Wikimedia-l November 2015

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136 participants
78 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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New tools: pronuncify and pronuncify.net
by Asaf Bartov 27 Jan '17

27 Jan '17

Hello, everyone. (this is an announcement in my capacity as a volunteer.) Inspired by a lightning talk at the recent CEE Meeting[1] by our colleague Lars Aronsson, I made a little command-line tool to automate batch recording of pronunciations of words by native speakers, for uploading to Commons and integration into Wiktionary etc. It is called *pronuncify*, is written in Ruby and uses the sox(1) tool, and should work on any modern Linux (and possibly OS X) machine. It is available here[2], with instructions. I was then asked about a Windows version, and agreed to attempt one. This version is called *pronuncify.net <http://pronuncify.net>*, and is a .NET gooey GUI version of the same tool, with slightly different functions. It is available here[3], with instructions. Both tools require word-list files in plaintext, with one word (or phrase) per line. Both tools name the files according to the standard established in [[commons:Category:Pronunciation]], and convert them to Ogg Vorbis for you, so they are ready to upload. In the future, I may add OAuth-based direct uploading to Commons. If you run into difficulties, please file issues on GitHub, for the appropriate tool. Feedback is welcome. A. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2015/Programme/Lightn… [2] https://github.com/abartov/pronuncify [3] https://github.com/abartov/Pronuncify.net -- Asaf Bartov

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Wikipedia Kenya - copyright infringement
by Lucas Teles 11 Apr '16

11 Apr '16

Hi, everyone. Somehow I was directed to this project in a search on Google: http://www.wikipedia.or.ke/ Does anybody know what is that project? It seems to have a large content in English but pages doesn't mention authorship properly. I am assuming it uses Wikipedia content in violation of copyrights. It also uses the Wikipedia logo improperly. Not sure if a mirror can do that... Regards, Teles -- *Lucas Teles* * Steward at Wikimedia Foundation. Administrator * *at Portuguese Wikipedia.*https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Teles Contact me: [image: Facebook] <http://www.facebook.com/telesr> < https://www.facebook.com/telesr <http://www.facebook.com/telesr> > [image: Twitter] <http://www.twitter.com/Lucas_Teles> < https://twitter.com/Lucas_Teles > [image: Skype] < lucastelesr > Mobile: < 55 71 9374 2725 > I am a Wikimedia volunteer. Wikimedia Foundation can not be held responsible for my actions.

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Who are the nicest people on our projects ?
by Fæ 06 Feb '16

06 Feb '16

Hi, After reading an interesting related discussion on GenderGap, I have queried the top 10 users of the thanks feature last month, on both the English Wikipedia and Commons. Snapshot image attached and report link below. Perhaps someone might think of a suitable barnstar and award these folks for "being nice"? :-) Link: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:F%C3%A6/sandbox&oldid=1… P.S. This is a long query to run, taking 20 to 30 minutes due to the nature of the logging tables. However if someone wanted to make a monthly summary on-wiki somewhere, part of an active "be nice" campaign, I would be happy to set up an automated monthly report (if someone discovers this is already reported somewhere, that's cool we can use that). Fae -- faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae

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Decentralised Wikipedia
by Erik Aas 04 Jan '16

04 Jan '16

Hello, this is my first post to this list. I think Wikipedia is a great project and am impressed by how well it works. It seems the (lack of) funding of the project is one of the more severe threats to its continued success. Since (I assume) the biggest cost is the maintenance of servers, I wonder if there are there any plans of making Wikipedia decentralised. Let me elaborate. I'm thinking of a system where many users each would store a small part of the encyclopedia. A user wanting to look up or edit an article connects to another user who has a copy of that article. When an article is updated the update is sent to all other users (that are online) responsible for storing that article. Are there any efforts to accomplish this? Would it be feasible? Best, Erik

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Quality issues
by Gerard Meijssen 30 Dec '15

