Wikimedia-l December 2010

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

130 participants
125 discussions

[Foundation-l] Improving search in Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery
by Brian J Mingus 09 Sep '22

09 Sep '22

This paper (first reference) is the result of a class project I was part of almost two years ago for CSCI 5417 Information Retrieval Systems. It builds on a class project I did in CSCI 5832 Natural Language Processing and which I presented at Wikimania '07. The project was very late as we didn't send the final paper in until the day before new years. This technical report was never really announced that I recall so I thought it would be interesting to look briefly at the results. The goal of this paper was to break articles down into surface features and latent features and then use those to study the rating system being used, predict article quality and rank results in a search engine. We used the [[random forests]] classifier which allowed us to analyze the contribution of each feature to performance by looking directly at the weights that were assigned. While the surface analysis was performed on the whole english wikipedia, the latent analysis was performed on the simple english wikipedia (it is more expensive to compute). = Surface features = * Readability measures are the single best predictor of quality that I have found, as defined by the Wikipedia Editorial Team (WET). The [[Automated Readability Index]], [[Gunning Fog Index]] and [[Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level]] were the strongest predictors, followed by length of article html, number of paragraphs, [[Flesh Reading Ease]], [[Smog Grading]], number of internal links, [[Laesbarhedsindex Readability Formula]], number of words and number of references. Weakly predictive were number of to be's, number of sentences, [[Coleman-Liau Index]], number of templates, PageRank, number of external links, number of relative links. Not predictive (overall - see the end of section 2 for the per-rating score breakdown): Number of h2 or h3's, number of conjunctions, number of images*, average word length, number of h4's, number of prepositions, number of pronouns, number of interlanguage links, average syllables per word, number of nominalizations, article age (based on page id), proportion of questions, average sentence length. :* Number of images was actually by far the single strongest predictor of any class, but only for Featured articles. Because it was so good at picking out featured articles and somewhat good at picking out A and G articles the classifier was confused in so many cases that the overall contribution of this feature to classification performance is zero. :* Number of external links is strongly predictive of Featured articles. :* The B class is highly distinctive. It has a strong "signature," with high predictive value assigned to many features. The Featured class is also very distinctive. F, B and S (Stop/Stub) contain the most information. :* A is the least distinct class, not being very different from F or G. = Latent features = The algorithm used for latent analysis, which is an analysis of the occurence of words in every document with respect to the link structure of the encyclopedia ("concepts"), is [[Latent Dirichlet Allocation]]. This part of the analysis was done by CS PhD student Praful Mangalath. An example of what can be done with the result of this analysis is that you provide a word (a search query) such as "hippie". You can then look at the weight of every article for the word hippie. You can pick the article with the largest weight, and then look at its link network. You can pick out the articles that this article links to and/or which link to this article that are also weighted strongly for the word hippie, while also contributing maximally to this articles "hippieness". We tried this query in our system (LDA), Google (site:en.wikipedia.org hippie), and the Simple English Wikipedia's Lucene search engine. The breakdown of articles occuring in the top ten search results for this word for those engines is: * LDA only: [[Acid rock]], [[Aldeburgh Festival]], [[Anne Murray]], [[Carl Radle]], [[Harry Nilsson]], [[Jack Kerouac]], [[Phil Spector]], [[Plastic Ono Band]], [[Rock and Roll]], [[Salvador Allende]], [[Smothers brothers]], [[Stanley Kubrick]]. * Google only: [[Glam Rock]], [[South Park]]. * Simple only: [[African Americans]], [[Charles Manson]], [[Counterculture]], [[Drug use]], [[Flower Power]], [[Nuclear weapons]], [[Phish]], [[Sexual liberation]], [[Summer of Love]] * LDA & Google & Simple: [[Hippie]], [[Human Be-in]], [[Students for a democratic society]], [[Woodstock festival]] * LDA & Google: [[Psychedelic Pop]] * Google & Simple: [[Lysergic acid diethylamide]], [[Summer of Love]] ( See the paper for the articles produced for the keywords philosophy and economics ) = Discussion / Conclusion = * The results of the latent analysis are totally up to your perception. But what is interesting is that the LDA features predict the WET ratings of quality just as well as the surface level features. Both feature sets (surface and latent) both pull out all almost of the information that the rating system bears. * The rating system devised by the WET is not distinctive. You can best tell the difference between, grouped together, Featured, A and Good articles vs B articles. Featured, A and Good articles are also quite distinctive (Figure 1). Note that in this study we didn't look at Start's and Stubs, but in earlier paper we did. :* This is interesting when compared to this recent entry on the YouTube blog. "Five Stars Dominate Ratings" http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html… I think a sane, well researched (with actual subjects) rating system is well within the purview of the Usability Initiative. Helping people find and create good content is what Wikipedia is all about. Having a solid rating system allows you to reorganized the user interface, the Wikipedia namespace, and the main namespace around good content and bad content as needed. If you don't have a solid, information bearing rating system you don't know what good content really is (really bad content is easy to spot). :* My Wikimania talk was all about gathering data from people about articles and using that to train machines to automatically pick out good content. You ask people questions along dimensions that make sense to people, and give the machine access to other surface features (such as a statistical measure of readability, or length) and latent features (such as can be derived from document word occurence and encyclopedia link structure). I referenced page 262 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to give an example of the kind of qualitative features I would ask people. It really depends on what features end up bearing information, to be tested in "the lab". Each word is an example dimension of quality: We have "*unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on.*" You then use surface and latent features to predict these values for all articles. You can also say, when a person rates this article as high on the x scale, they also mean that it has has this much of these surface and these latent features. = References = - DeHoust, C., Mangalath, P., Mingus., B. (2008). *Improving search in Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery*. Technical Report. PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/6/68/DeHoustMangalat…> - Rassbach, L., Mingus., B, Blackford, T. (2007). *Exploring the feasibility of automatically rating online article quality*. Technical Report. PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/d/d3/RassbachPincock…>

