Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Frederick Noronha]

> However, as a general guideline, it is not so
> much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have been
> already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
> or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first
hit
> — they are likely to find what they need with more than 99% chance.

Yaroslav, Which world are you talking about? North America and Europe?

When it comes to Asia (which I'm part of) and Africa, possibly Latin
America too, we haven't even written down 1% of the diversity of these
places. Leave aside getting it up onto the Wikipedia!

Of course, I agree with the suggestion for new approaches (if I read you
right). This is particularly true in a part of the world where much of the
discussion is still in the oral domain, is often not in print; when it's in
print, it is not digitised. Even when digitised, chances are that it's in a
non-English language, which is very hard to find very search engines. (No
wonder that some of the prominent people from our regions are continually
getting dismissed as non-notable, which I see as another form of 'systemic
bias').

Give it a thought, please.

Frederick Noronha
Goa

On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 03:05, Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:

> I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
> comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The target
> audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
> several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> apologize in advance.
>

-- 
FN* फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا‎ +91-9822122436
AUDIO: https://archive.org/details/@fredericknoronha
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Yaroslav Blanter]

Hi Frederick.

sure, I know. I am mostly writing about Russia, and I know there are a lot
of topics which are not covered. I am usually the first one who says that
there are many topics to even start an article on, and way more to improve.

But let us face it - if an English-speaking person looks for something in
the English Wikipedia they are most likely to find it. The articles I
create are definitely useful, but they get dozens of views per year.This is
one of the reason we lose editors.

But my point is that we are about to lose most of our editors - at least in
the first world countries which produce the most contribution in the
English Wikipedia, USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New
Zealand. I guess India is different, but the trend is global, I think it is
just a matter of time when it comes to that in India as well. And if
Wikipedia would die in these countries, it will die in India as well.

Cheers
Yaroslav

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:14 PM Frederick Noronha <
fredericknoro...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > However, as a general guideline, it is not so
> > much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have been
> > already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
> > or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first
> hit
> > — they are likely to find what they need with more than 99% chance.
>
> Yaroslav, Which world are you talking about? North America and Europe?
>
> When it comes to Asia (which I'm part of) and Africa, possibly Latin
> America too, we haven't even written down 1% of the diversity of these
> places. Leave aside getting it up onto the Wikipedia!
>
> Of course, I agree with the suggestion for new approaches (if I read you
> right). This is particularly true in a part of the world where much of the
> discussion is still in the oral domain, is often not in print; when it's in
> print, it is not digitised. Even when digitised, chances are that it's in a
> non-English language, which is very hard to find very search engines. (No
> wonder that some of the prominent people from our regions are continually
> getting dismissed as non-notable, which I see as another form of 'systemic
> bias').
>
> Give it a thought, please.
>
> Frederick Noronha
> Goa
>
> On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 03:05, Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:
>
> > I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> > this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> > that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
> > comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The
> target
> > audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> > Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
> > several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> > apologize in advance.
> >
>
> --
> FN* फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا‎ +91-9822122436
> AUDIO: https://archive.org/details/@fredericknoronha
> TEXT: http://bit.ly/2SBx41G PIX: http://bit.ly/2Rs1xhl
> Can't get through on mobile? Please SMS/WhatsApp
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Joseph Seddon]

A it's always nice to quote someone other than Mike Godwin and it seems
Betteridge's law of headlines is alive and well. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines


On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:26 PM Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:

> Hi Frederick.
>
> sure, I know. I am mostly writing about Russia, and I know there are a lot
> of topics which are not covered. I am usually the first one who says that
> there are many topics to even start an article on, and way more to improve.
>
> But let us face it - if an English-speaking person looks for something in
> the English Wikipedia they are most likely to find it. The articles I
> create are definitely useful, but they get dozens of views per year.This is
> one of the reason we lose editors.
>
> But my point is that we are about to lose most of our editors - at least in
> the first world countries which produce the most contribution in the
> English Wikipedia, USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New
> Zealand. I guess India is different, but the trend is global, I think it is
> just a matter of time when it comes to that in India as well. And if
> Wikipedia would die in these countries, it will die in India as well.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:14 PM Frederick Noronha <
> fredericknoro...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > However, as a general guideline, it is not so
> > > much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have
> been
> > > already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia
> -
> > > or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first
> > hit
> > > — they are likely to find what they need with more than 99%
> chance.
> >
> > Yaroslav, Which world are you talking about? North America and Europe?
> >
> > When it comes to Asia (which I'm part of) and Africa, possibly Latin
> > America too, we haven't even written down 1% of the diversity of these
> > places. Leave aside getting it up onto the Wikipedia!
> >
> > Of course, I agree with the suggestion for new approaches (if I read you
> > right). This is particularly true in a part of the world where much of
> the
> > discussion is still in the oral domain, is often not in print; when it's
> in
> > print, it is not digitised. Even when digitised, chances are that it's
> in a
> > non-English language, which is very hard to find very search engines. (No
> > wonder that some of the prominent people from our regions are continually
> > getting dismissed as non-notable, which I see as another form of
> 'systemic
> > bias').
> >
> > Give it a thought, please.
> >
> > Frederick Noronha
> > Goa
> >
> > On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 03:05, Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:
> >
> > > I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> > > this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> > > that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want
> to
> > > comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The
> > target
> > > audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> > > Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the
> first
> > > several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> > > apologize in advance.
> > >
> >
> > --
> > FN* फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا‎ +91-9822122436
> > AUDIO: https://archive.org/details/@fredericknoronha
> > TEXT: http://bit.ly/2SBx41G PIX: http://bit.ly/2Rs1xhl
> > Can't get through on mobile? Please SMS/WhatsApp
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
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> 



-- 
Seddon

*Community and Audience Engagement Associate*
*Advancement (Fundraising), Wikimedia Foundation*
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Benjamin Lees]

You paint the problem as being about us adapting to changing
demographics.  I'm not so sure--if only because the notion of
attention-impaired millennials appears to be one of those
self-propagating ideas whose supposed statistical support turns out to
be fabricated.[1][2]  If the concern is about getting more _readers_,
by providing a digestible version of articles, Google already attempts
to do that, and I'm sure we'll see better efforts down the line.

I think the bigger problem, and I'm not breaking any new ground here,
is that our vectors for bringing people into the editing fold may be
shrinking.  Short versions of articles, whether we provide them or
Google does, do not readily lend themselves to participation by
outsiders.  Mobile devices are inherently challenging to edit with:
the WMF rightly has great people working to make it easier, but at the
end of the day, I don't know if I would have ever started editing if
I'd had to do it on a phone. (I hope my millennial brethren are
hardier than I am.)  And, as Frederick notes, even if someone gets to
the point of editing, finding sources that we consider acceptable is
going to be hardest for the areas in which we're most lacking
coverage.  These are hard problems, and I don't claim to have the
solutions, but I don't know if your proposals would help on this
front.

In any event, "slowly d[ying]" doesn't quite seem "imminent".  Call it
a side issue, but I'd prefer not to be clickbaited on this list.

Emufarmers, editor, a few edits

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790
[2] There's gotta be some Person's Law I can cite here, right?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[MZMcBride]

Yaroslav Blanter wrote in part:
>This is a paradigm shift. Currently, the editors generally consider that
>it is good to have long Wikipedia articles - because long means more
>complete. Sometimes there are even proposals (fortunately isolated and
>without followup) to delete all short articles even if they describe
>notable topics and contain verified information. Clips are almost not in
>use.  Of course they still need to be made, but this is not such a big
>problem - there are plenty of school students who have their own youtube
>channel, if they can make clips, everybody can.
>
>[...]
>
>I envision it differently. Ideally, we have the Wikipedia as it is now,
>but on top of this, every article has a collection of shorter companion
>articles, simple and a paragraph or two long, so that each of them can be
>read in half a minute, They should not have excessive markup, references,
>categories or anything else which can be found in the main article if
>needed. References in Wikipedia are required not for the sake of having
>references, but as a means to ensure that the information is verifiable -
>and if the main article does it the companion articles do not need to.
>Some of these companion articles can be in fact clips - there is a
>difficulty that clips can not be edited collaboratively, but I am sure
>this one can be solved. If anybody wants to solve it.

Regarding your subject line, I think
 very
clearly applies. :-)  No, the death of Wikipedia is not imminent.

I agree with a few of your points. For example, I agree that it should be
easier to edit from a mobile device or tablet. (Though the simple
counter-argument has often been that doing research sometimes does require
a physically larger working space and that's not really a fact to be
ashamed of.) I also agree that we need more and better multimedia within
wiki projects. In particular, we need better videos, better animations,
and better images.

That said, I'm not sure I understand what your concern is with long
articles or lots of text. As your post here and my reply hopefully
demonstrates, it's possible to have a long text and only interact with a
piece of it. In terms of user interface, it is trivial to hide or collapse
text if we want to. The default mobile view on Wikipedia collapses most
sections of an article and only the introductory paragraphs are expanded.
If readers find the default desktop view too overwhelming, we could hide
or not even load every paragraph on the initial view.

I think we want to be in a position where we have too much information and
can hide some of it or filter out the "noise" as needed, instead of being
in the opposite position of not having enough content and not being able
to adequately serve our readers' needs.

Or put more directly, if we have 50,000 words about the early life of
Britney Spears, someone who's interested in researching where she was born
does not need to read 50,000 words, they hopefully only need to read a few
words in an infobox or in the relevant paragraph in a section of an
article. Using Wikipedia and Wikidata as sources, we can also expand
interactions such as query/answer services that would allow a user to
simply ask "Where was Britney Spears born?" and get a direct, sourced
answer. The content is still the centerpiece, while we create and adapt
how the content is accessed.

A large part of what has made Wikipedia successful has been its open
license. Readers and editors enjoy and can embrace free content. If a
successor project comes along and can use the same free content in a
better way, we should welcome that. That isn't the death of Wikipedia,
that's a continuation and evolution of it, in my opinion.

And we should be open to a better future. The current model of having a
very top-heavy Wikimedia Foundation Inc. headquartered in San Francisco is
bad. While we never want to conflate change with improvement, there's
plenty of room for the latter.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Peter Southwood]

Hi Yaroslav, 
Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have 
described reasonably well.
Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much
Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps 
concentrates too much on a small vocabulary.
I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" 
version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the 
full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a 
desktop view, and possibly the primary target in mobile. This would not be 
needed for all articles.
Cheers,
Peter Southwood

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Yaroslav Blanter
Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The target
audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
apologize in advance.

Cheers
Yaroslav
_
I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless, but
someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
talking about the English Wikipedia (referring to it as Wikipedia). I am
active in other projects as well, and some of them have similar issues, but
there are typically many other things going on there which make the picture
more complicated.

Let us first look at the current situation. Wikipedia exists since 2001,
and in a couple of weeks will turn 18. Currently, it has 5.77 million
articles. I often hear an opinion that all important articles have already
been created. This is incorrect, and I am often the first person to point
out that this is not correct. For example, today I created an article on an
urban locality in Russia with the population of 15 thousands. Many articles
are indeed too short, badly written, or suffer from other issues, and they
need to be improved. There are new topics which appear on a regular basis:
new music performers, new winners of sports competitions or prizes, and so
on. As any Web 2.0 project, Wikipedia requires a regular cleanup, since
there are many people happy to vandalize the 5th website in the world in
terms of the number of views. However, as a general guideline, it is not so
much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have been
already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first hit
— they are likely to find what they need with more than 99% chance.

In this sense, Wikipedia now is very different from Wikipedia in 2008 or
Wikipedia in 2004. Ten and especially fifteen years ago, everybody could
contribute something important. For example, the article on the 1951 film
"A Streetcar Named Desire", which won four Academy Awards, was started in
2005, as well as an article on Cy Twombly, at the time probably the most
famous living artist. This is not possible anymore. This is why the number
of active editors is currently dropping - to contribute to the content in a
meaningful way, one now has to be an advanced amateur - to master some
field of knowledge much better than most others do. Or one can be a
professional - but there are very few professionals contributing to
Wikipedia in their fields, and there are very few articles written at a
professional level. Attempts to attract professionals have been made for
many years, and, despite certain local success, generally failed. They have
been going now for long enough to assume they will never succeed on a large
scale. Wikipedia is written by advance amateurs for amateurs. However,
despite the decline in the number of editors, there are enough resources to
maintain and to expand the project. It does not mean there are no problems
- there are in fact many problems. One of the most commonly discussed one
is systemic bias - there is way more information on Wikipedia on subjects
pertaining to North America than to Africa, and if a topic is viewed on
differently in different countries, one can be sure that the American view
dominates. But it is usually thought - and I agree with this - that these
drawbacks are not crucial, and Wikipedia is atill a useful and sustainable
project. Wikipedia clearly has its ecosystem, there are no competitors to
talk about, and all attempts to fork it were unsuccessful. There is a
steady development, and everybody is happy.