30 Dec '15

Hoi, At Wikidata we often find issues with data imported from a Wikipedia. Lists have been produced with these issues on the Wikipedia involved and arguably they do present issues with the quality of Wikipedia or Wikidata for that matter. So far hardly anything resulted from such outreach. When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia quality because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality. Arguably known issues with quality are the easiest to solve. There are many ways to approach this subject. It is indeed a quality issue both for Wikidata and Wikipedia. It can be seen as a research issue; how to deal with quality and how do such mechanisms function if at all. I blogged about it.. Thanks, GerardM http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/11/what-kind-of-box-is-wikipedia.ht…

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Call for Board nominees
by Boryana Dineva 29 Dec '15

29 Dec '15

Hello everyone, As you may have heard, I joined the Wikimedia Foundation last Monday as the VP of Human Resources. I am so excited to be here and help to the best of my abilities. One of the projects that I am currently focusing on is adding two members to our board of trustees. I wanted to reach out to you and ask you to nominate candidates that you think should be considered. I am attaching a role description that will provide more insight into what the ideal candidates for these two board slots would be. If someone you know comes to mind, please send the name of the candidate including some information regarding why you think they would be great. Also let me know if you know that person is interested in the position and can afford the time commitment the role will require or if it’s someone you think may be great but are unsure if they are interested or would have time to commit. Please email nominations to board-nominations(a)lists.wikimedia.org by next Wednesday, Sept 30th. I understand that this is a short notice and not much time to nominate, but we need to find someone that can start in Nov and we need to contact, screen, interview, etc before then. Thank you in advance for your nominations and have a wonderful weekend! Warmest regards, Boryana

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Free Bassel
by Gerard Meijssen 11 Dec '15

11 Dec '15

Hoi, I was so afraid when I read that Bassel has been sentenced to death. I read it on the website of Amnesty International [1]. I blogged about him in the past [2]. I am sad to say that it is him. Bassel was active as a Wikimedian, he worked towards making information available about Palmyra. If there is anything that we can do, please let us do this. Thanks, GerardM [1] http://www.amnesty.nl/nieuwsportaal/pers/syria-fears-life-free-expression-a… [2] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/10/freebassel-free-culture-advocate…

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Branislav Jovanovic, User:BraneJ in critical condition
by Milos Rancic 11 Dec '15

11 Dec '15

At some point of time, the best you could do is to reach for a superstition and hope it will work. It doesn't matter how it will be explained after, but at this point of time, it's only that superstition which matters. My particular superstition is that Brane would be able to see his eulogy and that we'll be able to laugh together. You know, it's a rare opportunity to see how your eulogy would look like, so I hope I am giving it to him. An hour ago I heard that he is in critical condition. At first, I was thinking what should I write after he dies. Then, I realized that I should write it now and post it after. Then, it's come into my mind that I should send it immediately as, at least, I could think about reading with him this eulogy and your comments after he recovers. Since August 2014 he is struggling with bone cancer. His curse is that his body is so strong, that chemotherapy is not working yet. Paradoxically, we hope that his body is weak enough now that it will finally accept chemotherapy. Monday would be crucial day for him. He is one of those "invisible" Wikimedians who actually contributed significantly to our movement. Some of you, mostly those who visited Belgrade, know him. He is one of the founders of Wikimedia Serbia. It's a pity that he is in this condition while WMRS is preparing to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Here is our photo from the founding assembly [1]. Presently, he is a board member of Wikimedia Serbia. His epic fight for copyright correctness on Serbian Wikipedia created the foundations of the present day strict copyright rules. It's a great achievement for a project of such size and it was possible just because of him. While he was active editor, he was highly trusted Wikipedian and he was administrator, bureaucrat and checkuser on Serbian Wikipedia, as well as on a number of of other projects in Serbian language. Alpha software for transliteration between Cyrillic and Latin scripts of Serbian language in MediaWiki was his work. That was the basis for the future implementation. It was the first software of that kind implemented in one web engine. He is my close friend. Besides a lot of things which he did, which will be mentioned at appropriate time, I want to say that many things which I did wouldn't be possible without his contribution. He is now very exhausted and he won't be able to read this today or tomorrow. However, I am sure he will be able to read it on Monday, after he recovers a bit. So, your support matters, no matter of my superstitious reasons for sending this email. [1] https://www.facebook.com/wikimedia.rs/photos/a.826279217387658.1073741828.2…

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