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
by GerardM 09 Aug '22

09 Aug '22

Hoi, I have asked and received permission to forward to you all this most excellent bit of news. The linguist list, is a most excellent resource for people interested in the field of linguistics. As I mentioned some time ago they have had a funding drive and in that funding drive they asked for a certain amount of money in a given amount of days and they would then have a project on Wikipedia to learn what needs doing to get better coverage for the field of linguistics. What you will read in this mail that the total community of linguists are asked to cooperate. I am really thrilled as it will also get us more linguists interested in what we do. My hope is that a fraction will be interested in the languages that they care for and help it become more relevant. As a member of the "language prevention committee", I love to get more knowledgeable people involved in our smaller projects. If it means that we get more requests for more projects we will really feel embarrassed with all the new projects we will have to approve because of the quality of the Incubator content and the quality of the linguistic arguments why we should approve yet another language :) NB Is this not a really clever way of raising money; give us this much in this time frame and we will then do this as a bonus... Thanks, GerardM ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: LINGUIST Network <linguist(a)linguistlist.org> Date: Jun 18, 2007 6:53 PM Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers To: LINGUIST(a)listserv.linguistlist.org LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831. Mon Jun 18 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875. Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar(a)linguistlist.org> Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry(a)linguistlist.org> Reviews: Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project <reviews(a)linguistlist.org> Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/ The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, and donations from subscribers and publishers. Editor for this issue: Ann Sawyer <sawyer(a)linguistlist.org> ================================================================ To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html ===========================Directory============================== 1) Date: 18-Jun-2007 From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org > Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers -------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:49:35 From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org > Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers Dear subscribers, As you may recall, one of our Fund Drive 2007 campaigns was called the "Wikipedia Update Vote." We asked our viewers to consider earmarking their donations to organize an update project on linguistics entries in the English-language Wikipedia. You can find more background information on this at: http://linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2007/wikipedia/index.cfm. The speed with which we met our goal, thanks to the interest and generosity of our readers, was a sure sign that the linguistics community was enthusiastic about the idea. Now that summer is upon us, and some of you may have a bit more leisure time, we are hoping that you will be able to help us get started on the Wikipedia project. The LINGUIST List's role in this project is a purely organizational one. We will: *Help, with your input, to identify major gaps in the Wikipedia materials or pages that need improvement; *Compile a list of linguistics pages that Wikipedia editors have identified as "in need of attention from an expert on the subject" or " does not cite any references or sources," etc; *Send out periodical calls for volunteer contributors on specific topics or articles; *Provide simple instructions on how to upload your entries into Wikipedia; *Keep track of our project Wikipedians; *Keep track of revisions and new entries; *Work with Wikimedia Foundation to publicize the linguistics community's efforts. We hope you are as enthusiastic about this effort as we are. Just to help us all get started looking at Wikipedia more critically, and to easily identify an area needing improvement, we suggest that you take a look at the List of Linguists page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguists. M Many people are not listed there; others need to have more facts and information added. If you would like to participate in this exciting update effort, please respond by sending an email to LINGUIST Editor Hannah Morales at hannah(a)linguistlist.org, suggesting what your role might be or which linguistics entries you feel should be updated or added. Some linguists who saw our campaign on the Internet have already written us with specific suggestions, which we will share with you soon. This update project will take major time and effort on all our parts. The end result will be a much richer internet resource of information on the breadth and depth of the field of linguistics. Our efforts should also stimulate prospective students to consider studying linguistics and to educate a wider public on what we do. Please consider participating. Sincerely, Hannah Morales Editor, Wikipedia Update Project Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable ----------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831

