Wikimedia-l July 2012

151 participants
102 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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Russian Wikipedia goes on strike
by abi yoyo 02 Dec '12

02 Dec '12

Tim Starling wrote: > According to ru.wp Arbcom member DR, the danger to Wikipedia was > overstated, and the text of the proposed law was misrepresented. I think that the interpretation to the bill given by DR is incorrect. In fact the proposed bill was not only about child pornography and extremism, but also about drugs and, about “information, prompting children to commit actions, making threat to their life and health”. That was a very loose clause, that could ban virtually anything. After the blackout this clause was removed from the bill and it is a clear achievement of the strike. On the other hand the final version of the bill contains another clause, that is even more hazardous to us. It is about “information of methods of producing and use of narcotic substances, … of methods and places of cultivation of narcotic plants”. We do have information of drug synthesis on Wikipedia, ways of its use (e.g. marijuana) and we do have thorough instructions of marijuana cultivation on wikibooks. That is why our achievements are ambiguous. On the one hand we have a removal of a loose clause about information harmful to children, but on the otherwe now have another clause that is even more dangerous. That is why we are still trying to do what we can via our contacts within the authorities to revise the passed bill. But that is not all. The most important issue is extremism. According to the bill, the materials, that are banned for distribution in Russia should be included to the register of banned information on the ground of the court decision, banning the distribution of that information in Russia. We already have such court decisions and a list of extremist materials, distribution of which is prohibited in Russia. That list contains some really nasty materials, as e.g. nazi propaganda, but also Islamic texts (including those of famous non-terrorist Islamic authors e.g. Said Nursî), Saentologist, Jehova’s witnesses , Falun Gong, letters and materials of opposition in Russia, works of contemporary art, etc. We *do have* banned extremist materials in Wikipedia. E.g. this image: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Файл:Александр_Савко_Путешествия_Микки_Мауса_п… искусства.jpeg is considered extremist and is banned for distribution in Russia. (Hopefully it was uploaded two years before it was regulated as banned by the court). This letter in wikisource is also considered extremist: http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Всем,_кто_сочувствует_жертвам_бесланского_тер…! This is enough for banning the IPs of Wikimedia projects in Russia. And I am really afraid of this. I guess DR is aware of discussion on this list, but anyway I will inform him of it. Maybe he has something to add. > According to Levg in his Arbcom application, again via Google > Translate, "It should be noted that there are no objective reasons for > such a 'sprint survey' did not exist, to discuss the bill on second > reading has been known since at least last Friday." That is our fault that we could not manage to get the information in time. The first hearing was on Friday, but the community and myself got to know about the problem only on Monday, 9th. What for me personally I haven’t read the news on the weekend (yes, it is bad, that I relaxed on the weekend and haven’t read the news), and I failed to get to know about the problem in time. I guess it is also true for others. If we start to organize on Friday, the result would be better. It is a fault, but anyway it was not a deliberate fault, as nobody has informed the community earlier.

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Upcoming Survey, Feedback requested, and Office Hour
by Christine Moellenberndt 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

*Hi everyone, It's been a bit since I last emailed this list (or any list, for that matter!)... you may remember me, I worked at the Foundation last year in the Community Department, working with Philippe on any number of issues, as well as with the OTRS team. I've come back to work on a short term project with the Foundation, and I have to say it's great to be back! (and a great break from my Master's thesis!) We're getting ready to run the next version of the Editor Survey, for August 2012. This will be the third incarnation we've run since 2011. As with the prior incarnations of the survey, we'll be looking at a variety of topics, this time with the goal of not only understanding your needs and pressing issues while interacting with fellow editors, but also focusing on editors' satisfaction with the work of the Foundation. The last time we ran an editor survey, it was completed by over 6,000 respondents. When you break that down, it means that each minute of time demanded by the survey corresponds to 100 hours of Wikipedians' time. We want to make sure that this time is spent wisely, ensuring that the questions we have are worded clearly, don't cause confusion, and will generate meaningful answers. So we'd like to ask you to take a look at the survey, and give us feedback on the questions. You can find them here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_August_201… <https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Surv…> ... and please leave your feedback on the talk page there so we can keep the discussion in one place :) You can find out more information about the survey here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_August_2012 Also, we are planning an IRC Office Hour on the survey, this **Tuesday, July 31 at 1700 UTC.** (See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hoursfor general information about IRC Office hours) I know there has been some discussion about offering Office Hours in a broader range of times, and I know this time may not be the greatest for some... but this was the best time we could find currently. Thanks everyone!! -Christine Wikimedia Foundation*

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Fund-raising goal questions
by MZMcBride 20 Aug '12

20 Aug '12

Hi. How is the fund-raising goal determined each year? Is there a fund-raising goal set for the upcoming fund-raiser (the one beginning in November 2012)? Is there a guideline or policy regarding what happens once the fund-raising goal is met? MZMcBride

