Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, I am sure that you and I have learned to create new articles. In the usability study, people who were completely new to MediaWiki were asked to perform well described tasks. All testsubjects were unable to create new articles. They did nothing wrong, they just could not figure out how to do this. These tests were recorded on video and analysed by usability experts. Consequently the results are relevant and provide the best explanation that I have had so far why so many of our projects are failing. The good news is that the issue that has been identified is one that we can remedy. The even better news is that the UNICEF developers have created extensions that have been proven to make a difference. We only have to understand their results and apply the knowledge gained. Obviously we will want to ensure that this software complies with our standards, but this is something that we have the expertise for. This is a clear win-win situation as UNICEF stands to gain their functionality adopted by the WMF and consequently have less of a maintenance issue. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Amir E. Aharoni [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Gerard Meijssen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At Wikimania 2008 a presentation was given by developers from UNICEF who had done proper usability studies. They found that 100% of their newbie testsubjects were not able to create a new article. They must have done something wrong. If they are right, then it must be an illusion that Wikipedia has several millions of articles. I find the creation of a new article very easy. On the other hand, adding a link somewhere that says create a new article won't hurt. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace. - T. Moore ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] EN Wikipedia Editing Statistics
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 7:29 AM, Nikola Smolenski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Monday 01 December 2008 04:09:11 Robert Rohde wrote: On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Neil Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is the data replicated anywhere outside the Tampa data centre (such as in Amsterdam or Seoul)? If not, just one fire, flood or hurricane could destroy the entire en: Wikipedia. There are database mirrors of every wiki, including en, as part of the toolserver cluster in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, enwiki mirror doesn't include article text :( Are you sure about that? Last time I checked the text databases were shared between all wikimedia project and thus replicated all at once or not at all. Bryan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Amir E. Aharoni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Getting empowered is not equal to learning English. The two are not equal, to be sure. But, at the risk of sounding pugilistic, I will say that there probably is a positive correlation between knowing a more popular language and knowledge empowerment. Even if this is true, the foundation is more interested in getting people involved (which means targeting native languages) then in trying to convert people to more popular (and possibly more empowering) languages. To do the second task we would still want to create projects in small languages so we could write learning resources to teach people the big languages. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
GerardM - what steps need to be taken to begin testing and adapting the UNICEF usability extensions? Where would be a good project to begin - perhaps the Simple English Wikipedia, if that community is amenable? That its in English might make development easier, and a more usable interface might fit with the philosophy of the Simple wiki. Milos - you wrote: To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp. Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm curious to know what data changed your mind. Moreschi - What you advocate is basically cultural imperialism, which is a recipe for conflict and disruption - not education. Making knowledge available to as many people as possible is the goal; if those people don't speak English, they should not be excluded. As others have noted, it is much easier and much more in line with our goal to find contributors who can build suitable references in all languages. To your point that these references are likely to have poor quality anyway - I'm not sure that makes sense logically. A small community does not necessarily equal poor quality content; I imagine that the size of the community correlates with the volume of content, and while there are less people to police quality issues there is less content to police. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Fajro [EMAIL PROTECTED]: WTF??? Some people really need read more about cultural diversity Bible belt America does not share a culture with say Perth or indeed much of New York. and linguistic rights No such thing. Language can be a tool for control. With English this is hard. There is simply too much of it out there an English speakers move around too much. It isn't really practical to keep them out. But if your general population doesn't speak English that doesn't matter. By actively promoting minority languages you increase the longevity and frequency of such situations. A population that does not speak English is one that it is fairly easy for those in power (be it dictators of tribal elders or religious leaders) to control the information flow to. And wikipedia can do nothing about that. A single data source is too easy to block. So we tolerate smaller languages or languages with lower levels of existing information but should not go as far as actively promoting them. For the time being we accept that yes they are what we are going to have to use if we want to work with such groups (and heh even North Korea has a hard time dealing with Korean speakers among it tourists). But that does not mean we should make any attempt to promote them. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Nathan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Milos - you wrote: To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp. Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm curious to know what data changed your mind. I don't know how exactly Milos arrived at this conclusion, but i have a half-educated guess. original-research-and-educated-guesses Many - quite possibly most - readers arrive at Wikipedia through a search engine. Now the question is - which language they use to search the web. It's quite natural that a significant number of people in Serbia will search the web in Serbian. The same goes for Israel/Hebrew and Russia/Russian. The problem is with less privileged languages. Belarusian is official in Belarus and the (arguable) statistics say that most people there consider it to be their native language, but in practice Russian is considerably more popular in the published media, so when they google for something, they do it in Russian, because they don't expect to find anything useful in Belarusian. Or take Hindi. The second most spoken language in the world and the main official language of a country where many people are online. (1% of India's population is MANY.) Yet the Hindi Wikipedia has less than 30,000 articles (if i read the Indic digits correctly...) Now, these are languages which have millions of speakers, rich literature and an official status; when it comes to languages which are even less privileged, people go straight to the English WP (or French or Spanish.) /original-research-and-educated-guesses Speaking in Linguistic terms, it is a question of [[Pragmatics]]. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace. - T. Moore ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Ziko van Dijk [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Anyone who doubts about the deplorable state of, well, many language editions of Wikipedia, may have a look at this: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gleederoldid=25822 Gleeder That's hardly a good example - we're never going to have a good Wikipedia in a language mostly spoken by members of a culture that shuns modern technology, are we? Those speakers that aren't Amish are generally of the older generation, a demographic we have difficulty attracting (work has been done on that front, with some success as I understand it, but it requires an existing community to start the process). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Don't forget Esperanto. Since when has Esperanto been a global language? It was a failed attempt at creating one, that's all. There is very little point in anyone learning it except for the fun of it (if you enjoy that sort of thing). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
@Pedro :Yep, it's a two way interaction that I believe benefits all projects (sort of human interwiki) @Thomas:Echo would be the English word, thanks. Ecco however is also correct eEnglish, ref. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_non-eEnglish_spelling_and_grammar_campaign. (Note to self: Irony should be avvoided in online communication, especially when writing foreignly) @Gerard: Yes, there will be a lot of loud voices, but in the end we'll manage to work out this as an improvement to help new (and perhaps older) users as well. There was A LOT of load voices at Commons when (what I still hope is) a more userfriendly uploadsystem was launched, but it seems to be working just fine ;) We may get more nonsense articles going straight to speedy deletion, but the way to raise the quality of wikip/media is certainly not to avvoid maiking it easier for people to edit, Finn R 2008/12/1 Pedro Sanchez [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:44 PM, Finn Rindahl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'd like to ecco (is that an eEnglish word..?) Michael Finney here. Most people who engage them self in a small language wikimedia projects will sooner or later participate in projects like en:wp and commons as well - and thus both learn more about the facts of reality as well as communicating with others in a (for them) foreign language. An also a fair share of people who initially engage into enwip ant he alike, eventually decide to migrate to smaller projects. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, The Dutch Wikipedia has passed 500.000 articles.. if a seven year old Dutch kid would be looking for a paard, the child would not get what we have in store when it asks for a horse in stead.. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=paardgo=Try+exact+match http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Horse I know of smaller WMF projects where even the admins have given up on Commons.. So yes, Commons is a great project but it has only 3,5 million media files and it does not support other languages like it could and in my opinion should. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2008/12/1 Gerard Meijssen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hoi, There is no point in usability studies when the lessons learned are not applied. At the Boston Wikimania there was another person who had done studies on usability and MediaWiki. She even presented about it at the Hacker days... The problem is the info tends to be around it an easy to access and search form. As to Commons, it is effectively useless to the people that do not speak English. Really? Even with the extensive uselang stuff in say german? -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Gerard Meijssen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hoi, The Dutch Wikipedia has passed 500.000 articles.. if a seven year old Dutch kid would be looking for a paard, the child would not get what we have in store when it asks for a horse in stead.. People use the search feature on commons? I would assume they would click the link at the bottom of http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paard_(dier) and get taken to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Equus_caballus?uselang=nl -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] EN Wikipedia Editing Statistics