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[Foundation-l] Ancient Greek reconstructed an analysis of a proposal for a new Wikipedia
by Gerard Meijssen 20 Sep '11

20 Sep '11

Hoi, There is a request for a Wikipedia in Ancient Greek. This request has so far been denied. A lot of words have been used about it. Many people maintain their positions and do not for whatever reason consider the arguments of others. In my opinion their are a few roadblocks. - Ancient Greek is an ancient language - the policy does not allow for it - Text in ancient Greek written today about contemporary subjects require the reconstruction of Ancient Greek. - it requires the use of existing words for concepts that did not exist at the time when the language was alive - neologisms will be needed to describe things that did not exist at the time when the language was alive - modern texts will not represent the language as it used to be - Constructed and by inference reconstructed languages are effectively not permitted We can change the policy if there are sufficient arguments, when we agree on a need. When a text is written in reconstructed ancient Greek, and when it is clearly stated that it is NOT the ancient Greek of bygone days, it can be obvious that it is a great tool to learn skills to read and write ancient Greek but that it is in itself not Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek as a language is ancient. I have had a word with people who are involved in the working group that deals with the ISO-639, I have had a word with someone from SIL and it is clear that a proposal for a code for "Ancient Greek reconstructed" will be considered for the ISO-639-3. For the ISO-639-6 a code is likely to be given because a clear use for this code can be given. We can apply for a code and as it has a use bigger then Wikipedia alone it clearly has merit. With modern texts clearly labelled as distinct from the original language, it will be obvious that innovations a writers needs for his writing are legitimate. This leaves the fact that constructed and reconstructed languages are not permitted because of the notion that mother tongue users are required. In my opinion, this has always been only a gesture to those people who are dead set against any and all constructed languages. In the policies there is something vague "*it must have a reasonable degree of recognition as determined by discussion (this requirement is being discussed by the language subcommittee <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_subcommittee>)."* It is vague because even though the policy talks about a discussion, it is killed off immediately by stating "The proposal has a sufficient number of living native speakers to form a viable community and audience." In my opinion, this discussion for criteria for the acceptance of constructed or reconstructed languages has not happened. Proposals for objective criteria have been ignored. In essence, to be clear about it: - We can get a code for reconstructed languages. - We need to change the policy to allow for reconstructed and constructed languages We need to do both in order to move forward. The proposal for objective criteria for constructed and reconstructed languages is in a nutshell: - The language must have an ISO-639-3 code - We need full WMF localisation from the start - The language must be sufficiently expressive for writing a modern encyclopaedia - The Incubator project must have sufficiently large articles that demonstrate both the language and its ability to write about a wide range of topics - A sufficiently large group of editors must be part of the Incubator project Thanks, GerardM

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[Foundation-l] Pending Changes development update: September 27
by Rob Lanphier 02 Aug '11