Does this mean t

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Jane Darnell]

I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split
curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more
easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to
discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for
extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the
18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the
content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super
simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a
tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted
with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading
to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should
not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be
enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should
reflect editability and it doesn't.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Hi Yaroslav,
> Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you
> have described reasonably well.
> Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much
> Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but
> perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary.
> I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive
> summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a
> need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked
> from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in mobile.
> This would not be needed for all articles.
> Cheers,
> Peter Southwood
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter
> Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
> comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The target
> audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
> several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> apologize in advance.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
> _
> I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
> Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless, but
> someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
> talking about the English Wikipedia (referring to it as Wikipedia). I am
> active in other projects as well, and some of them have similar issues, but
> there are typically many other things going on there which make the picture
> more complicated.
>
> Let us first look at the current situation. Wikipedia exists since 2001,
> and in a couple of weeks will turn 18. Currently, it has 5.77 million
> articles. I often hear an opinion that all important articles have already
> been created. This is incorrect, and I am often the first person to point
> out that this is not correct. For example, today I created an article on an
> urban locality in Russia with the population of 15 thousands. Many articles
> are indeed too short, badly written, or suffer from other issues, and they
> need to be improved. There are new topics which appear on a regular basis:
> new music performers, new winners of sports competitions or prizes, and so
> on. As any Web 2.0 project, Wikipedia requires a regular cleanup, since
> there are many people happy to vandalize the 5th website in the world in
> terms of the number of views. However, as a general guideline, it is not so
> much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have been
> already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
> or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first hit
> — they are likely to find what they need with more than 99% chance.
>
> In this sense, Wikipedia now is very different from Wikipedia in 2008 or
> Wikipedia in 2004. Ten and especially fifteen years ago, everybody could
> contribute something important. For example, the article on the 1951 film
> "A Streetcar Named Desire", which won four Academy Awards, was started in
> 2005, as well as an article on Cy Twombly, at the time probably the most
> famous living artist. This is not possible anymore. This is why the number
> of active editors is currently dropping - to contribute to the content in a
> meaningful way, one now has to be an advanced amateur - to master some
> field of knowledge much better than most others 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Zubin JAIN]

>I am 51, and I do not know much about the 18- generation, but I know two
important things about them. They have a very short attention span and
difficulties to concentrate. And they get a graphical and visualized
information much more easier than texts. For example, my son is capable of
watching three or four movies per day, but he has difficulties to read 20
pages from a book.

>Well, the first question is whether an encyclopedia is an appropriate / the
best format for them to get knowledge (as it is for us). I do not know the
answer. What I write below assumes that the answer is positive, otherwise
the rest of the text does not make sense.

>The next question is what should be done. How Wikipedia should look like to
be accessible to this generation? The answer seems to be obvious. Articles
must be short and contain a lot of graphic information. May be they need to
be videoclips. Short clips. Or, at lest, they must contain clips, with more
voice and less letters. If one needs more detailed information or just
further information - one hops to the next article or watches the next clip.

These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed.
Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect
that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and
one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the
fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the
site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable
of using it as well as anybody else.

The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on
fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not
to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video
content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with
disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia
unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of
generational decline is insulting.

On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell  wrote:

> I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split
> curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more
> easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to
> discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for
> extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the
> 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the
> content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super
> simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a
> tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted
> with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading
> to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
> adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should
> not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be
> enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should
> reflect editability and it doesn't.
>
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Hi Yaroslav,
> > Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you
> > have described reasonably well.
> > Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much
> > Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but
> > perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary.
> > I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive
> > summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a
> > need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked
> > from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in
> mobile.
> > This would not be needed for all articles.
> > Cheers,
> > Peter Southwood
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter
> > Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
> >
> > I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> > this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> > that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
> > comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The
> target
> > audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> > Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
> > several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> > apologize in advance.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Yaroslav
> > _
> > I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
> > Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Anders Wennersten]

In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction 
part of the article.


It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand 
it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)


It should hopefully only be 1-3 sentences, and to state what is all 
about and not a summary.


We do not live up to this recommendation all the time, but I have 
noticed that he introducion part on enwp generally are very long, in 
comparison


Anders



Den 2018-12-30 kl. 11:39, skrev Zubin JAIN:

I am 51, and I do not know much about the 18- generation, but I know two

important things about them. They have a very short attention span and
difficulties to concentrate. And they get a graphical and visualized
information much more easier than texts. For example, my son is capable of
watching three or four movies per day, but he has difficulties to read 20
pages from a book.


Well, the first question is whether an encyclopedia is an appropriate / the

best format for them to get knowledge (as it is for us). I do not know the
answer. What I write below assumes that the answer is positive, otherwise
the rest of the text does not make sense.


The next question is what should be done. How Wikipedia should look like to

be accessible to this generation? The answer seems to be obvious. Articles
must be short and contain a lot of graphic information. May be they need to
be videoclips. Short clips. Or, at lest, they must contain clips, with more
voice and less letters. If one needs more detailed information or just
further information - one hops to the next article or watches the next clip.

These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed.
Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect
that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and
one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the
fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the
site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable
of using it as well as anybody else.

The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on
fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not
to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video
content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with
disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia
unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of
generational decline is insulting.

On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell  wrote:


I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split
curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more
easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to
discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for
extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the
18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the
content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super
simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a
tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted
with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading
to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should
not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be
enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should
reflect editability and it doesn't.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:


Hi Yaroslav,
Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you
have described reasonably well.
Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much
Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but
perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary.
I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive
summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a
need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked
from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in

mobile.

This would not be needed for all articles.
Cheers,
Peter Southwood

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter
Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The

target

audience I was thinking about 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[David Gerard]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section
says pretty much the same:

> The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's 
> topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic 
> is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent 
> controversies. The notability of the article's subject is usually established 
> in the first few sentences.

that is, the intro section should be a short standalone article:

> As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four 
> well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate.

For an extreme case, [[World War II]] gets *five* long paragraphs for
its intro section.


- d.



On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 10:57, Anders Wennersten
 wrote:
>
> In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction
> part of the article.
>
> It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand
> it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
>
> It should hopefully only be 1-3 sentences, and to state what is all
> about and not a summary.
>
> We do not live up to this recommendation all the time, but I have
> noticed that he introducion part on enwp generally are very long, in
> comparison
>
> Anders
>
>
>
> Den 2018-12-30 kl. 11:39, skrev Zubin JAIN:
> >> I am 51, and I do not know much about the 18- generation, but I know two
> > important things about them. They have a very short attention span and
> > difficulties to concentrate. And they get a graphical and visualized
> > information much more easier than texts. For example, my son is capable of
> > watching three or four movies per day, but he has difficulties to read 20
> > pages from a book.
> >
> >> Well, the first question is whether an encyclopedia is an appropriate / the
> > best format for them to get knowledge (as it is for us). I do not know the
> > answer. What I write below assumes that the answer is positive, otherwise
> > the rest of the text does not make sense.
> >
> >> The next question is what should be done. How Wikipedia should look like to
> > be accessible to this generation? The answer seems to be obvious. Articles
> > must be short and contain a lot of graphic information. May be they need to
> > be videoclips. Short clips. Or, at lest, they must contain clips, with more
> > voice and less letters. If one needs more detailed information or just
> > further information - one hops to the next article or watches the next clip.
> >
> > These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed.
> > Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect
> > that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and
> > one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the
> > fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the
> > site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable
> > of using it as well as anybody else.
> >
> > The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on
> > fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not
> > to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video
> > content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with
> > disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia
> > unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of
> > generational decline is insulting.
> >
> > On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell  wrote:
> >
> >> I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split
> >> curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more
> >> easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to
> >> discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for
> >> extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the
> >> 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the
> >> content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super
> >> simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a
> >> tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted
> >> with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading
> >> to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
> >> adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should
> >> not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be
> >> enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should
> >> reflect editability and it doesn't.
> >>
> >> On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood <
> >> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi Yaroslav,
> >>> Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you
> >>> have described reasonably well.
> >>> Short descriptions help a 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Peter Southwood]

Jane,
I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they 
would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an 
explanation or clarify the concept?
Cheers,
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Jane Darnell
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2018 11:20 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split
curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more
easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to
discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for
extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the
18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the
content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super
simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a
tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted
with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading
to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should
not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be
enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should
reflect editability and it doesn't.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Hi Yaroslav,
> Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you
> have described reasonably well.
> Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much
> Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but
> perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary.
> I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive
> summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a
> need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked
> from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in mobile.
> This would not be needed for all articles.
> Cheers,
> Peter Southwood
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter
> Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
> comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The target
> audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
> several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> apologize in advance.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
> _
> I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
> Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless, but
> someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
> talking about the English Wikipedia (referring to it as Wikipedia). I am
> active in other projects as well, and some of them have similar issues, but
> there are typically many other things going on there which make the picture
> more complicated.
>
> Let us first look at the current situation. Wikipedia exists since 2001,
> and in a couple of weeks will turn 18. Currently, it has 5.77 million
> articles. I often hear an opinion that all important articles have already
> been created. This is incorrect, and I am often the first person to point
> out that this is not correct. For example, today I created an article on an
> urban locality in Russia with the population of 15 thousands. Many articles
> are indeed too short, badly written, or suffer from other issues, and they
> need to be improved. There are new topics which appear on a regular basis:
> new music performers, new winners of sports competitions or prizes, and so
> on. As any Web 2.0 project, Wikipedia requires a regular cleanup, since
> there are many people happy to vandalize the 5th website in the world in
> terms of the number of views. However, as a general guideline, it is not so
> much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have been
> already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
> or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first hit
> — they are likely 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Fæ]

On Sat, 29 Dec 2018 at 21:35, Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:
> I have written a long text today (posted in my FB)

Facebook, is that still a thing? Gah, whatever is being posted there,
many of us Wikipedians are never going to see it. It would be nice to
see more people writing decent essays as blog posts rather than as
messages on a closed cynical data harvesting platform that makes a
multi-billionaire even richer.

There is a problem with the emphasis of (en) Wikipedia being on the
glory of ''creating'' an article. As a result many newbies and oldies
are driven to create lots of stubs and mediocre articles which may
never be much expanded. The primary criticism I hear from academics is
that the articrles for their subject area are ghastly, relying on
outdated sources, outdated ideas and seem so badly written that they
remain a concern for any student relying on Wikipedia as a starting
point for finding quality reliable sources for further reading.

Yesterday I was flagged on twitter about potential bias of "Feminist
views on transgender topics". It's a pretty sorry example which gives
an initial impression that the vast majority of feminists positively
hate trans people. However a closer read shows that the sources focus
on inflammatory writings, many sources and quotes being from the
1970s, so several decades out of date. The outcome is a polarised
essay which paints a social war, because that is what
self-aggrandising pundits, newspapers and social media focuses on,
when real life experience is nothing like this. Being a trans or
sexuality related article, sadly means that it is hard for newbies to
understand the special attention this gets on Wikipedia, with most
newbie edits being rapidly reverted and these contributors finding it
frustratingly complicated to talk about what they want to change.

If Wikipedia(s) are to have a revitalising period in the 2020s, there
needs to be more built-in ways to encourage and reward newbies to work
collegiality building up ''existing articles'', and to recognise that
those boldly trying to rewrite and restructure existing mediocre
articles to turn them in to good up to date topics are doing a far,
far more difficult and skilful thing than obsessive old lexicographers
trying to carpetbag red links.

Links
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics

Fae
-- 
fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
https://twitter.com/Faewik

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Anders Wennersten]

Thats excellent. It is just then to live up to that guidline, and foster 
people who can simplity the lead sections


For myself I remember how hard it was to get an educated physisct to 
write of the Coriolis effect in the lead section to make it 
understandable. He just squeemed that with simple language then it is no 
correct. And in it there is animations but without proper text it is 
impossible to understand


Anders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force is not easy to take in




Den 2018-12-30 kl. 13:23, skrev David Gerard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section
says pretty much the same:


The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. 
It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is 
notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent 
controversies. The notability of the article's subject is usually established 
in the first few sentences.

that is, the intro section should be a short standalone article:


As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four 
well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate.

For an extreme case, [[World War II]] gets *five* long paragraphs for
its intro section.


- d.



On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 10:57, Anders Wennersten
 wrote:

In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction
part of the article.

It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand
it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)

It should hopefully only be 1-3 sentences, and to state what is all
about and not a summary.

We do not live up to this recommendation all the time, but I have
noticed that he introducion part on enwp generally are very long, in
comparison

Anders



Den 2018-12-30 kl. 11:39, skrev Zubin JAIN:

I am 51, and I do not know much about the 18- generation, but I know two

important things about them. They have a very short attention span and
difficulties to concentrate. And they get a graphical and visualized
information much more easier than texts. For example, my son is capable of
watching three or four movies per day, but he has difficulties to read 20
pages from a book.


Well, the first question is whether an encyclopedia is an appropriate / the

best format for them to get knowledge (as it is for us). I do not know the
answer. What I write below assumes that the answer is positive, otherwise
the rest of the text does not make sense.


