, I despair about what the Research list has become and, I will explain why. What I despair about is the
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)
Hello, to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by Marwell and Oliver The Critical Mass in Collective Action (1993) http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsCredir_esc=y which points that fact that after some times, project are mature and need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood (which is, sometime, boring) Nicolas Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit : Hi everyone, I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread: *we need 10K or even 100K new active editors: would it not result in even higher levels of bureaucracy? Internet technologies have certainly allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000 active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise… *English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility. I would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021 on Wikipedia politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…). *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate. The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down http://scoms.hypotheses.org/241 after 2012. This is not because these communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil to greet newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to enhance participation would be to make some global change on society (reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time, creating a basic income, you name it…). That's all, folks PCL Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit : Hey folks, I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really relevant to the thread it appeared in. Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia. I'm studying the nature of socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems work break down. When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata will benefit from what I have learned. -Aaron On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com mailto:gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, I agree when it is the only thing I said. Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them and several times) and I always hear good idea, should be easy, we ill look into it and we get back to you. But as I said, your reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not. Thanks, GerardM On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfa...@gmail.com mailto:aaron.halfa...@gmail.com wrote: Gerard. Did you file the feature request? If not, you are ranting at the wrong mailing list.
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)
Not trolling, but wondering if there is a different lens through which to view the present situation. Let me preface a question with this: NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not easily submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins for the issues in play. My question is this: Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly in the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is, as-well-as-possible justified points of view, are crucial to understanding the situation? On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien nicolas.jull...@telecom-bretagne.eu wrote: Hello, to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by Marwell and Oliver The Critical Mass in Collective Action (1993) http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_ Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsCredir_esc=y which points that fact that after some times, project are mature and need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood (which is, sometime, boring) Nicolas Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit : Hi everyone, I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread: *we need 10K or even 100K new active editors: would it not result in even higher levels of bureaucracy? Internet technologies have certainly allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000 active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise… *English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility. I would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021 on Wikipedia politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…). *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate. The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down http://scoms.hypotheses.org/241 after 2012. This is not because these communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil to greet newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to enhance participation would be to make some global change on society (reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time, creating a basic income, you name it…). That's all, folks PCL Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit : Hey folks, I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really relevant to the thread it appeared in. Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia. I'm studying the nature of socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems work break down. When it reaches maturity, I hope
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)
I do not think we have too much of an issue here, thanks to Undue Weight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources_and_undue_weight: an encyclopedic article has to show the respective weight of every viewpoint. Of course, whenever the coverage topic is frenquently changing (typically, a current event) or quite small, you're likely to report all points of view. I don't know how often Undue Weight is quoted on the English Wikipedia, but the French adaptation I've drafted, Wp:PROPORTION https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Importance_disproportionn%C3%A9e, has proven quite useful to solve this regular encyclopedic challenge… As an aside, a good idea to ease the verification of Wikipedia sources would be to exploit the current expansion of open access sources and develop a side-to-side checking feature: you would get the wikipedia article on one side and the original source text on the other (with perhaps even some markup on the likely parts covered by the reference, thanks to some text mining magic). Wikisource has already a similar feature (with the pdf on one side and the translated text on the other) to ease retranscription. That's typically the kind of suggestions that would rather appear within the community (and here we get back to my suggestion of a wishlist). PCL Le 28/10/14 17:20, Jack Park a écrit : Not trolling, but wondering if there is a different lens through which to view the present situation. Let me preface a question with this: NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not easily submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins for the issues in play. My question is this: Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly in the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is, as-well-as-possible justified points of view, are crucial to understanding the situation? On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien nicolas.jull...@telecom-bretagne.eu mailto:nicolas.jull...@telecom-bretagne.eu wrote: Hello, to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by Marwell and Oliver The Critical Mass in Collective Action (1993) http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsCredir_esc=y which points that fact that after some times, project are mature and need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood (which is, sometime, boring) Nicolas Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit : Hi everyone, I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread: *we need 10K or even 100K new active editors: would it not result in even higher levels of bureaucracy? Internet technologies have certainly allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000 active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise… *English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility. I would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021 on Wikipedia politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…). *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate.