02 Aug '11

Hi everyone, As many of you know, the results of the poll to keep Pending Changes on through a short development cycle were approved for interim usage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Straw_poll_on_interi… Ongoing use of Pending Changes is contingent upon consensus after the deployment of an interim release of Pending Changes in November 2010, which is currently under development. The roadmap for this deployment is described here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pending_Changes_enwiki_trial/Roadmap An update on the date: we'd previously scheduled this for November 9. However, because that week is the same week as the start of the fundraiser (and accompanying futzing with the site) we'd like to move the date one week later, to November 16. Aaron Schulz is advising us as the author of the vast majority of the code, having mostly implemented the "reject" button. Chad Horohoe and Priyanka Dhanda are working on some of the short term development items, and Brandon Harris is advising us on how we can make this feature mesh with our long term usability strategy. We're currently tracking the list of items we intend to complete in Bugzilla. You can see the latest list here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=25293 Many of the items in the list are things we're looking for feedback on: Bug 25295 - "Improve reviewer experience when multiple simultaneous users review Pending Changes" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25295 Bug 25296 - "History style cleanup - investigate possible fixes and detail the fixes" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25296 Bug 25298 - "Figure out what (if any) new Pending Changes links there should be in the side bar" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25298 Bug 25299 - "Make pending revision status clearer when viewing page" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25299 Bug 25300 - "Better names for special pages in Pending Changes configuration" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25300 Bug 25301 - "Firm up the list of minor UI improvements for the November 2010 Pending Changes release" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25301 Please provide your input in Bugzilla if you're comfortable with that; otherwise, please remark on the feedback page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Feedback Thanks! Rob

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Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian
by Marc Riddell 25 Jul '11

25 Jul '11

Let's see what we've got here: A "Board" that appears answerable only to some god; an "Executive Director" who answers only to this "Board"; a group of "Moderators" who claim (with a straight face) that they are "independent", but whose "moderations" are clearly designed to keep the first two in a favorable light; and, dead last, you have the people who, not so ironically, create the substance of the thing that makes the first three possible. This setup sounds achingly familiar. And, like all similar setups throughout history, is set up to fail. Marc Riddell on 10/20/10 12:44 AM, Virgilio A. P. Machado at vam(a)fct.unl.pt wrote: > Brigitte, > > I agree with you. You raised some very good points. > > Sincerely, > > Virgilio A. P. Machado > > > At 03:47 20-10-2010, you wrote: >> ________________________________ From: Austin >> Hair <adhair(a)gmail.com> To: Wikimedia Foundation >> Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> >> Sent: Tue, October 19, 2010 12:35:07 PM Subject: >> Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian On >> Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 6:40 PM, Nathan >> <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: > If it pleases the >> moderators, might we know on what basis Greg >> was > banned and Peter indefinitely muzzled? >> Greg Kohs was banned for the same reason that >> he's been on moderation for the better part of >> the past yearnamely, that he was completely >> unable tto keep his contributions civil, and >> caused more flamewars than constructive >> discussion. Peter Damian is only on moderation, >> and we'll follow our usual policy of letting >> through anything that could be considered even >> marginally acceptable. We really are very >> liberal about thisotheerwise you wouldn't have >> heard from Mr. Kohs at all in the past six >> months. I'm sure that my saying this won't >> convince anyone who's currently defending him, >> but nothing about the decision to ban Greg Kohs >> was retaliatory. I'll also (not for the first >> time) remind everyone that neither the Wikimedia >> Foundation Board, nor its staff, nor any chapter >> or other organizational body has any say in the >> administration of this list. I hope that clears >> up all of the questions asked in this thread so >> far. It is not about defending anyone but about >> the fact that the "I know bannable when I see >> it" theory of moderation is unconstructive and >> leads to dramafests. The next ban is the one >> that will likely cause a real flame war. I >> suspect *more* people would be on moderation if >> any sort of objective criteria were being >> used. The lack of explanation over this bothers >> me so much because I suspect that you *can't* >> explain it. It seems to be the sort of gut-shot >> that hasn't been thought through. Moderate more >> people based on real criteria, rather than how >> you feel about them. Birgitte >> SB >> _______________________________________________ >> foundation-l mailing list >> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian
by Mike Dupont 23 Jul '11