The next question is what should be done. How Wikipedia should look like to

be accessible to this generation? The answer seems to be obvious. Articles
must be short and contain a lot of graphic information. May be they need to
be videoclips. Short clips. Or, at lest, they must contain clips, with more
voice and less letters. If one needs more detailed information or just
further information - one hops to the next article or watches the next clip.

These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed.
Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect
that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and
one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the
fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the
site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable
of using it as well as anybody else.

The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on
fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not
to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video
content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with
disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia
unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of
generational decline is insulting.

On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell  wrote:


I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split
curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more
easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to
discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for
extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the
18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the
content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super
simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a
tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted
with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading
to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should
not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be
enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should
reflect editabili

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Strainu]

În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:40, Zubin JAIN
 a scris:
> These are gross generalizations

That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but
the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we
support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?

> The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
Nobody proposed that.

> On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell  wrote:
>
> > We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
> > adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks.

I had a conversation with Dan Garry in Cape Town about why categories
and navboxes are not shown on mobile and it seems they are not a
"thing" anymore (aka not used by the readers, which prefer navigating
through inline links). For the rest, I agree. What do you think of the
CitationHunt tool? Would it help if integrated in the normal workflow?

În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:57, Anders Wennersten
 a scris:
>
> In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction
> part of the article.
>
> It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand
> it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)

How very interesting! I've always thought that Wikipedia should be
accessible for people with middle studies (highschool) but I've been
accused of trying to "dumb down" Wikipedia. Thanks for the idea!

More generally, yes, the introduction is the obvious candidate for
what Yaroslav is proposing, the question is how do you put it to the
best use? Are popups (currently enabled for anonymous users) enough?
Movies and visuals are complicated for most people, would an audio
help? Text to speech is pretty good (and dead cheap) these days and I
know WMSE has done some work in this domain. Would an audio of the
introduction help? What about reading the whole article?

This is a major topic, we should probably try to extract 2-3 ideas
that can be pushed forward from it.

Strainu

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Jane Darnell]

Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may
not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Jane,
> I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how
> they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an
> explanation or clarify the concept?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Zubin JAIN]

>That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but
the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we
support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?

But it's not supported by rigorous evidence, a few studies and a bunch of
clickbait headlines hawking a decline narrative aren't things that should
be used as a basis for deciding that the encylvopedia is out of date and
Wikipedia should change itself to a primary video format

>> The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
"Articles must be short and contain a lot of graphic information. May be
they need to be videoclips. Short clips. Or, at lest, they must contain
clips, with more voice and less letters." Dumbing down seems to be a fair
summary of the proposal

On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 20:51, Strainu  wrote:

> În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:40, Zubin JAIN
>  a scris:
> > These are gross generalizations
>
> That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but
> the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we
> support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?
>
> > The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
> Nobody proposed that.
>
> > On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell  wrote:
> >
> > > We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
> > > adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks.
>
> I had a conversation with Dan Garry in Cape Town about why categories
> and navboxes are not shown on mobile and it seems they are not a
> "thing" anymore (aka not used by the readers, which prefer navigating
> through inline links). For the rest, I agree. What do you think of the
> CitationHunt tool? Would it help if integrated in the normal workflow?
>
> În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:57, Anders Wennersten
>  a scris:
> >
> > In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction
> > part of the article.
> >
> > It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand
> > it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
>
> How very interesting! I've always thought that Wikipedia should be
> accessible for people with middle studies (highschool) but I've been
> accused of trying to "dumb down" Wikipedia. Thanks for the idea!
>
> More generally, yes, the introduction is the obvious candidate for
> what Yaroslav is proposing, the question is how do you put it to the
> best use? Are popups (currently enabled for anonymous users) enough?
> Movies and visuals are complicated for most people, would an audio
> help? Text to speech is pretty good (and dead cheap) these days and I
> know WMSE has done some work in this domain. Would an audio of the
> introduction help? What about reading the whole article?
>
> This is a major topic, we should probably try to extract 2-3 ideas
> that can be pushed forward from it.
>
> Strainu
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Yaroslav Blanter]

Thanks for the reactions so far, they have been very useful. Let me answer
some of the points.

Re subject line: Obviously it is deliberately provocative to generate more
response and reach out to more people. Whereas what I write I do seriously,
if it stays a discussion of a dozen of people with the same views on the
subject it is probably useful.

Re milennials: this is clearly not a red herring. Just ask Facebook what
their demographics is and why the 18- generation is not using it.

Re introduction vs shorter articles:  I agree that a well-written
introduction is very important (though in practice it more often becomes a
battleground than not, and for most articles on my watchlist with non-zero
traffic it gets deteriorated with time, and it takes really a LOT of effort
of the community to maintain them). However, there are many other things in
the articles which are important as well, and I believe having
non-introductory pieces separately, written in a simple language, and
without excessive formatting is important. Currently, we can not
accommodate them within the articles - because there are too many details
to add, references, and formatting (the intro is an exception, it can
indeed be written simply without references).

Re fork: I actually do not believe in forking Wikipedia. One can fork
Wikipedia but so far all attempts to fork the community were unsuccessful,
and I do not think they will be successful in the future. I do not have a
problem with forking, I just believe it is not going to happen. What I
believe it will happen is a completely new platform suitable for new ways
of getting information. Just to give a perspective, imagine someone started
a project in the 1980s based on videotapes, and produced a lot of tapes. By
now they have either been copied to other media, or got completely
forgotten because nobody can play tapes anymore, at least unless one is a
very serious amateur or goes to a specialized library.

Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well,
at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being done
about it). We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural networks.
We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to
do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we are
discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest in
Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe and
Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in
Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological
development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?

Cheers
Yaroslav

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 2:50 PM Zubin JAIN 
wrote:

> >That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but
> the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we
> support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?
>
> But it's not supported by rigorous evidence, a few studies and a bunch of
> clickbait headlines hawking a decline narrative aren't things that should
> be used as a basis for deciding that the encylvopedia is out of date and
> Wikipedia should change itself to a primary video format
>
> >> The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
> "Articles must be short and contain a lot of graphic information. May be
> they need to be videoclips. Short clips. Or, at lest, they must contain
> clips, with more voice and less letters." Dumbing down seems to be a fair
> summary of the proposal
>
> On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 20:51, Strainu  wrote:
>
> > În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:40, Zubin JAIN
> >  a scris:
> > > These are gross generalizations
> >
> > That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but
> > the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we
> > support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?
> >
> > > The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
> > Nobody proposed that.
> >
> > > On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell  wrote:
> > >
> > > > We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes,
> > > > adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks.
> >
> > I had a conversation with Dan Garry in Cape Town about why categories
> > and navboxes are not shown on mobile and it seems they are not a
> > "thing" anymore (aka not used by the readers, which prefer navigating
> > through inline links). For the rest, I agree. What do you think of the
> > CitationHunt tool? Would it help if integrated in the normal workflow?
> >
> > În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:57, Anders Wennersten
> >  a scris:
> > >
> > > In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction
> > > part of the article.
> > >
> > > It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand
> > > it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
> >
> > How very interesting! I've always thought that Wikipedia should be
> > a

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Lane Rasberry]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_end_of_Wikipedia
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[David Cuenca Tudela]

Answering the initial question: It depends on how you understand "death".
Wikipedia is the manifestation of a collection of algorithms running in the
minds of thousands of people. With time it could become less popular to run
that algorithm in your life, or you would like to try a different one. With
less people then the Wikipedias would be different as they are today. More
out-of-date information, less capacity to oversee the project, stagnation,
and perhaps eventually irrelevance. Myspace, digg, and winamp are still
alive, however people prefer other options these days.

I think it is important to move with the flow, and open new opportunities
for collaboration as the technology and our contributor base are ready for
them. Wikidata started 6 years ago, Structured Commons is in the making,
and who knows what could come next.

In the age of review manipulation and mistrust, I see opportunities in
identifying thought leaders, and building a balanced critique on a subject
based on multiple sources. Wikipedia does this partially, but it is not its
main aim. Assigning trust to people or organizations is something that the
community does quite well, so it could be applied to other contexts.

A snippet-pedia also sounds useful, specially if a topic could be explained
with different levels of complexity. Layman's explanations are really
useful and there are communities built around them (for instance ELI5 with
16 million subscribers), however their explanations are neither
collaborative nor structured, so it is quite difficult to improve them or
navigate them.

It doesn't matter so much that Wikipedia "dies", what matters is that the
Wikimedia community adapts with new projects that keep the spirit of
gathering, organizing, and sharing knowledge alive. Perhaps we could also
consider other approaches that could be executed in real life. With diverse
approaches, there would be different kind of contributors, aka more
diversity. I would definitely welcome projects that would attract 90% of
female contributors, even if they are radically different and they are not
a wiki. In the end our mission is to enable everyone to share knowledge,
not necessarily encyclopedic, and not necessarily using current technology.
Just because we have a hammer doesn't mean that all problems can be solved
with it.

Regards,
Micru

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:35 PM Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:

> I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
> comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The target
> audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
> several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> apologize in advance.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
> _
> I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
> Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless, but
> someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
> talking about the English Wikipedia (referring to it as Wikipedia). I am
> active in other projects as well, and some of them have similar issues, but
> there are typically many other things going on there which make the picture
> more complicated.
>
> Let us first look at the current situation. Wikipedia exists since 2001,
> and in a couple of weeks will turn 18. Currently, it has 5.77 million
> articles. I often hear an opinion that all important articles have already
> been created. This is incorrect, and I am often the first person to point
> out that this is not correct. For example, today I created an article on an
> urban locality in Russia with the population of 15 thousands. Many articles
> are indeed too short, badly written, or suffer from other issues, and they
> need to be improved. There are new topics which appear on a regular basis:
> new music performers, new winners of sports competitions or prizes, and so
> on. As any Web 2.0 project, Wikipedia requires a regular cleanup, since
> there are many people happy to vandalize the 5th website in the world in
> terms of the number of views. However, as a general guideline, it is not so
> much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have been
> already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
> or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first hit
> — they are likely to find what they need with more than 99% chance.
>
> In this sense, Wikipedia now is very different from Wikipedia in 2008 or
> Wikipedia in 2004. Ten and especially fifteen years ago, everybody could
> contribute something important. For example, the article on the 1951 film
> "A Streetcar Named Desire", which won four Academy Awards, was started in
> 2005, as well as an article on Cy

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Peter Southwood]

Does the technology exist? Is it available?
How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
Cheers,
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Jane Darnell
Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may
not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.

On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Jane,
> I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how
> they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an
> explanation or clarify the concept?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Peter Southwood]

The problem with using simple language in complex topics is that simple 
language almost always needs far more words to say the same thing. The simpler 
the language, the more words are needed, assuming that the original was not 
unnecessarily verbose. This is why specialist terms exist: they require 
previous knowledge, but can reduce the number of words needed to explain. The 
alternative is dumbing down, lies-to-children, Wittgenstein's ladder, and that 
sort of thing. Ideally all of these options would be available to the reader, 
who could choose the level which works best for themselves.

Editors who have invested a lot of effort to produce a technically correct and 
comprehensive explanation will nor look kindly at dumbing down the article, but 
may be entirely unconcerned about an alternative explanation provided in 
parallel with the more correct version. To a large extent, that is the 
intention of the lead specification, but one person's excessively complex is 
another's needless dumbing down. Procrustean methods will fail almost everyone. 
Alternative explanations can allow a "just right" version for more readers. 
This is obviously more work for editors, and just as obviously, the versions 
should be consistent with each other, so more work again. It is somewhat like 
translating, but in the same language. 

Many editors would probably consider this a waste of time. They don’t have to 
do it, we are volunteers.  Others would consider it very important. Maybe they 
will do it. I think that linking articles with the same title between en: and 
simple: could be a relatively easy way of testing the utility of the concept. 
And I don’t mean the sidebar link that most readers do not know about (does it 
even exist on mobile?), I mean something obvious and self-explanatory in the 
title area. 

Cheers,
Peter Southwood



-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Anders Wennersten
Sent: 30 December 2018 14:50
To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

Thats excellent. It is just then to live up to that guidline, and foster 
people who can simplity the lead sections

For myself I remember how hard it was to get an educated physisct to 
write of the Coriolis effect in the lead section to make it 
understandable. He just squeemed that with simple language then it is no 
correct. And in it there is animations but without proper text it is 
impossible to understand

Anders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force is not easy to take in




Den 2018-12-30 kl. 13:23, skrev David Gerard:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section
> says pretty much the same:
>
>> The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's 
>> topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the 
>> topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any 
>> prominent controversies. The notability of the article's subject is usually 
>> established in the first few sentences.
> that is, the intro section should be a short standalone article:
>
>> As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four 
>> well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate.
> For an extreme case, [[World War II]] gets *five* long paragraphs for
> its intro section.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
> On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 10:57, Anders Wennersten
>  wrote:
>> In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction
>> part of the article.
>>
>> It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand
>> it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
>>
>> It should hopefully only be 1-3 sentences, and to state what is all
>> about and not a summary.
>>
>> We do not live up to this recommendation all the time, but I have
>> noticed that he introducion part on enwp generally are very long, in
>> comparison
>>
>> Anders
>>
>>
>>
>> Den 2018-12-30 kl. 11:39, skrev Zubin JAIN:
>>>> I am 51, and I do not know much about the 18- generation, but I know two
>>> important things about them. They have a very short attention span and
>>> difficulties to concentrate. And they get a graphical and visualized
>>> information much more easier than texts. For example, my son is capable of
>>> watching three or four movies per day, but he has difficulties to read 20
>>> pages from a book.
>>>
>>>> Well, the first question is whether an encyclopedia is an appropriate / the
>>> best format for them to get knowledge (as it is for us). I do not know the
>>> answer. What I write below assumes

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Jane Darnell]

1) Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and
easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the
relevant used references.

