[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation External Audit and FAQ for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2020

[Jaime Villagomez]

Dear all,

In addition to our standard practice of documenting and publishing the
Audit Committee meeting minutes regarding the review and approval of
the *Wikimedia
Foundation’s Independent Auditors’ Report* by the Audit Committee - a board
subcommittee, we want to inform you that  The Independent Auditors’ Report
for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2020 is now published and  available
at:  https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

We have also posted on Meta-Wiki answers to frequently asked questions
(“FAQ”) about the Independent Auditors’ Report:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports/Financial/Audits/2019-2020_-_frequently_asked_questions

The external audit is conducted annually by an independent third-party
audit firm (KPMG) as a part of our financial oversight, and provides an
overview of basic information about the organization's financial position
and its financial activities.

Please contact me or (Tony Le ) via email if you have
any questions.

Best regards,

Jaime

Jaime Villagomez  (jvillago...@wikimedia.org)

Chief Financial Officer

Wikimedia Foundation 



*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.Donate.
*
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[Wikimedia-l] Annual Report for Wikimedia User Group Turkey

[Basak Tosun]

Thank you for the question! During the year our user group activities were
focused on only increasing contributions to Wikipedia. In 2021 we might
work on Wikisource as well; particularly Turkish Language Association was
interested in taking part in projects related to Wikisource, they have
expressed that WikiSource is one of the projects they benefited most in
their work. We also want to encourage high school students to contribute to
Wikisource, during the year we had events only in universities, we have met
with a small group of highschool students to talk about ways of
contributing projects for the first time today :) It was great!

-Best,
Basak


Satdeep Gill , 11 Ara 2020 Cum, 01:59 tarihinde şunu
yazdı:

> Thanks for so much for sharing this Başak. It's lovely to read about all
> the amazing activities that the UG did in this year.
>
> I am particularly interested in Wikisource. So, what's happening on
> Turkish Wikisource?
>
> Best
> Satdeep
>
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[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Research Showcase] December 16, 2020: Disinformation and Reliability of Sources in Wikipedia

[Janna Layton]

Hello,

The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, December 16,
at 9:30 AM PST/17:30 UTC, and will be on the theme of disinformation and
reliability of sources in Wikipedia. In the first talk, Włodzimierz
Lewoniewski will present recent work around multilingual approaches for the
assessment of content quality and reliability of sources in Wikipedia
leveraging machine learning algorithms. In the second talk, Diego
Saez-Trumper will give an overview of ongoing work on fighting
disinformation in Wikipedia; specifically, the development of tools and
datasets aimed at supporting the discovery of suspicious content and
improving verifiability.

Youtube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Wcc-TeaEY

As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase

Talk 1

Speaker: Włodzimierz Lewoniewski (Poznań University of Economics and
Business, Poland)

Title: Quality assessment of Wikipedia and its sources

Abstract: Information in Wikipedia can be edited in over 300 languages
independently. Therefore often the same subject in Wikipedia can be
described differently depending on language edition. In order to compare
information between them one usually needs to understand each of considered
languages. We work on solutions that can help to automate this process.
They leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. The
crucial component, however, is assessment of article quality therefore we
need to know how to define and extract different quality measures. This
presentation briefly introduces some of the recent activities of Department
of Information Systems at Poznań University of Economics and Business
related to quality assessment of multilingual content in Wikipedia. In
particular, we

demonstrate some of the approaches for the reliability assessment of
sources in Wikipedia articles. Such solutions can help to enrich various
language editions of Wikipedia and other knowledge bases with information
of better quality.


Talk 2

Speaker: Diego Saez-Trumper (Research, Wikimedia Foundation)

Title: Challenges on fighting Disinformation in Wikipedia: Who has the
(ground-)truth?

Abstract: Different from the major social media websites where the fight
against disinformation mainly refers to preventing users to massively
replicate fake content, fighting disinformation in Wikipedia requires tools
that allows editors to apply the content policies of: verifiability,
non-original research, and neutral point of view. Moreover, while other
platforms try to apply automatic fact checking techniques to verify
content, the ground-truth for such verification is done based on Wikipedia,
for obvious reasons we can't follow the same pipeline for fact checking
content on Wikipedia. In this talk we will explain the ML approach we are
developing to build tools to efficiently support wikipedians to discover
suspicious content and how we collaborate with external researchers on this
task. We will also describe a group of datasets we are preparing to share
with the research community in order to produce state-of-the-art algorithms
to improve the verifiability of content on Wikipedia.

-- 
Janna Layton (she/her)
Administrative Associate - Product & Technology
Wikimedia Foundation 
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[Wikimedia-l] Trees and Wikimedia

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Wikimedia is now associated with a project where trees are planted.

In many ways the notion of planting new trees is great.

However, very often it is not. In Europe grazers are actively introduced to
prevent shrubs and trees from growing. Reasons for this abound. The first
is that it helps biodiversity. Second, trees often create a fire risk.
Third, when trees are in the seed bank, you do not have to plant them, they
will grow when they are left alone to grow. When they are not in the local
seed bank, trophic rewilding will introduce the species that distribute
seeds and/or you can plant trees as a starter for a seed bank.

When you really really want to make a difference, you protect marshes,
prevent peat from burning or being exploited. You can prevent water rushing
to sea by introducing leaky weirs/beavers and adding swales to prevent
water to rush downstream. There is plenty of literature to be found on
these subject in Wikidata. For Wikipedia there is a recent template that
links a reference in a Wikipedia article to the item for the paper in
Wikidata.

When you really care to understand a paper, you use the Scholia for a paper
to learn more about what the publication is about.. Yes, more effort to
expose scientific papers would be cool. This [1] is an example of a paper I
am working on at the moment.
Thanks,
  GerardM

[1] https://scholia.toolforge.org/work/Q51696994
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[Wikimedia-l] You are invited to a global virtual celebration for Wikipedia’s 20th birthday!

[Nadee Gunasena]

Hi all,

As many of you know, Wikipedia is celebrating a big milestone next month
with the 20th birthday on January 15th, 2021. In honor of the birthday, we
will be hosting a virtual birthday party for the global communities on
January 15th from 4-5 pm UTC (check out your local time [1])! Please join
us on a Youtube livestream [2] where we will celebrate all of the
volunteers and community members who have built this movement over the last
20 years.

This celebration will include remarks from community members about how they
have seen the movement grow over the 20 years and their wishes for the
future, as well as from Jimmy Wales and Katherine Maher.

We’d also love to hear from all of you! This celebration is a chance for us
to come together and to recognize the people behind our projects that make
this all possible. We’ll be highlighting community milestones and
achievements over the past year. Tell us what you’ve been working on, and
big moments you’d like to call out from the past year! You can share
details on the Meta page for the 20th virtual birthday party [3] and we’ll
include those during the virtual event. We’ll also be sharing more details
soon about other ways to participate.

This virtual birthday party is just one of many activities that are being
planned around the movement for the 20th birthday. You can check out the
Wikipedia 20 birthday hub [4] to learn more about local and regional
events, birthday images, media activities and other resources for community
celebrations. If you have any questions, you can also reach the Wikimedia
Foundation’s 20th birthday committee at wikipedi...@wikimedia.org.

We are looking forward to celebrating with you! Thank you on behalf of the
Wikipedia 20 team,


Nadee Gunasena

Communications

Wikimedia Foundation


[1]
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikipedia+20+Celebration=20210115T16=%3A=1

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzGAGfSObOw=youtu.be

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_20/Global_event

[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_20


-- 
*Nadee Gunasena*
Executive Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation 
ᐧ
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