Re: [Wiki-research-l] [Wikimedia-l] Farewell, Erik!

[rupert THURNER]

Many thanks erik and all the best!! One sentence in eriks blog post cited i
found surprising. What type of modesty you guys were talking about?

"At Wikimania London (2014) I talked about how we should err on the side of
modesty. That message never came across. I started to have a discussion on
this within WMF but failed to bring this to fruition. My bad."



On Wed, Feb 6, 2019, 22:18 Dario Taraborelli  “[R]ecent revisions of an article can be peeled off to reveal older layers,
> which are still meaningful for historians. Even graffiti applied by vandals
> can by its sheer informality convey meaningful information, just like
> historians learned a lot from graffiti on walls of classic Pompei. Likewise
> view patterns can tell future historians a lot about what was hot and what
> wasn’t in our times. Reason why these raw view data are meant to be
> preserved for a long time.”
>
> Erik Zachte wrote these lines in a blog post
> <
> https://web.archive.org/web/20171018194720/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/07/michael-jackson/
> >
> almost
> ten years ago, and I cannot find better words to describe the gift he gave
> us. Erik retired  this
> past Friday, leaving behind an immense legacy. I had the honor to work with
> him for several years, and I hosted this morning an intimate, tearful
> celebration of what Erik has represented for the Wikimedia movement.
>
> His Wikistats project —with his signature
> pale yellow background we've known and loved since the mid 2000s
>  >—has
> been much more than an "analytics platform". It's been an individual
> attempt he initiated, and grew over time, to try and comprehend and make
> sense of the largest open collaboration project in human history, driven by
> curiosity and by an insatiable desire to serve data to the communities that
> most needed it.
>
> Through this project, Erik has created a live record of data describing the
> growth and reach of all Wikimedia communities, across languages and
> projects, putting multi-lingualism and smaller communities at the very
> center of his attention. He coined metrics such as "active editors" that
> defined the benchmark for volunteers, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the
> academic community to understand some of the growing pains and editor
> retention issues
> <
> https://web.archive.org/web/20110608214507/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/new-editors-are-joining-english-wikipedia-in-droves/
> >
> the movement has faced. He created countless reports—that predate by nearly
> a decade modern visualizations of online attention—to understand what
> Wikipedia traffic means in the context of current events like elections
> <
> https://web.archive.org/web/20160405055621/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/09/sarah-palin/
> >
> or public health crises
> <
> https://web.archive.org/web/20090708011216/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/05/h1n1-flu-or-new-flu-or/
> >.
> He has created countless
>  visualizations
> <
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/10/27/new-interactive-visualization-wikipedia/
> >
> that show the enormous gaps in local language content and representation
> that, as a movement, we face in our efforts to build an encyclopedia for
> and about everyone. He has also made extensive use of pie charts
> <
> https://web.archive.org/web/20141222073751/http://infodisiac.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/piechartscorrected.png
> >,
> which—as friends—we are ready to turn a blind eye towards.
>
> Most importantly, the data Erik has brougth to life has been cited over
> 1,000 times
> <
> https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=stats.wikimedia.org
> >
> in the scholarly literature. If we gave credit to open data creators in the
> same way as we credit authors of scholarly papers, Erik would be one of the
> most influential authors in the field, and I don't think it is much of a
> stretch to say that the massive trove of data and metrics Erik has made
> available had a direct causal role in the birth and growth of the academic
> field of Wikimedia research, and more broadly, scholarship of online
> collaboration.
>
> Like I said this morning, Erik -- you have been not only an invaluable
> colleague and a steward for the movement, but also a very decent human
> being, and I am grateful we shared some of this journey together.
>
> Please join me in celebrating Erik on his well-deserved retirement, read
> his statement  to learn
> what he's planning to do next, or check this lovely portrait
>  Wired published a
> while back about "the Stats Master Making Sense of Wikipedia's Massive Data
> Trove".
>
> Dario
>
>
> --
> *Dario Taraborelli  *Director, Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
> research.wikimedia.org •

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[rupert THURNER]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 11:08 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> The English Wikipedia alone has hundreds of thousands of items to fix -
> missing references, misspellings, etc. The problems are nicely sorted at
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog . There are
> millions of other things to fix in other projects. So quality is getting
> higher in many ways, but the amount of stuff to fix is still enormous.
>
> What we don't have is an easy way for new people to start eliminating
> items from the backlogs. The Wikidata games are a nice step in the right
> direction, but their appeal to new participants is non-existent.
>

there is a backlog? after 15 years contributing you tell that on the
research mailing list :) i used wikidata games for a couple of minutes and
great pleasure when i see the link flying by in an email. but i am never
able to find that link again in my life. maybe that is the problem? rename
the "donate" link to "contribute" and then have "money" and "time" which
links to code and content. just my 2c ...

rupert
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Paper: "Fostering Voluntary Contributions to a Public Good"

[rupert THURNER]

On May 13, 2016 09:43, "Pine W"  wrote:
>
> Thanks to Ed Erhart for finding this:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2579118
>

Ha I like the sentence "...standard economics would predict that rational
individuals do not contribute to
Wikipedia."

