Wikimedia-l June 2013

164 participants
106 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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Quarterly reviews of high priority WMF initiatives
by Erik Moeller 16 Feb '15

16 Feb '15

Hi folks, to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process, starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the Board [1]: - Visual Editor - Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero) - Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams) - Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity I'm proposing the following initial schedule: January: - Editor Engagement Experiments February: - Visual Editor - Mobile (Contribs + Zero) March: - Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects) - Funds Dissemination Committee We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on their recent progress, which will help set some context that would otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will also create open opportunities for feedback and questions. My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here which we can use to discuss the concept further: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r… The internal review will, at minimum, include: Sue Gardner myself Howie Fung Team members and relevant director(s) Designated minute-taker So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker. I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks: - Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter, compared with goals - Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would? - Review of challenges, blockers and successes - Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other action items - Buffer time, debriefing Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world. In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in engineering. As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can help inform and support reviews across the organization. Feedback and questions are appreciated. All best, Erik [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)
by Tomasz W. Kozlowski 20 Nov '13

20 Nov '13

Hi all, for those of you who do not watch the RecentChanges on the Foundation wiki <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges>, I think it might be somehow surprising to see that in a top-level decision, almost all volunteer administrators of the wiki have been stripped off their adminship yesterday evening (UTC time). As far as I know, community members have been helping out maintaining this wiki for as long as 2006, spending countless hours of their free time on categorising existing pages, importing translations from Meta, and recently, deleting unnecessary and broken pages left over by WMF staff. Apparently, this is something that not only isn't appreciated, but unwelcome. Let me repeat that: the WMF does not wish volunteers to help out with running their wiki, even if they have been helping out almost since the very start of the wiki. Some questions come to my mind right now: 1) Who made the decision to remove adminship from all community members? (I'm assuming it was Gayle, but it could've be someone from the Communications department for all we know.) 2) Why did you make this decision now? What changed? 3) Why did you decide to desysop people straight away instead of discussing things with them first? These are questions directed at the WMF—for you regular folks, I have a riddle (I'll give a WikiLove barnstar to the first person to submit a correct answer). There is /at least/ one community member who does not hold any official position within the WMF, and who has not been desysopped in yesterday's purge—do you know who this person is? -- Tomasz

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Office hour with WMF researchers
by ENWP Pine 29 Sep '13

29 Sep '13

Hi everyone, WMF researchers have agreed to participate in an office hour about WMF research projects and methodologies. The currently scheduled participants are: * Aaron Halfaker, Research Analyst (contractor) * Jonathan Morgan, Research Strategist (contractor) * Evan Rosen, Data Analytics Manager, Global Development * Haitham Shammaa, Contribution Research Manager * Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Strategy We'll meet on IRC in #wikimedia-office on April 22 at 1800 UTC. Please join us. Pine

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Update ED Transition Team pages
by Jan-Bart de Vreede 11 Sep '13

11 Sep '13

Hi Everyone, As mentioned after Sue's announcement of her intention to depart the Foundation we will try to ensure transparency in the work of the Transition Team where possible (and respect privacy where necessary). To that end I would like to draw you attention to a set of recent changes made to the Transition Team pages on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Executive_Director_Transition_Team These changes include a preliminary timeline, FAQ and an invitation to add people to the "connectors list". Please feel free to add more questions and other discussion points. We expect to add more information (such as the choice we made with regards to the Search firm that will assist us) in the coming week. Regards Jan-Bart de Vreede Chair Executive Director Transition Team

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Wikipedia Zero in Google search result
by Benjamin Chen 28 Aug '13

28 Aug '13

Hi, I noticed that when I'm searching on Google, many Wikipedia results are in the form of lang-code.zero.wikipedia.org, perhaps just since a day or two ago. I'm not sure what items are indexed this way, but it would really be a trouble - there is no link on the page that jumps you to the standard site (even the notice links to main page of m.wikipedia.org, not the corresponding article on m.wikipedia.org) Regards, Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]]

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Single User Login finalisation: some accounts will be renamed
by James Forrester 03 Aug '13