On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Does the technology exist? Is it available?
> How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may
> not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
> reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
>
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Jane,
> > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how
> > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an
> > explanation or clarify the concept?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> >
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Peter Southwood]

I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you would 
have all the components to worry about.
I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect.
Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen 
sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme case 
where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly the same, 
where a reference is used across several sections, which is common, it looks 
like more work: from a little more, to a lot more.
Unless I misunderstand your meaning...
Cheers,
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Jane Darnell
Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

1) Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and
easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the
relevant used references.

On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Does the technology exist? Is it available?
> How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may
> not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
> reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
>
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Jane,
> > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how
> > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an
> > explanation or clarify the concept?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> >
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Kiril Simeonovski]

er?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may
> not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
> reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
>
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Jane,
> > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how
> > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an
> > explanation or clarify the concept?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> >
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Kiril Simeonovski]

efinitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether outreach
> to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting
> with something new.
>
> I am sorry for the extensive text but there are things that need to be
> discussed.
>
> Best,
> Kiril
>
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
>> Does the technology exist? Is it available?
>> How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
>> Cheers,
>> Peter
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
>> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
>> Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
>> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
>> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>>
>> Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
>> items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
>> line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
>> template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
>> articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may
>> not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
>> structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
>> would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
>> snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
>> reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
>> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>>
>> > Jane,
>> > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how
>> > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
>> an
>> > explanation or clarify the concept?
>> > Cheers,
>> > Peter
>> >
>> >
>> ___
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>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
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>> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>
>
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:57 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you
> would have all the components to worry about.
> I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect.
> Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen
> sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme
> case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly
> the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is
> common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more.
> Unless I misunderstand your meaning...
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> 1) Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
> and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and
> easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the
> relevant used references.
>
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Does the technology exist? Is it available?
> > How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> > Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wik

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Jane Darnell]

Well of course it is impossible for me to peek in the kitchens of all other
Wikipedia article creators, but speaking for myself, I don't blindly type
into a blank editing window but prepare the way forward by knitting a
sweater of edits, generally across various projects, including other
language Wikipedias. I of course use Google to do the heavy lifting, often
triggered by some annoying incorrect thing I heard from Siri/Alexa, but it
could also be something inspiring I got off social media that made me
curious. I rarely go from inspiration to page creation in one go, and the
whole process sometimes takes me years. In the course of my tenure as a
Wikipedia editor, I have built up quite a library of random articles,
though most of them are related in some way to Dutch 17th century art.
Since becoming active on Wikidata, I have also built quite a library of
listeria lists in my userspace and elsewhere to check related edits across
projects and these sort of drown out everything else in my watchlists
unless I select a specific namespace only. In general, an article in my
process moves from "quote in Wikitext somewhere" to "quote+cited source(s)
in Wikitext somewhere" to  "quote+cited source(s)+media file in Wikitext
somewhere",  to  "quote+cited source(s)+Commons category for media file(s)
in Wikitext somewhere" before it ever sees the light of day as a
stand-alone article. These "pipeline nuggets" are often also line items in
lists (thus my first explanation), but most of them are not. Once created,
my articles are not orphans, but have a select number of incoming links
that I also try to keep track of. Aside from my own personal "article
pipeline", I also spend time de-orphanizing and interlinking such nuggets
in existing articles and I would love to be able to watch them all in
two-way linked stereo, but that is impossible today.

On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:57 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you
> would have all the components to worry about.
> I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect.
> Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen
> sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme
> case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly
> the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is
> common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more.
> Unless I misunderstand your meaning...
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> 1) Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
> and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and
> easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the
> relevant used references.
>
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Does the technology exist? Is it available?
> > How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> > Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
> >
> > Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> > items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> > line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> > template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> > articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
> may
> > not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> > structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> > would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> > snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
> > reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
> > peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Jane,
> > > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
> how
> > > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
> an
> > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Peter Southwood]

Sorry, you have lost me completely now, I cannot parse your idiom, or its 
relevance to the previous discussion, but it is not important enough to lose 
sleep over. Shall we just accept that we do things differently? Cheers, Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Jane Darnell
Sent: 31 December 2018 13:09
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

Well of course it is impossible for me to peek in the kitchens of all other
Wikipedia article creators, but speaking for myself, I don't blindly type
into a blank editing window but prepare the way forward by knitting a
sweater of edits, generally across various projects, including other
language Wikipedias. I of course use Google to do the heavy lifting, often
triggered by some annoying incorrect thing I heard from Siri/Alexa, but it
could also be something inspiring I got off social media that made me
curious. I rarely go from inspiration to page creation in one go, and the
whole process sometimes takes me years. In the course of my tenure as a
Wikipedia editor, I have built up quite a library of random articles,
though most of them are related in some way to Dutch 17th century art.
Since becoming active on Wikidata, I have also built quite a library of
listeria lists in my userspace and elsewhere to check related edits across
projects and these sort of drown out everything else in my watchlists
unless I select a specific namespace only. In general, an article in my
process moves from "quote in Wikitext somewhere" to "quote+cited source(s)
in Wikitext somewhere" to  "quote+cited source(s)+media file in Wikitext
somewhere",  to  "quote+cited source(s)+Commons category for media file(s)
in Wikitext somewhere" before it ever sees the light of day as a
stand-alone article. These "pipeline nuggets" are often also line items in
lists (thus my first explanation), but most of them are not. Once created,
my articles are not orphans, but have a select number of incoming links
that I also try to keep track of. Aside from my own personal "article
pipeline", I also spend time de-orphanizing and interlinking such nuggets
in existing articles and I would love to be able to watch them all in
two-way linked stereo, but that is impossible today.

On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:57 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you
> would have all the components to worry about.
> I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect.
> Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen
> sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme
> case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly
> the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is
> common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more.
> Unless I misunderstand your meaning...
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> 1) Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
> and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and
> easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the
> relevant used references.
>
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Does the technology exist? Is it available?
> > How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> > Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
> >
> > Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> > items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> > line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> > template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> > articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
> may
> > not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> > structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> > would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> > snippets" in the wiki

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

Yaroslav Blanter  escreveu no dia domingo, 30/12/2018
à(s) 13:55:


> Re milennials: this is clearly not a red herring. Just ask Facebook what
> their demographics is and why the 18- generation is not using it.
>

Stats show that Galinha Pintadinha was one of the most viewed articles in
2018 at the Portuguese Wikipedia:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=pt.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2017-12&end=2018-11&pages=Galinha_Pintadinha

I seem to recall it got the 3rd place, but was undoubtedly among the 10
first. Galinha Pintadinha is a very sucessful Brazilian project that
produces songs for children. Apparently those hits are being caused by
children looking for the songs, who click on the Wikipedia article because
it was among the first hits on Google (apparently it's not anymore, and the
hits went down dramatically, accordingly). What this tells is that
apparently an incredible number of very young children already have an easy
access to Wikipedia, and from direct experience at wiki.pt, many of them
stay there editing on the things they like, primarily animation series like
Naruto. We get a lot of new editors who have about 9-12 years old,
confirmed. While this brings a lot of new issues, because our old,
"plastered" Wikipedia project is not really prepared to deal with children
as editors, it's also very refreshing to observe that the community is
continuously renewing itself.

At least in the Portuguese Wikipedia, a large, large fraction of our
readers are children and teens, and a large fraction of our editors are
teens - and this is not limited to Brazil, it's a phenomena I've been
observing at the Portuguese speaking African countries, where our editors
are in general very young, and even in Portugal. The only common trend here
with what is generally publicly stated about Wikipedia is that it's mostly
boys and young men, which should bring about some meditation about what
could be the true causes of the Wikipedia gender gap. Girls and young women
are indeed very rare as editors (though apparently they read and externally
use us a lot).

This is not inline with that idea that we are losing the young generations,
at least in the Portuguese speaking world. Surely they complain a lot about
the usability of the project, and the outdated looks of it (that kind of
1990s flashback), but that is a common complaint that seem to cross all
generations.

While we are at it, some anecdotic evidence of another curious phenomena
I've observed at a recent Wikidata workshop we've organized at our National
Library. We were expecting a participation mostly by young people, since it
was mostly technical stuff. Instead, most of the participants were
archivists and librarians with more than 40 years old, many above 50, 60,
and up. And it was a success, they appeared to be kind of native to
Wikidata, even if it was the first time they were touching it. A large
number of them were women, too, I seem to recall the majority. I've been
observing 10 years old featuring articles and getting to the rank of sysop
at Wiki.pt (nobody knew how old they were at the time :P ), and now I'm
seeing senior people at retirement age engaging with Wikidata - reality
often is very different from what we imagine a priori.

I believe the potential is all there, we just need to understand who our
targets are, and the proper way to get to them. And be creative on the ways
to approach, not getting stuck to the old edithatons (of which efficiency I
have many doubts, apart from some specific situations such as art+feminism
which are also about activism, and so have a potential to result).

Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well,
> at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being done
> about it).


Mobile editing really is a problem. I've been trying for months to engage
new editors in Guinea-Bissau and Angola, and mobile editing really has
shown to be a very powerful barrier for the participation on those places
where everybody has a cell phone (sometimes even 3 of them, as I've been
told is the case in Guinea-Bissau), but desktop computers are extremely
rare.

We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural networks.
> We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to
> do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we are
> discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest in
> Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe and
> Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in
> Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological
> development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?


i don't believe it is correct to mix those things. The people that edit-war
about trifles are often not the same that can propose, discuss and develop
those higher scale improvements and evolutions; or at least they are in a
very differe

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

I expect the degree of incidence of vandalism and its patterns would remain
the same in the brethren articles as in the parent one, so more items to
watchlist should not be a problem (it will be shown moreless the same times
as if it was in one piece, but showing the parts). It can also allow for
protections on those parts more prone to vandalism, leaving the main
article unprotected, which is a plus, and actually reduces the number of
things we have to watch for. Similarly, it can attract "specialized
watchers" which are only interested in the genealogy of Cristiano Ronaldo,
but don't care the least about his football skills (just an example), which
would otherwise never watch the whole thing, since almost all the regular
editions would be about football. Overally it seems a good idea to split,
and keep only the more generic stuff in the main thing, indeed.

Cheers,

Paulo

Peter Southwood  escreveu no dia segunda,
31/12/2018 à(s) 08:57:

> I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you
> would have all the components to worry about.
> I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect.
> Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen
> sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme
> case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly
> the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is
> common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more.
> Unless I misunderstand your meaning...
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> 1) Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
> and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and
> easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the
> relevant used references.
>
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Does the technology exist? Is it available?
> > How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> > Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
> >
> > Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> > items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> > line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> > template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> > articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
> may
> > not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> > structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> > would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> > snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
> > reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
> > peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Jane,
> > > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
> how
> > > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
> an
> > > explanation or clarify the concept?
> > > Cheers,
> > > Peter
> > >
> > >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> >
> > ---
> > This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
> > https://www.avg.com
> >
> >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lis

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

Kiril Simeonovski  escreveu no dia segunda,
31/12/2018 à(s) 10:05:



> some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete
> infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and
> further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in
> infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether outreach
> to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting
> with something new.
>

I've been experimenting this personally for some time, firstly with the
Art+Feminism initiative, which past experience has shown to be highly
counterproductive if handled in a simple, amateurish way - events have been
organized here in Portugal without appropriate support, which resulted in
massive eliminations of the articles created, with a consequent
traumatizing experience for the people that took part in them, that never
again wanted to hear about Wikipedia. The 1lib1ref in its basic form also
do not seem to be ideal to catch the attention of librarians over here, but
alternative ways of organizing it seem to result. Edithatons in general
have shown to be a bad option for reaching to new editors, except in the
cases where we have some motivated work force already available (feminist
activists, students being evaluated, etc.). My personal experience is that
participating in edithatons "just because" is simply not fun nor
attractive, there must be something to gain from it (promoting a specific
cause, getting good grades, etc). We should indeed get innovative here, and
above all, share our experiences, so that we can build something on this
together.

Cheers,

Paulo
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New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Kiril Simeonovski]

Hi Paulo,

I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new and
what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible
decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor and
the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor.
There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is reasonable to
believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This
will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.

Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to allow
new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's
structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people that we
reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are eager
to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the articles
reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus can
not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and
the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.