Rupert
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] "Self-management" management philosophy and Wikipedia

[rupert THURNER]

Hi Brian,

In my perception the main difference is who sets the rules. The time frame
in this light is only a following of many, also newly contributing persons
have the possibility to voice their preference. This would apply also to
structure coming out of such a process. One person or organization
controlling an important asset can lead to what may be perceived as
imbalance. An example is wikimedia foundation, and ultimately it's board,
controlling the websites domain name, and with it money flow. Would you see
a different "self" for content and money?

Best
Rupert
On Dec 8, 2015 02:49, "Brian Butler"  wrote:

> Much of this comes down to how you define “management”, “organizations”,
> and “self”.
>
> Once you allow for structures, roles (hierarchical or network based),
> locally developed and enforced rules and practices, policed boundaries, and
> other things included in most realistic self-managed groups then really the
> only difference between self-managed organizations and “traditional” ones
> is one of timeframe.  If you look on a small timeframe management always
> looked “imposed” and if you look on a longer timeframe all social systems
> are “self-organizing" (since at least to this point there have been no
> non-humans that have come into the world to do it for/to us).
>
> All of this is to say that, yes Wikipedia and wikipedia teams can learn a
> great deal from other organizations (and can teach other organizations a
> lot).
> (This is one of the big reasons that Wikipedia research is valuable beyond
> the Wikipedia community).
>
> Brian B.
>
> —
> Brian S. Butler, Ph.D.
> Professor and Interim Dean, UMD iSchool
> University of Maryland
> College Park, MD  USA
> —
>
>
> From: Wiki-research-l  on
> behalf of Kerry Raymond 
> Reply-To: "kerry.raym...@gmail.com" , Research
> into Wikimedia content and communities <
> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Monday, December 7, 2015 at 6:41 PM
> To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' <
> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] "Self-management" management philosophy
> and Wikipedia
>
> I’ve been part of teams that could probably be described as self-managing.
> If you have the right mix of skills in people with the right attitude,
> things can go really well without any kind of “management process” because
> everyone is always thinking and talking about what’s coming up, what
> problems we’ve still got to solve,  all the time, and everyone trusts one
> another. If teams have the ability to do their own recruitment (whether
> internal/external), then you are more likely to get that outcome as they
> want the new people they are bringing on board and those people want to be
> in the team. However, in most organisations in the name of “productivity”,
> it is more common to see teams formed by some arbitrary manager (not part
> of the team) on the basis of “who’s available and has a vaguely relevant
> set of skills” and whether or not that team “gels” is a matter of luck.
> Having been given teams in those kind of circumstances, I know that some of
> them may well be the folks “moved on” from another team who saw the chance
> to get rid of a problem person.
>
>
>
> I am sure there are “topics” or “projects” within Wikipedia which are
> self-managing because, through luck, the folks attracted to them do have
> the right skills and the right attitude. But I think it unlikely Wikipedia
> as a whole could be self-managing in this way. With respect to volunteers,
> we have no carrots to ensure we attract the right skills and we have very
> little ability to prevent the entry of those with a “bad attitude”.
>
>
>
> Increasingly organisations that have a large volunteer group now do very
> pro-active volunteer management. People who go along to volunteer are often
> taken aback to find there is a selection process to be taken on and that,
> being taken on, involves committing to a regular roster or a minimum time
> commitment each month to remain a volunteer. Some organisations even do
> performance reviews on their volunteers. It’s fair to say that some of the
> wannabe volunteers get quite offended by this, especially if they get
> turned down or dropped.
>
>
>
> Why don’t we have a set of training and quizzes to allow editors to gain
> “competency certificates” on Wikipedia (in addition to certain levels of
> experience at certain tasks – have created X new articles, rather than
> simple edit counts) ? Then we could limit things like becoming an admin, or
> participating in certain kinds of discussions e.g. AfD to those with
> certain competencies. Similarly, if we could have articles graded for
> quality (and now we have the automated means, this may be more reliable
> than in the past), then we could restrict the editing of the FAs and GAs to
> those with high levels of competency and allow editing of lower quality
> articles by people with