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] 2012-13 Annual Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation
by Florence Devouard 12 Aug '12

12 Aug '12

On 7/28/12 5:58 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote: > Hi all, > > the Wikimedia Foundation's 2012-13 Annual Plan has just been published at > > https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:2012-13_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan… > > accompanied by a Q&A: > > https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_An… > > The plan was approved by the Board of Trustees at its meeting in > Washington, DC, at Wikimania, and previously outlined to the > Foundation staff and interested community members at the monthly staff > meeting on July 5, 2012. We were planning to publish the video > recording of that meeting at this point, but encountered technical > difficulties; the video will hopefully become available soon. > Slide 8 : "How are we doing against the 2012 targets" I was stopped by "The Global Education Program is now the largest-ever systematic effort of the Wikimedia mouvement to boost high quality content creation, with a projected addition of 19 million characters to Wikipedia through student assignements 2011-2012" OF COURSE, we all know that WMF needs to glorify what it is actually initiating/in charge of. And that's fair enough. But seriously... I would feel fine with us trying to claim that the GEP is the largest system effort to INCREASE the number of articles. It is probably true. But we all know that the result is... so and so. Possibly good content, but also lot's of crap being reverted and deleted afterwards. Claiming it is the largest effort to boost high quality content is not only disingenous... but I actually find it counter productive and a tiny bit offensive toward the actual community. High quality content simply does NOT come from newbie students. Florence

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conversations between WMF and non-English projects
by Amir E. Aharoni 05 Aug '12

05 Aug '12

Hi, In the 2012-13 WMF plan document I saw an interesting thing: "We’ve hosted key community stakeholders such as English Wikipedia’s ArbCom and Portuguese Wikipedia’s top contributors, in an effort to better understand and respond to issues they're facing." (page 41). I was very happy to read this. In general, I hope that such focused meetings will be held with more language communities. I don't think that I need to explain why :) I don't know how did the meeting with the Portuguese Wikipedians go; I suppose that it was good. I don't remember that I read anything about it in blogs or mailing lists, but I may have missed it. Maybe what I'm about to write is known already, but I'll say it anyway. An important thing in such meetings is to have a community member who contributes to the Wikipedia in that language AND to the English Wikipedia. This is needed because the Foundation people are probably familiar with policies, customs and jargon in the English Wikipedia. Even simple terms, like "Village Pump", are not necessarily familiar to people who primarily edit in other languages; not all Wikipedias have ArbComs; not all Wikipedias prohibit voting; etc. Such a person will be able to "translate" between the English Wikipedia terms and the local Wikipedia terms. Without such a person misunderstandings will definitely happen, even if everybody knows the English language well. That's it, hope it helps. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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[Wikimedia Announcements] 2012-13 Annual Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation
by Tilman Bayer 03 Aug '12

03 Aug '12

Hi all, the Wikimedia Foundation's 2012-13 Annual Plan has just been published at https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:2012-13_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan… accompanied by a Q&A: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_An… The plan was approved by the Board of Trustees at its meeting in Washington, DC, at Wikimania, and previously outlined to the Foundation staff and interested community members at the monthly staff meeting on July 5, 2012. We were planning to publish the video recording of that meeting at this point, but encountered technical difficulties; the video will hopefully become available soon. -- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l

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photography restrictions at the Olympics
by Amir E. Aharoni 01 Aug '12

01 Aug '12

Hi, The Olympic games are beginning soon. Apparently, ticket holders cannot use photo equipment longer than 30cm and cannot use the photos and videos for commercial purposes without accreditation. Practically everything that happens at the Olympics is notable and should be on Wikipedia, Commons, etc. Does anybody know whether there are professional accredited photographers who are Wikimedia-friendly and plan to upload their photos? If there aren't any, does anybody know whether a Wikipedian can obtain such accreditation? This doesn't concern me directly, but there are many, many people who write Wikipedia articles about sports in all languages and it may be interesting to them. Also, it may be a frequent issue in sports and I'm just not aware of it because I rarely follow sports. Sources for the restrictions: * http://www.tickets.london2012.com/purchaseterms.html * PDF: http://j.mp/london2012prohibited -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Two Community Fellowship proposals that might interest you (feedback requested)
by Ocaasi Ocaasi 01 Aug '12

01 Aug '12

Hi folks! Two Community Fellowship Proposals you might be interested in: The Wikipedia Adventure is a dynamic, interactive learning game about how to use Wikipedia (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Project_Ideas/The_Wiki…). The Wikipedia Library is a single point of access for donated resources like HighBeam, Credo and JSTOR (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Project_Ideas/The_Wiki…). Feedback on either would be great! Jake Orlowitz Wikipedia editor: Ocaasi http://enwp.org/User:Ocaasi wikiocaasi(a)yahoo.com

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Wikimedia-l July 2012