23 Jul '11

Hello, >From what I have seen about Greg Kohs is that he does have some interesting points to make, but I do see that he is jumping to conclusions and does seem to have a biased viewpoint. People want to make their own decisions and have enough information to do that. We don't want to have important information deleted away because it is uncomfortable. Banning him makes it less likely for him to be heard, and these interesting points which are worth considering are not heard my many people : this is depriving people of critical information, that is not fair to the people involved. Just look at this article for example, it is quite interesting and well written, and why should it not be visible to everyone on the list. http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikimedia-foundation-directo… Deleting and banning people who say things that are not comfortable, that does make you look balanced and trustworthy. The Wikimedia foundation should be able to stand up to such accusations without resorting to gagging people, it just gives more credit to the people being gagged and makes people wonder if there is any merit in what they say. This brings up my favorite subject of unneeded deletions versions needed ones. Of course there is material that should be deleted that is hateful, Spam etc, lets call that evil content. But the articles that i wrote and my friends wrote that were deleted did not fall into that category, they might have been just bad or not notable. We have had a constant struggle to keep our articles from being deleted in a manner that we consider unfair. Additionally, the bad content is lost and falls into the same category as evil content. Also there should be more transparency on deleted material on the Wikipedia itself, there is a lot of information that is being deleted and gone forever without proper process or review. In my eyes there is a connection between the two topics, the banning of people and the deleting of information. Both are depriving people from information that they want and need in an unfair manner. Instead of articles about obscure events, things, and old places in Kosovo you have a wikipedia full of the latest information about every television show, is that what you really want? I think there should be room for things in places that are not not notable because they are not part of mainstream pop culture, we also need to support the underdogs of Wikipedia even if they are not mainstream, Mr Kohs definitely has something to say and I would like like to hear it. And the Kosovars have something to say even if the Serbs don't want to hear it. The Albanians have something to say even if the Greeks don't want to hear it, etc. There are many cases of people from Kosovo and Albania driven out of Wikipedia and depriving the project of important information because they are not able to get started and the contributions are so far way from the dominating political viewpoint of the opposite side that they don't even get a chance to be heard. We need to make a way for these people to be heard and to moderate the conflicts better, that will make Wikipedia stronger and more robust. thanks, mike

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[Foundation-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis
by David Gerard 05 Jan '11

05 Jan '11

[crossposted to foundation-l and wikitech-l] "There has to be a vision though, of something better. Maybe something that is an actual wiki, quick and easy, rather than the template coding hell Wikipedia's turned into." - something Fred Bauder just said on wikien-l. Our current markup is one of our biggest barriers to participation. AIUI, edit rates are about half what they were in 2005, even as our fame has gone from "popular" through "famous" to "part of the structure of the world." I submit that this is not a good or healthy thing in any way and needs fixing. People who can handle wikitext really just do not understand how offputting the computer guacamole is to people who can cope with text they can see. We know this is a problem; WYSIWYG that works is something that's been wanted here forever. There are various hideous technical nightmares in its way, that make this a big and hairy problem, of the sort where the hair has hair. However, I submit that it's important enough we need to attack it with actual resources anyway. This is just one data point, where a Canadian government office got *EIGHT TIMES* the participation in their intranet wiki by putting in a (heavily locally patched) copy of FCKeditor: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/034062.html "I have to disagree with you given my experience. In one government department where MediaWiki was installed we saw the active user base spike from about 1000 users to about 8000 users within a month of having enabled FCKeditor. FCKeditor definitely has it's warts, but it very closely matches the experience non-technical people have gotten used to while using Word or WordPerfect. Leveraging skills people already have cuts down on training costs and allows them to be productive almost immediately." http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/034071.html "Since a plethora of intelligent people with no desire to learn WikiCode can now add content, the quality of posts has been in line with the adoption of wiki use by these people. Thus one would say it has gone up. "In the beginning there were some hard core users that learned WikiCode, for the most part they have indicated that when the WYSIWYG fails, they are able to switch to WikiCode mode to address the problem. This usually occurs with complex table nesting which is something that few of the users do anyways. Most document layouts are kept simple. Additionally, we have a multilingual english/french wiki. As a result the browser spell-check is insufficient for the most part (not to mention it has issues with WikiCode). To address this a second spellcheck button was added to the interface so that both english and french spellcheck could be available within the same interface (via aspell backend)." So, the payoffs could be ridiculously huge: eight times the number of smart and knowledgeable people even being able to *fix typos* on material they care about. Here are some problems. (Off the top of my head; please do add more, all you can think of.) - The problem: * Fidelity with the existing body of wikitext. No conversion flag day. The current body exploits every possible edge case in the regular expression guacamole we call a "parser". Tim said a few years ago that any solution has to account for the existing body of text. * Two-way fidelity. Those who know wikitext will demand to keep it and will bitterly resist any attempt to take it away from them. * FCKeditor (now CKeditor) in MediaWiki is all but unmaintained. * There is no specification for wikitext. Well, there almost is - compiled as C, it runs a bit slower than the existing PHP compiler. But it's a start! http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/2010-August/000318.html - Attempting to solve it: * The best brains around Wikipedia, MediaWiki and WMF have dashed their foreheads against this problem for at least the past five years and have got *nowhere*. Tim has a whole section in the SVN repository for "new parser attempts". Sheer brilliance isn't going to solve this one. * Tim doesn't scale. Most of our other technical people don't scale. *We have no resources and still run on almost nothing*. ($14m might sound like enough money to run a popular website, but for comparison, I work as a sysadmin at a tiny, tiny publishing company with more money and staff just in our department than that to do *almost nothing* compared to what WMF achieves. WMF is an INCREDIBLY efficient organisation.) - Other attempts: * Starting from a clear field makes it ridiculously easy. The government example quoted above is one. Wikia wrote a good WYSIWYG that works really nicely on new wikis (I'm speaking here as an experienced wikitext user who happily fixes random typos on Wikia). Of course, I noted that we can't start from a clear field - we have an existing body of wikitext. So, specification of the problem: * We need good WYSIWYG. The government example suggests that a simple word-processor-like interface would be enough to give tremendous results. * It needs two-way fidelity with almost all existing wikitext. * We can't throw away existing wikitext, much as we'd love to. * It's going to cost money in programming the WYSIWYG. * It's going to cost money in rationalising existing wikitext so that the most unfeasible formations can be shunted off to legacy for chewing on. * It's going to cost money in usability testing and so on. * It's going to cost money for all sorts of things I haven't even thought of yet. This is a problem that would pay off hugely to solve, and that will take actual money thrown at it. How would you attack this problem, given actual resources for grunt work? - d.