Best,
Kiril

On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 19:09 Paulo Santos Perneta 
wrote:

> Kiril Simeonovski  escreveu no dia segunda,
> 31/12/2018 à(s) 10:05:
>
>
>
> > some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete
> > infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and
> > further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in
> > infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether
> outreach
> > to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting
> > with something new.
> >
>
> I've been experimenting this personally for some time, firstly with the
> Art+Feminism initiative, which past experience has shown to be highly
> counterproductive if handled in a simple, amateurish way - events have been
> organized here in Portugal without appropriate support, which resulted in
> massive eliminations of the articles created, with a consequent
> traumatizing experience for the people that took part in them, that never
> again wanted to hear about Wikipedia. The 1lib1ref in its basic form also
> do not seem to be ideal to catch the attention of librarians over here, but
> alternative ways of organizing it seem to result. Edithatons in general
> have shown to be a bad option for reaching to new editors, except in the
> cases where we have some motivated work force already available (feminist
> activists, students being evaluated, etc.). My personal experience is that
> participating in edithatons "just because" is simply not fun nor
> attractive, there must be something to gain from it (promoting a specific
> cause, getting good grades, etc). We should indeed get innovative here, and
> above all, share our experiences, so that we can build something on this
> together.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paulo
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Kiril Simeonovski]

P.S. I can give you a very nice example of this happening in practice from
my personal experience. Few years ago, we produced high-quality videos
documenting physics and chemistry experiments that had to be added to
related articles. The project was welcomed by some chapters, mostly
despised by the Wikimedia Foundation, while the communities appeared to be
not ready for the introduction of such videos with only some users on
Wikimedia Commons showing some interest and sharing their thoughts.

The main problem seems to be the lack of coordination between various
stakeholders inside the movement on technology-related questions that are
strategically important for the future of Wikipedia.

Best,
Kiril

On Mon 31. Dec 2018 at 19:59, Kiril Simeonovski 
wrote:

> Hi Paulo,
>
> I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new and
> what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible
> decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor and
> the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor.
> There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is reasonable to
> believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This
> will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
>
> Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to allow
> new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's
> structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people that we
> reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are eager
> to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the articles
> reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus can
> not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and
> the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.
>
> Best,
> Kiril
>
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 19:09 Paulo Santos Perneta <
> paulospern...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Kiril Simeonovski  escreveu no dia segunda,
>> 31/12/2018 à(s) 10:05:
>>
>>
>>
>> > some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete
>> > infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and
>> > further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in
>> > infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether
>> outreach
>> > to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting
>> > with something new.
>> >
>>
>> I've been experimenting this personally for some time, firstly with the
>> Art+Feminism initiative, which past experience has shown to be highly
>> counterproductive if handled in a simple, amateurish way - events have
>> been
>> organized here in Portugal without appropriate support, which resulted in
>> massive eliminations of the articles created, with a consequent
>> traumatizing experience for the people that took part in them, that never
>> again wanted to hear about Wikipedia. The 1lib1ref in its basic form also
>> do not seem to be ideal to catch the attention of librarians over here,
>> but
>> alternative ways of organizing it seem to result. Edithatons in general
>> have shown to be a bad option for reaching to new editors, except in the
>> cases where we have some motivated work force already available (feminist
>> activists, students being evaluated, etc.). My personal experience is that
>> participating in edithatons "just because" is simply not fun nor
>> attractive, there must be something to gain from it (promoting a specific
>> cause, getting good grades, etc). We should indeed get innovative here,
>> and
>> above all, share our experiences, so that we can build something on this
>> together.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Paulo
>> ___
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
>> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> 
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

‫בתאריך יום ב׳, 31 בדצמ׳ 2018 ב-10:14 מאת ‪Peter Southwood‬‏ <‪
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net‬‏>:‬

Does the technology exist? Is it available?
How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
Cheers,
Peter


Not exactly, but it's doable and it's desirable.

There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that
are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions.
They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors because
they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do
myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to
implementing Jane's suggestion.

This suggestion is not even very new. In a way, the extremely old bug
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2167 , originally filed in 2004 (!)
suggests pretty much the same thing: separate interlanguage links and other
metadata from the page content. Interlanguage links were mostly separated
from pages thanks to Wikidata, but categories still aren't, and a lot of
other kinds of metadata appeared since then: DEFAULTSORT, newsectionlink,
notoc, and many others. Authority control, navbox, and infobox templates,
as well as links to disambiguation pages, can probably be converted to
separately-stored metadata as well.

Wikidata can probably play a major role in getting this done, but it's not
the only factor, and a lot of development is needed to better integrate
Wikidata with other projects.

But yes—I generally agree with Jane that better modularization of wiki
pages' content components can go a long to making them easier to edit,
easier to search, easier to query, etc. It's not the only major change that
our technical infrastructure needs, but it's among the more important ones.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬


>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may
> not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
> reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
>
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Jane,
> > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how
> > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an
> > explanation or clarify the concept?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> >
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Samuel Klein]

Dear Kiril, I assume you mean these lovely experiments by Shared Knowledge:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_Republic_of_Macedonia

They are lovely, and look like they are now in use.  I like specific
examples like these; was there any description of the project afterwards
covering its welcome, the steps towards its inclusion, notes for future
research groups tackling similar projects in the future?

Kiril writes:
> The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily
bypassed
> even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and the changes usually
get
> rejected as good-faith attempts.

A dedicated Draft-Wiki, like [test] but for text and media, with much
simpler standards for structure, sourcing, and metadata [perhaps combined
w/ incubator?]  would be a simple and welcome solution.  It would help not
only small media projects but also massive uploads from existing archives
and GLAMs take their first steps without overly complicating things.  I
think this is one of the most valuable simple additions we could make.

There is also a more general solution already available: to create a new
tool that participants in a new initiative use (which only later gets
integrated fully into the standard workflow on various projects).  But that
takes a bit of technical preparation each time.

Amir writes:
>   There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that
>   are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions.
>   They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors
because
>   they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do
>   myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to
>   implementing Jane's suggestion.

Yes!  and thanks for bringing up T2167 -- that and adding a simple
mechanism for federating such data (so that every owner of a lowly
small-scale mediawiki instance can add to or revise metadata namespaces)
feel more like a basic expansion of wiki-nature --- with associated
expansion of the kinds and magnitude of knowledge included in our projects
-- than like just another set of features.

Warmly + medialogically, SJ

On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 2:18 PM Kiril Simeonovski <
kiril.simeonov...@gmail.com> wrote:

> P.S. I can give you a very nice example of this happening in practice from
> my personal experience. Few years ago, we produced high-quality videos
> documenting physics and chemistry experiments that had to be added to
> related articles. The project was welcomed by some chapters, mostly
> despised by the Wikimedia Foundation, while the communities appeared to be
> not ready for the introduction of such videos with only some users on
> Wikimedia Commons showing some interest and sharing their thoughts.
>
> The main problem seems to be the lack of coordination between various
> stakeholders inside the movement on technology-related questions that are
> strategically important for the future of Wikipedia.
>
> Best,
> Kiril
>
> On Mon 31. Dec 2018 at 19:59, Kiril Simeonovski <
> kiril.simeonov...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi Paulo,
> >
> > I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new
> and
> > what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible
> > decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor and
> > the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor.
> > There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is reasonable
> to
> > believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This
> > will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
> >
> > Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to
> allow
> > new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's
> > structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people that
> we
> > reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are
> eager
> > to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the articles
> > reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus can
> > not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement
> and
> > the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[James Heilman]

With respect to complexity of language, we have some data in publication,
looking at the the leads of English medical articles over time. Good news
is that they have improved over the last 10 years from a reading level of
close to "grade 16" to just under "grade 13". This has been a concerted
effort by a small group of us since 2014 and I believe has helped approach
our goal of writing for a general audience rather than a specialist one.

Happy holidays to those getting time off :-)
James

On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 5:51 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> Dear Kiril, I assume you mean these lovely experiments by Shared Knowledge:
>
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_Republic_of_Macedonia
>
> They are lovely, and look like they are now in use.  I like specific
> examples like these; was there any description of the project afterwards
> covering its welcome, the steps towards its inclusion, notes for future
> research groups tackling similar projects in the future?
>
> Kiril writes:
> > The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily
> bypassed
> > even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and the changes usually
> get
> > rejected as good-faith attempts.
>
> A dedicated Draft-Wiki, like [test] but for text and media, with much
> simpler standards for structure, sourcing, and metadata [perhaps combined
> w/ incubator?]  would be a simple and welcome solution.  It would help not
> only small media projects but also massive uploads from existing archives
> and GLAMs take their first steps without overly complicating things.  I
> think this is one of the most valuable simple additions we could make.
>
> There is also a more general solution already available: to create a new
> tool that participants in a new initiative use (which only later gets
> integrated fully into the standard workflow on various projects).  But that
> takes a bit of technical preparation each time.
>
> Amir writes:
> >   There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki
> that
> >   are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content
> Revisions.
> >   They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors
> because
> >   they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do
> >   myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to
> >   implementing Jane's suggestion.
>
> Yes!  and thanks for bringing up T2167 -- that and adding a simple
> mechanism for federating such data (so that every owner of a lowly
> small-scale mediawiki instance can add to or revise metadata namespaces)
> feel more like a basic expansion of wiki-nature --- with associated
> expansion of the kinds and magnitude of knowledge included in our projects
> -- than like just another set of features.
>
> Warmly + medialogically, SJ
>
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 2:18 PM Kiril Simeonovski <
> kiril.simeonov...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > P.S. I can give you a very nice example of this happening in practice
> from
> > my personal experience. Few years ago, we produced high-quality videos
> > documenting physics and chemistry experiments that had to be added to
> > related articles. The project was welcomed by some chapters, mostly
> > despised by the Wikimedia Foundation, while the communities appeared to
> be
> > not ready for the introduction of such videos with only some users on
> > Wikimedia Commons showing some interest and sharing their thoughts.
> >
> > The main problem seems to be the lack of coordination between various
> > stakeholders inside the movement on technology-related questions that are
> > strategically important for the future of Wikipedia.
> >
> > Best,
> > Kiril
> >
> > On Mon 31. Dec 2018 at 19:59, Kiril Simeonovski <
> > kiril.simeonov...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Paulo,
> > >
> > > I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new
> > and
> > > what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible
> > > decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor
> and
> > > the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor.
> > > There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is
> reasonable
> > to
> > > believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This
> > > will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
> > >
> > > Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to
> > allow
> > > new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's
> > > structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people
> that
> > we
> > > reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are
> > eager
> > > to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the
> articles
> > > reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus
> can
> > > not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement
> > and
> > > the changes usually get re

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Kiril Simeonovski]

Hi Sj,

The project documentation can be found on Meta and the story was also
featured in the GLAM newsletter twice.

The idea about dedicated environment either as a separate wiki or as part
of the incubator for testing novelties is sound, and it would be
interesting to see how that will work in support of their ultimate
implementation.

Best,
Kiril


On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 01:51 Samuel Klein  wrote:

> Dear Kiril, I assume you mean these lovely experiments by Shared Knowledge:
>
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_Republic_of_Macedonia
>
> They are lovely, and look like they are now in use.  I like specific
> examples like these; was there any description of the project afterwards
> covering its welcome, the steps towards its inclusion, notes for future
> research groups tackling similar projects in the future?
>
> Kiril writes:
> > The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily
> bypassed
> > even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and the changes usually
> get
> > rejected as good-faith attempts.
>
> A dedicated Draft-Wiki, like [test] but for text and media, with much
> simpler standards for structure, sourcing, and metadata [perhaps combined
> w/ incubator?]  would be a simple and welcome solution.  It would help not
> only small media projects but also massive uploads from existing archives
> and GLAMs take their first steps without overly complicating things.  I
> think this is one of the most valuable simple additions we could make.
>
> There is also a more general solution already available: to create a new
> tool that participants in a new initiative use (which only later gets
> integrated fully into the standard workflow on various projects).  But that
> takes a bit of technical preparation each time.
>
> Amir writes:
> >   There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki
> that
> >   are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content
> Revisions.
> >   They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors
> because
> >   they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do
> >   myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to
> >   implementing Jane's suggestion.
>
> Yes!  and thanks for bringing up T2167 -- that and adding a simple
> mechanism for federating such data (so that every owner of a lowly
> small-scale mediawiki instance can add to or revise metadata namespaces)
> feel more like a basic expansion of wiki-nature --- with associated
> expansion of the kinds and magnitude of knowledge included in our projects
> -- than like just another set of features.
>
> Warmly + medialogically, SJ
>
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 2:18 PM Kiril Simeonovski <
> kiril.simeonov...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > P.S. I can give you a very nice example of this happening in practice
> from
> > my personal experience. Few years ago, we produced high-quality videos
> > documenting physics and chemistry experiments that had to be added to
> > related articles. The project was welcomed by some chapters, mostly
> > despised by the Wikimedia Foundation, while the communities appeared to
> be
> > not ready for the introduction of such videos with only some users on
> > Wikimedia Commons showing some interest and sharing their thoughts.
> >
> > The main problem seems to be the lack of coordination between various
> > stakeholders inside the movement on technology-related questions that are
> > strategically important for the future of Wikipedia.
> >
> > Best,
> > Kiril
> >
> > On Mon 31. Dec 2018 at 19:59, Kiril Simeonovski <
> > kiril.simeonov...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Paulo,
> > >
> > > I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new
> > and
> > > what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible
> > > decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor
> and
> > > the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor.
> > > There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is
> reasonable
> > to
> > > believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This
> > > will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
> > >
> > > Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to
> > allow
> > > new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's
> > > structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people
> that
> > we
> > > reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are
> > eager
> > > to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the
> articles
> > > reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus
> can
> > > not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement
> > and
> > > the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.
> >
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

Ahh, it would really be a fantastic improvement if we could get rid of all
that template & category clutter from the articles.