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Nathan wrote: Wow, someone had more than 10,000 edits in February of 2002. That's probably Conversion script. :) - -- brion -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkk0WRoACgkQwRnhpk1wk45UngCfdUkZa1wV8zskTs6kvdADgyyX SjgAni2hvsPi5h3XbkXaUF5QtmWLKULD =Dahu -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Hoi, When you are to build a system that connects Wikipedia / Wiktionary etc articles to Commons, you are building a system that relies on the articles to exist in the languages you want to get the data from. So it is restricted to the data that you have in the projects. To build this data, I would use the software developed by Daniel Kintzler for his master thesis and expand it for the languages Daniel does not yet support. This approach will work for Wikipedias. What you get is the type of data that can be included in a system that is based on the OmegaWiki notions and that will need a database that is quite similar to OmegaWiki. With an OmegaWiki implementation, we can include information from languages we do not support within the WMF. Consequently we can provide infromation that is not provided by any of the projects. So, yes you can. However there is more that you can do. As you may know, in OmegaWiki we demonstrated how to connect to both Commons and Wikipedias. The big advantage it provides that there is no need for connecting to Commons from each Wikipedia article. You only connect from the concept both to Commons and the various Wikipedias. Yes, OmegaWiki is Open Source and its data is Open Content. Thanks, GerardM 2008/12/1 Erik Moeller [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2008/12/1 geni [EMAIL PROTECTED]: People use the search feature on commons? I would assume they would click the link at the bottom of http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paard_(dier)http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paard_%28dier%29and get taken to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Equus_caballus?uselang=nl This is a valid point, especially when one uses it as a starting point to think about search. It might be feasible to build a search tool on the basis of this existing tagging of Wikipedia articles to Commons media -- and similarly, Wiktionary, Wikinews, and so on. This is an alternative to the notion of one giant ontology that's used for tagging. Instead you would treat a wiki -- any wiki -- as the ontology. So you could do a Wikinews/Commons search for terrorism, a Wiktionary/Commons search for pronunciations, etc. Because the approach would be wiki-agnostic, it would also be language-agnostic, and yield useful results as long as the underlying wiki is large enough and its articles are well tagged to Commons. What would be the technical requirements of this approach and what would be its disadvantages? -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Michael Finney wrote: Thank you for your comments. As a person who manages a small wiki project and two language forks from it, I found some of the comments very disturbing... almost frightening that such exist. Your comments re-affirm my confidence in the Wikimedia Foundation and its purpose. I certainly don't see it as frightening that a debate over the status of small minority languages *exists*. One always has, and continues to exist, in many countries, with the prevailing views differing greatly around the world. I personally come from a family whose native tongue was Pontian Greek, a language that is quickly becoming extinct, and most of whose users actively decided to switch to modern Greek, partly in order to reduce ethnic strife between different kinds of Greeks and make for a more unified modern nation. There are of course negative aspects to that approach, just as there are positive and negative aspects to any aspect of assimilation versus maintenance of differences. -Mark ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
2008/12/1 Erik Moeller [EMAIL PROTECTED]: What would be the technical requirements of this approach and what would be its disadvantages? It would require 1 bot and a copy of whichever wikis you wanted to work from. Just harvest all the links to commons and create those on commons as category redirects (you can also harvest all the redirects that point at the article with the link to commons and create redirecting cats for them as well) Problems? Maintenance wise it would be tricky. If you were instead going to build something server side you could use the articles the images are used in as keywords for your search engine but by then we are getting a little beyond my knowledge of search design. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
On 12/1/08, Andrew Whitworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To do the second task we would still want to create projects in small languages so we could write learning resources to teach people the big languages. I for one would enjoy learning resources targeted at those wishing to learn the smaller languages. Surely this can work both ways. —C.W. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 57, Issue 8