03 Aug '13

All, The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users (like cross-wiki notifications). These changes will mean users have the same account name everywhere, will let us give you new features that will help you edit & discuss better, and will allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the pre-conditions for this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis.[0] Unfortunately, some accounts are currently not unique across all our wikis, but instead clash with other users who have the same account name. To make sure that all of these users can use Wikimedia's wikis in future, we will be renaming a number of accounts to have "~” and the name of their wiki added to the end of their accounts' name. This change will take place on or around 27 May. For example, a user called “Example” on the Swedish Wiktionary who will be renamed would become “Example~svwiktionary”. All accounts will still work as before, and will continue to be credited for all their edits made so far. However, users with renamed accounts (whom we will be contacting individually) will have to use the new account name when they log in. It will now only be possible for accounts to be renamed globally; the RenameUser tool will no longer work on a local basis - since all accounts must be globally unique - therefore it will be withdrawn from bureaucrats' tool sets. It will still be possible for users to ask on Meta for their account to be renamed further, if they do not like their new user name, once this takes place. A copy of this note is posted to meta [1] for translation. Please forward this to your local communities, and help get it translated. Individuals who are affected will be notified via talk page and e-mail notices nearer the time. [0] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login [1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_User_Login_finalisation_announcement Yours, -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

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What community initiatives have made an impact on editor engagement?
by Steven Walling 30 Jul '13

30 Jul '13

Hi everyone, On July 11th at the next WMF Metrics & Activities meeting, myself, Erik Möller, Howie Fung, Maryana Pinchuk, and Dario Taraborelli are going to deliver a short update on the state of Wikimedia editor communities. (For those not familiar: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings) This is the beginning of the new fiscal year for the WMF, and we'd like to use this time to recap what we know about the decline or growth of Wikimedia communities. We're focusing on the following set of questions... * Are Wikimedia projects as a whole in decline? * Is English Wikipedia in decline? * Which WMF projects have been successful in driving growth? * Which non-WMF trends have driven growth (e.g. community projects)? * How does data/measurement enable us to drive growth? * Which future changes are expected to drive growth? I'm reaching out to this list on behalf of the team, so that we can get a list of the non-WMF projects that have had a measurable impact on the size or diversity of Wikimedia projects. One obvious example that comes to mind is Wiki Loves Monuments. Others are the Wikipedia Challenge in Kiswahili and Setswana, and edit-a-thons, such as this year's fashion edit-a-thon put together by Wikimedia Sverige. What am I missing from this list? -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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PRISM, government surveillance, and Wikimedia: Request for community feedback
by Geoff Brigham 18 Jul '13

18 Jul '13

Hi Tomasz, Thank you very much for everything you and the volunteers are doing. You people do rock. WMF is getting professional translations in German, French, Spanish, and Japanese, and will post by Tuesday. We are doing this because of the fast timing situation and our desire to hear international voices. We are asking for translations by volunteers in the other languages. If the community says that we need to push out the dates, we will listen of course. My competing consideration is that we don't miss opportunities if the right course is to proceed forward as recommended in the blog post. Apologies for any confusion here. Any fault is mine. Again ... many thanks. Geoff *Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 03:19:55 +0200 From: "Tomasz W. Kozlowski" <tomasz(a)twkozlowski.net> To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] PRISM, government surveillance, and Wikimedia: Request for community feedback Message-ID: <51BBC13B.10809(a)twkozlowski.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Geoff, I'm a bit lost here now that I've read that translation notice more carefully — are you really saying you want to have this post translated into German, French, Spanish and Japanese by Tuesday, June 18, and then for the local communities to comment on it by Friday, June 21? There is just no way that this can scale in this world. FYI, I posted a message asking for translations at <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2013-June/002311.html>, and I'm sure that our amazing volunteer translators can get it translated into those four languages (and more) by noon on Sunday (PST).* (And again—doing this kind of things on a Friday is a Very Bad Idea[TM].) -- Tomasz

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Wikimedia-l June 2013