Wikipedia categories are generally anathema to newbies, more like some
weird and absurd core they have to do in order to have their article
accepted. Even to me, who have been there for almost 10 years, Wikipedia
categories have little use (and I actually came to develop a crescent
hatred for them, due to the mess they have been causing in Wikidata, due to
the inappropriate linking to Commons categories). Let me tell a little
story: Some months ago I was in a workshop with a group of librarians, and
they were creating articles using VE. At some point all of them came under
a barrage of fire from resident wikipedians, bombing them with warnings
saying "you MUST add categories" and pointing them to the oldfashioned
instructions on how to add them on wikicode, totally useless for newbies
using VE. It was the first time I was using VE myself in a more intensive
way, and while all of we were hastily trying to find where the heck
categories were hidden in VE, the librarians kept asking, puzzled - what
are those categories that seem to be of such a crucial importance to
wikipedians? The sad fact is that 99% of those people that send those
useless warnings have not the least idea what categories are for, they
simply notice they are missing in a newly created article, and as they know
they are not supposed to be missing because they have been warned
themselves, they mimic the behavior perpetually, not even stopping to think
how useless and outdated they came to be, how hard it is for a newbie to
understand they exist at all, let alone what they are for, and that
throwing warnings designed in 2006 and never changed since then at newbies
is absolutely useless and only serves to confuse and annoy them, and make
them feel unwelcome in the project.

I really wish there was a better solution for what categories still do in
Wikipedia, so that they could be abolished for good. That would certainly
be an improvement in usability.

Paulo

Amir E. Aharoni  escreveu no dia segunda,
31/12/2018 à(s) 19:56:

> ‫בתאריך יום ב׳, 31 בדצמ׳ 2018 ב-10:14 מאת ‪Peter Southwood‬‏ <‪
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net‬‏>:‬
>
> Does the technology exist? Is it available?
> How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
>
> Not exactly, but it's doable and it's desirable.
>
> There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that
> are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions.
> They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors because
> they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do
> myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to
> implementing Jane's suggestion.
>
> This suggestion is not even very new. In a way, the extremely old bug
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2167 , originally filed in 2004 (!)
> suggests pretty much the same thing: separate interlanguage links and other
> metadata from the page content. Interlanguage links were mostly separated
> from pages thanks to Wikidata, but categories still aren't, and a lot of
> other kinds of metadata appeared since then: DEFAULTSORT, newsectionlink,
> notoc, and many others. Authority control, navbox, and infobox templates,
> as well as links to disambiguation pages, can probably be converted to
> separately-stored metadata as well.
>
> Wikidata can probably play a major role in getting this done, but it's not
> the only factor, and a lot of development is needed to better integrate
> Wikidata with other projects.
>
> But yes—I generally agree with Jane that better modularization of wiki
> pages' content components can go a long to making them easier to edit,
> easier to search, easier to query, etc. It's not the only major change that
> our technical infrastructure needs, but it's among the more important ones.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
>
> >
> > -Original Message-----
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> > Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
> >
> > Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> > items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> > line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> > template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> > articles. Suc

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

בתאריך יום א׳, 30 בדצמ׳ 2018, 15:55, מאת Yaroslav Blanter :

>
>
> Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well,
> at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being done
> about it). We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural networks.
> We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to
> do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we are
> discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest in
> Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe and
> Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in
> Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological
> development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?
>

False dichotomy.

Wide participation in big strategic discussion is a Good Thing, but it
doesn't mean that it's the only thing all the Wikimedians should be talking
about. There are people who are less interested in strategic discussions
and more interested in on-wiki fact-checking. Wikipedia editors' obsession
for fact-checking is its strength—our strength. It's sometimes frustrating
because it can go into silly technicalities or political ax-grinding, but
for the most part it's the main thing that keeps Wikipedia relevant,
trustworthy, and popular.

How can these fact-checking practices be harmonized with current technology
and media culture is the right question to ask. If the people who often do
this can *also* occasionally participate in strategic development
discussions, there's a chance it will be answered. Invite them.

Happy public domain day and happy new year! :)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

בתאריך יום ג׳, 1 בינו׳ 2019, 07:37, מאת Paulo Santos Perneta <
paulospern...@gmail.com>:

> Ahh, it would really be a fantastic improvement if we could get rid of all
> that template & category clutter from the articles.

[...]

Let me tell a little
> story: Some months ago I was in a workshop with a group of librarians, and
> they were creating articles using VE. At some point all of them came under
> a barrage of fire from resident wikipedians, bombing them with warnings
> saying "you MUST add categories"


I spent my first year or so on Wikipedia, editing and creating quite a lot
without understanding how categories work. Those were the days... Other
people, to who I'm deeply thankful, quietly fixed them after me. I later
learned how to work with them myself. If my edits were deleted because I
did not add categories, I'd possibly be away from this project.


and pointing them to the oldfashioned
> instructions on how to add them on wikicode, totally useless for newbies
> using VE.


This is another symptom: many of the help pages are hopelessly out of date.
And the main reason for this is that they are too localized: they were
initially created before we had better (but still not perfect) tools for
global pages and translation. Now the veterans think they're good even
though they rarely need them, and the newbies are just puzzled by them, and
for the developers of new features it's too hard to manage help pages that
are so dispersed across wikis and languages.

It was the first time I was using VE myself in a more intensive
> way, and while all of we were hastily trying to find where the heck
> categories were hidden in VE,


So here are a couple of things that you can do, and please tell everyone
else to do them: use the VE more! It will very frequently save you time,
and it will help you understand newbies better.

If it's not good enough for you to use more, report bugs! The only ways to
find bugs are to use it more yourself and to carefully observe other people
using it (see
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-06/Op-ed
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6sS0M9TpYQ&t=27m28s ; note that the
relevant part of the video begins at 27:28).

And every time a newbie asks you how to do something, check whether the
relevant help page in your wiki documents how to do it in VE, and if it
doesn't, take a few minutes to add the info.

None of these things will by themselves make a big strategic difference,
but it will make the work smoother for a lot of people, at least in the
short term.

the librarians kept asking, puzzled - what
> are those categories that seem to be of such a crucial importance to
> wikipedians?


Well, categories should actually be fairly easy for librarians to
understand. If these librarians had a hard time with them, it doesn't mean
that they are stupid, but that our categories system is badly broken.


The sad fact is that 99% of those people that send those
> useless warnings have not the least idea what categories are for, they
> simply notice they are missing in a newly created article, and as they know
> they are not supposed to be missing because they have been warned
> themselves, they mimic the behavior perpetually


Yes! Don't tolerate the perpetual mimicking of very old practices. Speak up
and change stuff.

Wikipedia should be a big club of people who like sharing knowledge, and
not a small club of people who managed to learn wiki syntax.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Jonathan Cardy]

Yes the greying of the pedia is a real phenomena, and I am sure that an editor 
survey would confirm that on average we are getting older.

You posit two reasons for the community to be in decline, that the easy 
articles have been written and that it is difficult to edit Wikipedia on a 
mobile. I agree with the second reason, and it is possible that the 2015/16 
rally has run its course. Editing volumes in late 2018 are dropping, but still 
above late 2014 levels, however I am not sure whether that is a real drop or a 
symptom of some of the infobox work moving to Wikidata. I am not convinced 
about your first reason. But there is a third that we should not underestimate, 
over the last decade or so expectations have risen and there is now little room 
for editors who add unsourced content. In quality terms this is a good thing, 
but it has repercussions on the quantity of editors (and I am sure contributes 
to the greying of the pedia). If as I suspect it is true that our decline is 
only among those who add uncited content, and that we are replacing those who 
add cited content as fast or faster than we lose them, then we can dismiss 
editor decline as no longer being an existential threat to the project.

I am sanguine about the mobile editing problem. It is a known issue. People are 
working on it, so we may get a technical fix. Fashions in technology have 
changed in the past and will change again, so we  may find that more people in 
the future have suitable devices to edit with. My own medium turn fix would be 
to launch an intermediate platform for tablets. This would leave the mobile 
platform for smartphone users, and I know we have at least a couple of editors 
who use smartphones, but the ratio of editors to readers is very much lower 
than among PC users. A Tablet platform would enable us  to offer tablet users a 
more editor friendly environment than could fit on the mobile platform.

As for screenagers with damaged attention spans, I think that some research 
would be useful. My expectation is that we would find that a maximum section 
size would be helpful to mobile users, and maybe we should also break up some 
lists into categories of stub articles. But the way to convince the community 
that such changes were useful would be first to commission some research so 
that we could propose evidence based changes. My hope is that if we knew that 
mobile users could only handle sections of a certain length, the Manual of 
Style would be changed and such indigestible articles would at least get 
subheadings.

To go back to the heading. No the death of Wikipedia is not imminent. I have 
known charities and not for profits where the volunteer community was far older 
and more closed than we are, and such volunteer communities can persist for 
decades even if a new generation doesn’t come along. Wikipedia is about to have 
its 18th birthday, if anything kills it in the next decade or two it will be 
something as yet scarcely on our radar as a risk.



Get Outlook for iOS


Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2018 22:34:27 +0100
From: Yaroslav Blanter 
To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The target
audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
apologize in advance.

Cheers
Yaroslav
_
I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless, but
someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
talking about the English Wikipedia (referring to it as Wikipedia). I am
active in other projects as well, and some of them have similar issues, but
there are typically many other things going on there which make the picture
more complicated.

Let us first look at the current situation. Wikipedia exists since 2001,
and in a couple of weeks will turn 18. Currently, it has 5.77 million
articles. I often hear an opinion that all important articles have already
been created. This is incorrect, and I am often the first person to point
out that this is not correct. For example, today I created an article on an
urban locality in Russia with the population of 15 thousands. Many articles
are indeed too short, badly written, or suffer from other issues, and they
need to be improved. There are new topics which appear on a regular basis:
new music performers, new winners of sports competitions or prizes, and so
on. As any Web 2.0 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Jane Darnell]

Thanks to Yaroslav who started this interesting conversation, and thanks
for all the comments. I agree with lots of them, but especially this: Happy
Public Domain Day!

On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 7:15 AM Amir E. Aharoni 
wrote:

> בתאריך יום א׳, 30 בדצמ׳ 2018, 15:55, מאת Yaroslav Blanter <
> ymb...@gmail.com
> >:
>
> >
> >
> > Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well,
> > at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being
> done
> > about it). We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural
> networks.
> > We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to
> > do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we
> are
> > discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest
> in
> > Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe
> and
> > Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in
> > Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological
> > development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?
> >
>
> False dichotomy.
>
> Wide participation in big strategic discussion is a Good Thing, but it
> doesn't mean that it's the only thing all the Wikimedians should be talking
> about. There are people who are less interested in strategic discussions
> and more interested in on-wiki fact-checking. Wikipedia editors' obsession
> for fact-checking is its strength—our strength. It's sometimes frustrating
> because it can go into silly technicalities or political ax-grinding, but
> for the most part it's the main thing that keeps Wikipedia relevant,
> trustworthy, and popular.
>
> How can these fact-checking practices be harmonized with current technology
> and media culture is the right question to ask. If the people who often do
> this can *also* occasionally participate in strategic development
> discussions, there's a chance it will be answered. Invite them.
>
> Happy public domain day and happy new year! :)
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Yethrosh]

I believe much depends on Wikipedia Mobile app. Users are mostly on mobile
now and they feel it natural to do any thing from mobile. If only, creating
articles and adding citations could be done easily through mobile app, can
make a big difference.