[Wiki-research-l] 'Wikipedia Network Analysis' by Brian Keegan
(Apologies if this has been referred to already on this list. If so, I missed it). A couple of Weeks ago, Brian Keegan published a very nice blog post [1] on the use of Python for Wikimedia research. He uses examples from the English Wikipedia but the techniques he describes are applicable more generally. It’s fascinating, and shows what a lot can be done with a few lines of code. Michael [1] http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/brianckeegan/Wikipedia-Network-Analysis/blob/master/Wikipedia%20Network%20Analysis.ipynb___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 9:09 AM, Aaron Halfaker ahalfa...@wikimedia.org wrote: When that kind of roadblock gets put in the path of innovation, we're already ossified. That's an interesting opinion. It seems that you are suggesting that the problem is not recoverable. How do you know that is true? The CC license gives us the assurance that the problem is recoverable. The question is WMF's role the recovery. HHVM is promising evidence that the WMF is open to technical innovation within a single layer of the infrastructure, but note that that has been driven from within the WMF, resourced by the WMF and I believe peopled by the WMF. What is needed is a framework (technical and organisational) that allows for similar innovation to be done by non-WMF people in areas that the WMF agrees with in principal but considers not a resourced priority. I certainly see no evidence of that. cheers stuart ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
[Wiki-research-l] FW: Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia
Why do my emails to this list keep being randomly rejected? Is it a hint of some kind? Kerry -Original Message- From: ee-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:ee-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of ee-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, 28 October 2014 10:08 AM To: kerry.raym...@gmail.com Subject: RE: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has been automatically rejected. If you think that your messages are being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at ee-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org. ---BeginMessage--- I'm 100% with you both on this matter of having tried the obvious easy solutions. If I hear one more person to propose outreach as the solution to the gender gap or new editor retention, I think I will insert threat of choice here. I do a lot of outreach here in Australia and, yes, hand-holding works as long as you in the room with them but stops working once they are at the mercy of the community (who will attack even during the outreach). And also that kind of handholding is not scalable. We don't just need 10 new active editors; we need 10K or even 100K new active editors. It is indeed time to tackle the hard problem and that is changing the crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere. The solution does not lie in training people to conform to that regime. Even if people are taught how to engage with it, if people don't enjoy the experience, of course they will walk away. Those of us still here are all probably as stubborn as mules and with the hides of rhinoceroses (or just enjoy being a bully safely hidden behind a pseudonym). Although academic standards of publication appears to held up as the ideal behind some of the Wikipedia quality guidelines, I must say they are higher standards than I've seen enforced at most journals or in most conferences. And certainly I've never seen the rigid enforcement of the nit-picking rules in the Manual of Style. I do think we are operating our own version of the Stanford Prison Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment only the difference is that they cancelled their experiment in about a week. Ours has been running for years .. The Wikipedia article above says . The results of the experiment have been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. Quality control is Wikipedia's legitimising ideology and our processes provide it with the social and institutional support. When did you ever see someone in an Article for Deletion discussion or similar say let's look at the big picture here, the WMF have a strategic priority to reverse editor attrition or close the gender gap, let's consider our decision here with that in mind. No, it's always we must decide this according to our rules, raising any other point is discouraged (you get slapped down for it). Of course, I question why WMF allows the community to make and enforce rules when the outcome appears to be working against their stated priorities. That's not strong governance, that's weakness. I don't think WMF needs to control everything top-down (and indeed it would not be scalable if they did) but they do need to set boundaries in some places in relation to the community's control over policy and process to ensure the success of the WMF strategic plan. For example, I would say that if a new editor creates a new article which isn't obviously spam/vandalism, does it really matter to let that article survive because it isn't notable enough according to the guidelines for that category of article. At the very least could we defer the discussion of deletion for a few months in the hope it is further developed to a better standard by then? Perhaps a two stage process, first communicate with the contributor(s) with *precise* concerns about how it needs to be improved and they have a month to do it, and that help is available (at the TeaHouse or wherever). (Feedback is often too vague, saying not notable is not helpful and saying WP:ANYTHING is not helpful either as it looks like a string of gibberish written like that and even if the link is clicked, the resulting page is full of jargon and often meaningless to the newbie). Maybe we should introduce a karma system (like Slashdot). You can only do certain actions if you have high karma. So positive emotional actions like thanking, wikilove, writing nice sentiment messages, making uncontested contributions to articles, etc earn you karma and only high karma people can take negative emotional actions (undoing - other than vandalism), proposing for deletion, voting to delete, because they reduce your karma etc. This might at least slow down the out-and-out bullies who engage in lots of emotionally negative behaviours . Kerry _ From:
Re: [Wiki-research-l] FW: Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia
Hello, I find the systemic approach very interesting and would like to become more familiar with it in time. My impression is that the key to understand the problems of Wikipedia is looking at communications, and that is why I am grateful for the work we have seen by David and others in the Wikipedia Research Showcase. Giving appropriate feedback and expressing oneself without being rude seems to be very difficult to many Wikipedians. I think that that is the main barrier for participation, and could only be met with a broad social skills training. Difficult to implement, though. :-( Kind regards Ziko 2014-10-28 23:40 GMT+01:00 Stuart A. Yeates syea...@gmail.com: I believe that the problem is you're hitting 'reply to all' to a message cross-posted to several different mailing lists, one or more of which you're not subscribed to. The bounce message specifically mentioned ee-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org, are you subscribed to e...@lists.wikimedia.org? If not, there's you problem. cheers stuart On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 11:13 AM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raym...@gmail.com wrote: Why do my emails to this list keep being randomly rejected? Is it a hint of some kind? Kerry -Original Message- From: ee-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:ee-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of ee-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, 28 October 2014 10:08 AM To: kerry.raym...@gmail.com Subject: RE: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has been automatically rejected. If you think that your messages are being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at ee-ow...@lists.wikimedia.org. ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Tool to find poorly written articles
Apologies for being somewhat late to the party, our upcoming CSCW 2015 paper (coming soon to a research outlet near you!) took my attention, which is kind of ironic, as in that paper our primary method of assessing quality is a machine learner (we also use human assessments to confirm our results). Earlier in the discussion, Aaron pointed to our WikiSym '13 paper[1]. Two aspects of article quality that has been brought up in this discussion were also on our mind when doing that work. First, readability: Stvilia et al[2] used Flesch-Kincaid[3] as part of one of their metrics. In my work I've found that it's not a particularly useful feature, it doesn't really help discern the quality of an article. Secondly, information about editors, e.g. edit counts, tenure, etc… These features will typically help, for instance having a diverse set of editors working on an article is associated with higher quality. But, as we argue in our 2013 paper, that is not a feature that it's easy to change, nor something that it's easy to help someone change. Same goes for a few other features from the literature, e.g. number of edits or mean edits per day (you should stop using the preview button and save all changes, even the small ones, because that'll increase the quality of the article). Instead we argue for using features that editors can act upon, and then feed those back into SuggestBot's set of article suggestions to assist editors in finding articles that they want to contribute to. Lastly, I'd like to mention that determining whether an article is high-quality or not is a reasonably simple task, as it's a binary classification problem. This is where for instance word count or article length have been shown to work well. Nowadays I find the problem of assessing quality on a finer-grained scale (e.g. English Wikipedia's 7-class assessment scale[4]) to be more interesting. But, as James earlier touched on, quality is a many-faceted subject. While computer approaches work well for measures like amount of content, use of images, or citations, determining if the sources used are appropriate is a much harder task. Footnotes: 1: Warncke-Wang, M., Cosley, D., Riedl, J. (2013, August). Tell me more: an actionable quality model for Wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration* (p. 8). ACM. http://opensym.org/wsos2013/proceedings/p0202-warncke.pdf 2: ASSESSING INFORMATION QUALITY OF A COMMUNITY-BASED ENCYCLOPEDIA, by Stvilia, Twidale, Smith, and Gasser, 2005 http://mitiq.mit.edu/ICIQ/Documents/IQ%20Conference%202005/Papers/AssessingIQofaCommunity-basedEncy.pdf 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests 4: With the exception of A-class articles, as they're practically nonexistent, and since they by definition are complete, just like Featured Articles, they shouldn't be A-class articles for long. Regards, Morten On 28 October 2014 18:07, Aileen Oeberst a.oebe...@iwm-kmrc.de wrote: I am currently on vacation and will not be able to answer your mail before November 10. But I will get back then as soon as possible. Best regards, Aileen Oeberst ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