There are 732 editable wikis on Wikimedia and nearly all of them are active in some way. Just a year ago, these wikis were getting hit by loads of spambots and malbots and barely any community to fight them, but since then we have seen changes in smaller wikis. Apart from maybe 15-20 wikis, I can safely say that most wikis are active and as Jimbo mentioned somewhere, it will be good to learn another language as your second tongue, preferably those that are spoken a lot more.We spend so much time on these language wikipedias, we should atleast try to learn something from it :) On 12/2/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Send foundation-l mailing list submissions to foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can reach the person managing the list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of foundation-l digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: 80% of our projects are failing (Finn Rindahl) 2. Re: 80% of our projects are failing (Fajro) 3. Re: 80% of our projects are failing (Thomas Dalton) 4. Re: 80% of our projects are failing (Thomas Dalton) 5. Re: 80% of our projects are failing (Pedro Sanchez) 6. Re: 80% of our projects are failing (Gerard Meijssen) 7. Re: 80% of our projects are failing (Finn Rindahl) 8. Re: 80% of our projects are failing (geni) -- Message: 1 Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 20:44:25 +0100 From: Finn Rindahl [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 I'd like to ecco (is that an eEnglish word..?) Michael Finney here. Most people who engage them self in a small language wikimedia projects will sooner or later participate in projects like en:wp and commons as well - and thus both learn more about the facts of reality as well as communicating with others in a (for them) foreign language. They may of course also learn the not so pleasant fact of reality that native English speakers unfortunately sometimes come across as a rather arrogant lot (an attitude also unfortunately often also adapted by dutch/scandinavians etc who often are more comfortable using English than other language groups - I've been arrogant myself at times) Finn Rindahl (mainly nowikicommons) 2008/12/1 Michael Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jimbo: Thank you for your comments. As a person who manages a small wiki project and two language forks from it, I found some of the comments very disturbing... almost frightening that such exist. Your comments re-affirm my confidence in the Wikimedia Foundation and its purpose. Thanks. Mike On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:24 PM, Jimmy Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Geni wrote: The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world first line of the mission statement. By actively promoting minority languages you lock more people into them which is not consistent with trying to empower them. I wrote: I do not share geni's views at all. Thomas Dalton wrote: It doesn't seem that anyone does... I should add at the same time that I think that it is a good thing for people to try to learn a relevant global language in addition to their local language, with the choice depending upon personal context. In many parts of the world and for many people, English is an excellent choice of a second language. In other parts of the world (Francophone Africa for example), French is an excellent choice. Chinese might be good for some people. Russian for others. Hindi for others. There are many variables. And I hope that Wikipedia is helpful to people both in learning about the facts of reality (usually most comfortably done in your mother tongue) and in learning another language. I don't see these goals as being in competition at all, but rather mutually reinforcing. --Jimbo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Message: 2 Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 17:45:07 -0200 From: Fajro [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Gerard, it would be good, if you could add links to all the extension pages in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Uniwiki, which point to pages which use those extensions. There are links to two pages who use the Uniwiki package, but I was not able to find live examples of most of the single extensions. Where can I find CreatePage live in action, or 'Generic Edit Page' or Layouts? Screenshots on the single extension pages would be good too. Marcus Buck ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Fajro wrote: On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:08 PM, geni [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No. You can argue for the tolerance of minority languages but actively promoting them conflicts with Wikimedia's stated objectives. How? Do you edit wikipedia to give Free Access To All Human Knowledge only to the educated elite? It seems to me that this would differ greatly depending on the minority language. Some minority languages, despite being minority, have millions of monolingual speakers. Clearly if these people are going to get Wikipedia's information without learning a new language, we need a good Wikipedia in that language, because otherwise the information is not available in a language they can understand. But other minority languages have few to no monolingual speakers; some barely have any native speakers at all. The presence or absence of a Wikipedia in those language is more of an issue of language politics and language preservation than actual dissemination of an encyclopedia's contents. -Mark ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