On Mon, 31 Dec 2018, 2:22 a.m. David Cuenca Tudela  Answering the initial question: It depends on how you understand "death".
> Wikipedia is the manifestation of a collection of algorithms running in the
> minds of thousands of people. With time it could become less popular to run
> that algorithm in your life, or you would like to try a different one. With
> less people then the Wikipedias would be different as they are today. More
> out-of-date information, less capacity to oversee the project, stagnation,
> and perhaps eventually irrelevance. Myspace, digg, and winamp are still
> alive, however people prefer other options these days.
>
> I think it is important to move with the flow, and open new opportunities
> for collaboration as the technology and our contributor base are ready for
> them. Wikidata started 6 years ago, Structured Commons is in the making,
> and who knows what could come next.
>
> In the age of review manipulation and mistrust, I see opportunities in
> identifying thought leaders, and building a balanced critique on a subject
> based on multiple sources. Wikipedia does this partially, but it is not its
> main aim. Assigning trust to people or organizations is something that the
> community does quite well, so it could be applied to other contexts.
>
> A snippet-pedia also sounds useful, specially if a topic could be explained
> with different levels of complexity. Layman's explanations are really
> useful and there are communities built around them (for instance ELI5 with
> 16 million subscribers), however their explanations are neither
> collaborative nor structured, so it is quite difficult to improve them or
> navigate them.
>
> It doesn't matter so much that Wikipedia "dies", what matters is that the
> Wikimedia community adapts with new projects that keep the spirit of
> gathering, organizing, and sharing knowledge alive. Perhaps we could also
> consider other approaches that could be executed in real life. With diverse
> approaches, there would be different kind of contributors, aka more
> diversity. I would definitely welcome projects that would attract 90% of
> female contributors, even if they are radically different and they are not
> a wiki. In the end our mission is to enable everyone to share knowledge,
> not necessarily encyclopedic, and not necessarily using current technology.
> Just because we have a hammer doesn't mean that all problems can be solved
> with it.
>
> Regards,
> Micru
>
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:35 PM Yaroslav Blanter 
> wrote:
>
> > I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> > this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> > that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
> > comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The
> target
> > audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> > Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
> > several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> > apologize in advance.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Yaroslav
> > _
> > I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
> > Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless, but
> > someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
> > talking about the English Wikipedia (referring to it as Wikipedia). I am
> > active in other projects as well, and some of them have similar issues,
> but
> > there are typically many other things going on there which make the
> picture
> > more complicated.
> >
> > Let us first look at the current situation. Wikipedia exists since 2001,
> > and in a couple of weeks will turn 18. Currently, it has 5.77 million
> > articles. I often hear an opinion that all important articles have
> already
> > been created. This is incorrect, and I am often the first person to point
> > out that this is not correct. For example, today I created an article on
> an
> > urban locality in Russia with the population of 15 thousands. Many
> articles
> > are indeed too short, badly written, or suffer from other issues, and
> they
> > need to be improved. There are new topics which appear on a regular
> basis:
> > new music performers, new winners of sports competitions or prizes, and
> so
> > on. As any Web 2.0 project, Wikipedia requires a regular cleanup, since
> > there are many people happy to vandalize the 5th website in the world in
> > terms of the number of views. However, as a general guideline, it is not
> so
> > much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have been
> > already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
> > or, more pre

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I spend some time formulating my thoughts on the subject. Arguably I am not
a Wikipedian but apart from the necessary changes we must go through, I see
a great future for our work. What I have to say is on my blog [1]. The most
important change is that we need to become less US-American to be more
effective. The most relevant reason: our public is not there.

What will also have a positive effect when we make our relation with
partners less parasitic. more symbiotic. Why not point to Open Library of
the local library when people read about books or authors? Why not show the
publications of scientists based on what we know, largely thanks to ORCID
and Crossref?  We say that Wikipedia should not be quoted but we can make
external source much more findable. Sharing the quest for the sum of all
knowledge is more effective by sharing the limelight with our partners..

Happy 2019
   GerardM

[1]
https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-decline-of-wikipedia-as-we-know-it.html

On Sat, 29 Dec 2018 at 22:35, Yaroslav Blanter  wrote:

> I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
> comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The target
> audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
> several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> apologize in advance.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
> _
> I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
> Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless, but
> someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
> talking about the English Wikipedia (referring to it as Wikipedia). I am
> active in other projects as well, and some of them have similar issues, but
> there are typically many other things going on there which make the picture
> more complicated.
>
> Let us first look at the current situation. Wikipedia exists since 2001,
> and in a couple of weeks will turn 18. Currently, it has 5.77 million
> articles. I often hear an opinion that all important articles have already
> been created. This is incorrect, and I am often the first person to point
> out that this is not correct. For example, today I created an article on an
> urban locality in Russia with the population of 15 thousands. Many articles
> are indeed too short, badly written, or suffer from other issues, and they
> need to be improved. There are new topics which appear on a regular basis:
> new music performers, new winners of sports competitions or prizes, and so
> on. As any Web 2.0 project, Wikipedia requires a regular cleanup, since
> there are many people happy to vandalize the 5th website in the world in
> terms of the number of views. However, as a general guideline, it is not so
> much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have been
> already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
> or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first hit
> — they are likely to find what they need with more than 99% chance.
>
> In this sense, Wikipedia now is very different from Wikipedia in 2008 or
> Wikipedia in 2004. Ten and especially fifteen years ago, everybody could
> contribute something important. For example, the article on the 1951 film
> "A Streetcar Named Desire", which won four Academy Awards, was started in
> 2005, as well as an article on Cy Twombly, at the time probably the most
> famous living artist. This is not possible anymore. This is why the number
> of active editors is currently dropping - to contribute to the content in a
> meaningful way, one now has to be an advanced amateur - to master some
> field of knowledge much better than most others do. Or one can be a
> professional - but there are very few professionals contributing to
> Wikipedia in their fields, and there are very few articles written at a
> professional level. Attempts to attract professionals have been made for
> many years, and, despite certain local success, generally failed. They have
> been going now for long enough to assume they will never succeed on a large
> scale. Wikipedia is written by advance amateurs for amateurs. However,
> despite the decline in the number of editors, there are enough resources to
> maintain and to expand the project. It does not mean there are no problems
> - there are in fact many problems. One of the most commonly discussed one
> is systemic bias - there is way more information on Wikipedia on subjects
> pertaining to North America than to Africa, and if a topic is viewed on
> differently in different countries, one can be sure that the American view
> dominates. But it is usually thought - and I agree with this - that these
> drawbacks are not c

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Peter Southwood]

Interesting, but I don't really understand the implications. Is there an 
example of how such an article might be represented? 
Cheers,
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Amir E. Aharoni
Sent: 31 December 2018 21:56
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

‫בתאריך יום ב׳, 31 בדצמ׳ 2018 ב-10:14 מאת ‪Peter Southwood‬‏ <‪
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net‬‏>:‬

Does the technology exist? Is it available?
How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
Cheers,
Peter


Not exactly, but it's doable and it's desirable.

There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that
are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions.
They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors because
they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do
myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to
implementing Jane's suggestion.

This suggestion is not even very new. In a way, the extremely old bug
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2167 , originally filed in 2004 (!)
suggests pretty much the same thing: separate interlanguage links and other
metadata from the page content. Interlanguage links were mostly separated
from pages thanks to Wikidata, but categories still aren't, and a lot of
other kinds of metadata appeared since then: DEFAULTSORT, newsectionlink,
notoc, and many others. Authority control, navbox, and infobox templates,
as well as links to disambiguation pages, can probably be converted to
separately-stored metadata as well.

Wikidata can probably play a major role in getting this done, but it's not
the only factor, and a lot of development is needed to better integrate
Wikidata with other projects.

But yes—I generally agree with Jane that better modularization of wiki
pages' content components can go a long to making them easier to edit,
easier to search, easier to query, etc. It's not the only major change that
our technical infrastructure needs, but it's among the more important ones.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬


>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may
> not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
> reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
>
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Jane,
> > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how
> > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an
> > explanation or clarify the concept?
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> >
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Jane Darnell]

No, because no one has invented it yet. An example of what I mean by a
"pipeline nugget" is "The necktie was invented in Croatia". This quote is
mentioned in various language Wikipedias and is 1) a publicity stunt, 2) an
example of intangible national heritage, 3) a poorly sourced statement in a
list. Maybe with an example like this you can grasp the concept a bit
better.

On Wed, Jan 2, 2019 at 8:01 PM Peter Southwood 
wrote:

> Interesting, but I don't really understand the implications. Is there an
> example of how such an article might be represented?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Amir E. Aharoni
> Sent: 31 December 2018 21:56
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
>
> ‫בתאריך יום ב׳, 31 בדצמ׳ 2018 ב-10:14 מאת ‪Peter Southwood‬‏ <‪
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net‬‏>:‬
>
> Does the technology exist? Is it available?
> How does this splitting make maintenance easier?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
>
> Not exactly, but it's doable and it's desirable.
>
> There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that
> are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions.
> They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors because
> they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do
> myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to
> implementing Jane's suggestion.
>
> This suggestion is not even very new. In a way, the extremely old bug
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2167 , originally filed in 2004 (!)
> suggests pretty much the same thing: separate interlanguage links and other
> metadata from the page content. Interlanguage links were mostly separated
> from pages thanks to Wikidata, but categories still aren't, and a lot of
> other kinds of metadata appeared since then: DEFAULTSORT, newsectionlink,
> notoc, and many others. Authority control, navbox, and infobox templates,
> as well as links to disambiguation pages, can probably be converted to
> separately-stored metadata as well.
>
> Wikidata can probably play a major role in getting this done, but it's not
> the only factor, and a lot of development is needed to better integrate
> Wikidata with other projects.
>
> But yes—I generally agree with Jane that better modularization of wiki
> pages' content components can go a long to making them easier to edit,
> easier to search, easier to query, etc. It's not the only major change that
> our technical infrastructure needs, but it's among the more important ones.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
>
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jane Darnell
> > Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
> >
> > Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line
> > items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such
> > line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly
> > template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of
> > articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
> may
> > not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be
> > structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I
> > would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing
> > snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation,
> > reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood <
> > peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Jane,
> > > I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
> how
> > > they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
> an
> > > explanation or clarify the concept?
> > > Cheers,
> > > Peter
> > >
> > >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikim

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

Samuel Klein  escreveu no dia terça, 1/01/2019 à(s)
00:51:

> Dear Kiril, I assume you mean these lovely experiments by Shared Knowledge:
>
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_Republic_of_Macedonia
>
> They are lovely, and look like they are now in use.  I like specific
> examples like these; was there any description of the project afterwards
> covering its welcome, the steps towards its inclusion, notes for future
> research groups tackling similar projects in the future?
>

Here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:NeuroMat%27s_partnership_with_Matemateca_USP
you have a number of videos that were produced by the Wikimedia Community
UG Brazil to illustrate mathematical concepts, many of them awarded as
Quality and Valuable content for Wikimedia Commons. I believe all of them
are in use as well.

I've seen some resistance from the Wikipedia community against content like
this, as some people see it as a promotional tool for universities and
research institutions. Personally I don't see nothing wrong with win-win
situations as those "promotions" where valuable content is produced by
universities and donated to us, but not all people look at it this way.

A dedicated Draft-Wiki, like [test] but for text and media, with much
> simpler standards for structure, sourcing, and metadata [perhaps combined
> w/ incubator?]  would be a simple and welcome solution.
>

+1 on the Draft Wiki, it would be great to have a safe environment to play,
but allowing the final result to be imported into Wikipedia or other
Wikimedia projects.
Cheers,

Paulo
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

Jonathan Cardy  escreveu no dia terça,
1/01/2019 à(s) 09:54:

> Yes the greying of the pedia is a real phenomena, and I am sure that an
> editor survey would confirm that on average we are getting older.
>

At least in the Lusophone world, evidence does not seem to support that
idea of the greying of Wikipedia. The lists of the most viewed and edited
articles at the Wikipedia in Portuguese has just been released this night:

http://blog.wikimedia.pt/2019/01/artigos-mais-vistos-em-2018/
https://rr.sapo.pt/especial/136124/bolsonaro-mundial-brasil-e-claro-cr7-as-paginas-mais-visitadas-da-wikipedia-lusofona-em-2018
https://shifter.sapo.pt/2019/01/tops-wikipedia-portuguesa-2018/

The most edited article is an infantile animation series, and there are
more like this down the list. the editors are, quite obviously, children
that are Ladybug fans and want to update the information in Wikipedia,
which they apparently use as a guide. Many of the other themes on the list
of the most edited seem to be clearly associated with the young
generations: Reality shows, pop culture, sports.

Evidence in the project also shows that most of the older (in project time)
editors are not editing anymore, and only an handful of them still remain
behind. Many of the current sysops and well established editors are in
their late teens, early 20s (mostly Brazilians waiting to enter University,
or already there). I joined that project in February 2009, and over those
almost 10 years I've been watching the most profound changes in the project
"society", it has been in continuous evolution, and today it's composition,
way to see Wikipedia, attitude, etc have changed dramatically (not always
for the better). At least in this particular project, I don't see any
greying at all.

But there is a third that we should not underestimate, over the last decade
> or so expectations have risen and there is now little room for editors who
> add unsourced content. In quality terms this is a good thing, but it has
> repercussions on the quantity of editors (and I am sure contributes to the
> greying of the pedia). If as I suspect it is true that our decline is only
> among those who add uncited content, and that we are replacing those who
> add cited content as fast or faster than we lose them, then we can dismiss
> editor decline as no longer being an existential threat to the project.
>

At wiki.pt we started very actively fighting unsourced content since about
2009-2010, when there was a kind of mind revolution about this theme, and
the community decided they would not tolerate unsourced content anymore as
they had done extensively in the past. We came to the conclusion that it
was a mistake from the start to tolerate the generalized adding of such
content to the articles, with no advantages and a lot of disadvantages,
specially to the people that wanted to fix them afterwards, which often had
to throw everything to waste and start from zero. So those low-grade
editors that thrived in an ambient where articles were written out of their
heads, I believe we lost all or most of them back then, already, and as you
say, I don't believe it has been a bad thing.