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[Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion
by Domas Mituzas 04 Jan '11

04 Jan '11

now that we have blinking banners, I'm sure we should try out how full-screen banners work, with "click to go to wikipedia". Domas

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[Foundation-l] Template Overkill
by WJhonson＠aol.com 01 Jan '11

01 Jan '11

Most of the templates in our project, imho are just more clutter. The number of people who know how to use any particular template, can probably be counted with a box of marbles. However when others see the templates, they just shy away, they don't bother to try to learn them. If we want to make things easier for editors, we should scrape templates entirely. What they add to the project is not worth, what they detract. W

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[Foundation-l] Announcement of Expert Trustees' Appointment and Bylaw-change
by Ting Chen 31 Dec '10

31 Dec '10

Happy Holidays! As we prepare to ring in the New Year, we're happy to announce that each of our current four Wikimedia Foundation Board members up for reappointment have been unanimously reappointed and will continue in their positions in 2011. In addition, the Board has completed the first ever evaluation process, and during that time, we thought hard about some of the details around the appointment process. After completing the evaluation process we've voted to adjust the bylaws to extend all Trustee appointments to two years. In the past, community-elected and chapter-nominated trustees held positions for two years before reelection or renomination was necessary; however, Board-appointed Trustees and the Community Founder Trustee needed to be reappointed every year. We've decided to amend Article 4, Section 3 of the Wikimedia Foundation's bylaws so that all Trustees are equal. We recognize that it's important to all of us that all terms are equal no matter what "seat" a member holds. This amendment will officially begin January 1, 2011, however, Stu, Jan-Bart, and Jimmy have volunteered to take on a one year term. Their terms will expire on December 31, 2011. Matt's and Bishaka's terms will expire on December 31, 2012. As written in the bylaws, the Board of Trustees consists of three members selected by the Wikimedia Community, two selected by Wikimedia chapters, four members through appointment by the Board for specific expertise, and a Community Founder seat. We currently remain a full Board with all 10 Trustees currently serving. Looking back at the last year, we've accomplished a lot as a Board and as a movement. 2011 will prove to be both exciting and challenging as we really move into implementing the five-year strategic plan we all worked so hard together on this year. We're looking forward to bringing Wikimedia to more people in more places all over the world. Thank you all for your commitment to keeping Wikimedia going and happy 10 years and 2011 to you all. Ting -- Ting Chen Member of the Board of Trustees Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. E-Mail: tchen(a)wikimedia.org

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