I also don't believe much that the lack of interesting articles to create
could be a motive for not having new editors. Our articles remain a "red
sea" of uncreated entries, many of them about quite easy to create stuff,
like cultural heritage.

I am sanguine about the mobile editing problem. It is a known issue. People
> are working on it, so we may get a technical fix. Fashions in technology
> have changed in the past and will change again, so we  may find that more
> people in the future have suitable devices to edit with. My own medium turn
> fix would be to launch an intermediate platform for tablets. This would
> leave the mobile platform for smartphone users, and I know we have at least
> a couple of editors who use smartphones, but the ratio of editors to
> readers is very much lower than among PC users. A Tablet platform would
> enable us  to offer tablet users a more editor friendly environment than
> could fit on the mobile platform.
>

We have editors that edit from smartphones in Africa and Brazil, and
specially in Africa, which is being connected right now, and many people
have 1, 2, 3 smartphones, the difficulties of mobile editing are shown.
It's not so much that they block community growth, it is more that the
community could be growing that way. On the other hand, with easy mobile
editing there often comes waves of vandalism, which had led in the past to
the complete blocking of those mobile networks in the project, so there is
also a downside on this .
I'll add a fourth motif here, one that I've been noticing for long, and
which I believe is the main cause of chasing away new editors at the
Portuguese Wikipedia: The entrenching of the establishment against
newcomers. It has nothing to do with graying, as we have 12 and 13 year old
kids as part of the "establishment", and already d

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

As someone already mentioned earlier in this thread, I believe there is a
concrete structural obstacle in mobile editing, which has to do with the
ability of searching resources, quickly reading books, papers, PDF
articles, a plethora of websites, news, etc, and using them in Wikipedia
articles in such a limited visual space. Turning "dumb editing" easier will
certainly have the collateral effect of bringing huge amounts of vandalism
from some given networks, leading to the complete blocking of those
networks from editing in Wikipedia, or even in all Wikimedia projects, as
is has been happening with some regularity since mobile editing was
released. This for smartphones.

Editing from tablets is a total different story, as it can be very similar
to what we do in the laptops and desktop computers, a tablet solution, as
proposed, possibly could have success in providing a better environment. On
the other hand, the current desktop version works fairly well in tablets,
so we just have to switch from the mobile version, which is really
suboptimal, and quite difficult to use, to that one.

Cheers,

Paulo


Yethrosh  escreveu no dia terça, 1/01/2019 à(s) 21:19:

> I believe much depends on Wikipedia Mobile app. Users are mostly on mobile
> now and they feel it natural to do any thing from mobile. If only, creating
> articles and adding citations could be done easily through mobile app, can
> make a big difference.
>
> On Mon, 31 Dec 2018, 2:22 a.m. David Cuenca Tudela  wrote:
>
> > Answering the initial question: It depends on how you understand "death".
> > Wikipedia is the manifestation of a collection of algorithms running in
> the
> > minds of thousands of people. With time it could become less popular to
> run
> > that algorithm in your life, or you would like to try a different one.
> With
> > less people then the Wikipedias would be different as they are today.
> More
> > out-of-date information, less capacity to oversee the project,
> stagnation,
> > and perhaps eventually irrelevance. Myspace, digg, and winamp are still
> > alive, however people prefer other options these days.
> >
> > I think it is important to move with the flow, and open new opportunities
> > for collaboration as the technology and our contributor base are ready
> for
> > them. Wikidata started 6 years ago, Structured Commons is in the making,
> > and who knows what could come next.
> >
> > In the age of review manipulation and mistrust, I see opportunities in
> > identifying thought leaders, and building a balanced critique on a
> subject
> > based on multiple sources. Wikipedia does this partially, but it is not
> its
> > main aim. Assigning trust to people or organizations is something that
> the
> > community does quite well, so it could be applied to other contexts.
> >
> > A snippet-pedia also sounds useful, specially if a topic could be
> explained
> > with different levels of complexity. Layman's explanations are really
> > useful and there are communities built around them (for instance ELI5
> with
> > 16 million subscribers), however their explanations are neither
> > collaborative nor structured, so it is quite difficult to improve them or
> > navigate them.
> >
> > It doesn't matter so much that Wikipedia "dies", what matters is that the
> > Wikimedia community adapts with new projects that keep the spirit of
> > gathering, organizing, and sharing knowledge alive. Perhaps we could also
> > consider other approaches that could be executed in real life. With
> diverse
> > approaches, there would be different kind of contributors, aka more
> > diversity. I would definitely welcome projects that would attract 90% of
> > female contributors, even if they are radically different and they are
> not
> > a wiki. In the end our mission is to enable everyone to share knowledge,
> > not necessarily encyclopedic, and not necessarily using current
> technology.
> > Just because we have a hammer doesn't mean that all problems can be
> solved
> > with it.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Micru
> >
> > On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:35 PM Yaroslav Blanter 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> > > this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> > > that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want
> to
> > > comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The
> > target
> > > audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily
> > > Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the
> first
> > > several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
> > > apologize in advance.
> > >
> > > Cheers
> > > Yaroslav
> > > _
> > > I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of
> Wikipedia.
> > > Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless,
> but
> > > someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
> > > talking about the English W

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[Leinonen Teemu]

Hi, 

Please, remember the Wikipedia / Wikimedia mission and vision.

Our aim is to be a global movement of free, global, multi-lingual knowledge. 
Globally smartphones are already the main and primary device to access the 
Internet for the majority of people. Therefore:

(1) We should do everything we can to invite the the mobile Internet-users to 
become editors. All improvements to the mobile editing experience helps.

(2) We should invite people to work on content that works well on smartphones. 
Short summary texts and videos summarising topics are good. 

Another idea: Have anyone tried to create podcasts / audio book our of 
categories? It could be a bit like a “create a book” -feature. You collect 
articles or select a category and a software create text to audio file with the 
content. Audio works well on mobiles. 

- Teemu 


> On 4 Jan 2019, at 9.10, Paulo Santos Perneta  wrote:
> 
> As someone already mentioned earlier in this thread, I believe there is a
> concrete structural obstacle in mobile editing, which has to do with the
> ability of searching resources, quickly reading books, papers, PDF
> articles, a plethora of websites, news, etc, and using them in Wikipedia
> articles in such a limited visual space. Turning "dumb editing" easier will
> certainly have the collateral effect of bringing huge amounts of vandalism
> from some given networks, leading to the complete blocking of those
> networks from editing in Wikipedia, or even in all Wikimedia projects, as
> is has been happening with some regularity since mobile editing was
> released. This for smartphones.
> 
> Editing from tablets is a total different story, as it can be very similar
> to what we do in the laptops and desktop computers, a tablet solution, as
> proposed, possibly could have success in providing a better environment. On
> the other hand, the current desktop version works fairly well in tablets,
> so we just have to switch from the mobile version, which is really
> suboptimal, and quite difficult to use, to that one.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Paulo
> 
> 
> Yethrosh  escreveu no dia terça, 1/01/2019 à(s) 21:19:
> 
>> I believe much depends on Wikipedia Mobile app. Users are mostly on mobile
>> now and they feel it natural to do any thing from mobile. If only, creating
>> articles and adding citations could be done easily through mobile app, can
>> make a big difference.
>> 
>> On Mon, 31 Dec 2018, 2:22 a.m. David Cuenca Tudela > wrote:
>> 
>>> Answering the initial question: It depends on how you understand "death".
>>> Wikipedia is the manifestation of a collection of algorithms running in
>> the
>>> minds of thousands of people. With time it could become less popular to
>> run
>>> that algorithm in your life, or you would like to try a different one.
>> With
>>> less people then the Wikipedias would be different as they are today.
>> More
>>> out-of-date information, less capacity to oversee the project,
>> stagnation,
>>> and perhaps eventually irrelevance. Myspace, digg, and winamp are still
>>> alive, however people prefer other options these days.
>>> 
>>> I think it is important to move with the flow, and open new opportunities
>>> for collaboration as the technology and our contributor base are ready
>> for
>>> them. Wikidata started 6 years ago, Structured Commons is in the making,
>>> and who knows what could come next.
>>> 
>>> In the age of review manipulation and mistrust, I see opportunities in
>>> identifying thought leaders, and building a balanced critique on a
>> subject
>>> based on multiple sources. Wikipedia does this partially, but it is not
>> its
>>> main aim. Assigning trust to people or organizations is something that
>> the
>>> community does quite well, so it could be applied to other contexts.
>>> 
>>> A snippet-pedia also sounds useful, specially if a topic could be
>> explained
>>> with different levels of complexity. Layman's explanations are really
>>> useful and there are communities built around them (for instance ELI5
>> with
>>> 16 million subscribers), however their explanations are neither
>>> collaborative nor structured, so it is quite difficult to improve them or
>>> navigate them.
>>> 
>>> It doesn't matter so much that Wikipedia "dies", what matters is that the
>>> Wikimedia community adapts with new projects that keep the spirit of
>>> gathering, organizing, and sharing knowledge alive. Perhaps we could also
>>> consider other approaches that could be executed in real life. With
>> diverse
>>> approaches, there would be different kind of contributors, aka more
>>> diversity. I would definitely welcome projects that would attract 90% of
>>> female contributors, even if they are radically different and they are
>> not
>>> a wiki. In the end our mission is to enable everyone to share knowledge,
>>> not necessarily encyclopedic, and not necessarily using current
>> technology.
>>> Just because we have a hammer doesn't mean that all problems can be
>> solved
>>> with it.
>>> 
>>> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[quiddity]

This is a long thread, with a somewhat confusing first post.  One of
the core ideas I can pull out of it, is along the lines of: "we should
have more dynamically variable content for different audiences/needs".
I.e. For any given topic: Some people want the 10 word version, Some
people want the 2 sentence version, Some people want the 2 paragraph
version, Some people want the 2,000 word version, Some people want the
20,000 word version, and Some people want the n-subarticles version.

This is a broad set of ideas that has come up regularly over our
history. It has obvious connections to Wiktionary and Wikidata for the
shortest "versions". It has obvious connections to the spectrum of
Mergism to Seperatism.[1] It has obvious connections to manual of
style guidelines about intro/lead-sections.[2] It has obvious
connections to Simple Wikipedia and the various
adapted-for-kids/schools versions (WikiJunior, Vikidia, and many
more). It has obvious connections to different display/consumption
types (widescreen vs tablet vs phone vs audio).

The first two version-types have been proposed, or implemented, in
various forms many times. A few years ago I made a summary table of
the existing variations, in an attempt to stop the
wheel-reinvention.[3]

Making complex content be /dynamically variable/ in length, has also
been tried externally before. As I wrote in an earlier Strategy
discussion:
"For example, The Encyclopedia of Life had an interesting "complexity
slider" interface in their early versions, that let readers set how
complex or scientific/formal they wanted their content [See ancient
screencast at youtube -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28T7q01pG50&t=167 (30 seconds worth)
and the preferences panel that let the reader restrict the content to
"Authoritative sources only" youtube -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C05jAgJkuPw&t=198 (40 seconds)]. -- A
10 year old person doesn't (always/often) benefit from the same
content as a PhD, and we want to help both. The books The Diamond Age
and Ender's Game contained the idea of software that auto-adapted to
suit the educational needs of the user. To me that's the final goal,
and it's a long way off, but we can make steps and experiments towards
it."[4]

Sadly, EoL removed that feature and I don't know why; perhaps due to
software complexity or perhaps due to the complexity for authors of
writing different versions. I do think dynamic content is an
incredibly important goal that we should work towards, but I also
think we're already in midst of many incredibly important and vastly
complex goals and I suspect we don't have the capacity to scale to
encompass many more simultaneously. However, Eventualism is
(generally) what got us to where we are, and is likely what will get
us to where we want/need to be.

TLDR: I hope some people collaborate on a wikipage to write down the
various ways a dynamic content system might technically work, so that
we can analyze the pros/cons of each method more efficiently than in a
tangent-filled email thread. I hope we eventually have a glorious
scifi future where the computers automagically adapt content,
neutrally(!), to best fit our individual needs in the moment. I hope
we can figure out a smooth transition path to move everyone happily
towards that long-term future goal, perhaps as part of the Strategy
discussions. I hope nobody attempts to get it all done too soon. ;-)

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mergism and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Separatism
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q10966628 and related sections
within other pages.
[3] 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Concise_Wikipedia#A_summary_of_existing_short-options,_using_an_example
[4] 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikimedia_Strategy_2017/Cycle_1#External_collaboration,_wider_usage,_slow_evolution,_more_patience,_better_tools_and_documentation

-- 
Quiddity

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?

[FRED BAUDER]

An executive summary is common at the head of many reports and articles. Only 
sections in the body of the article would be cited. Somewhat like a lede but 
more detailed. The main body of the article would still have a lede.

Fred Bauder



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