Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hello, 2010/6/4 MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com: John Vandenberg wrote: While that is impossible (read: hard), a simple approximation is to display languages links for the 10 largest corresponding articles in other languages, and then show a more.. when there are more than 10. Another option is for contributors to specify which other interwiki links should be always visible; e.g. we would always want the FA's in other languages to be shown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Link_FA The KISS principle comes to mind here. Are there ways to improve the current language list in the future? Perhaps. But the best general solution (that's quickest to implement and doesn't rely on vaporware) is to simply fix the default. Personally, I see a sidebar with a lot of room and nothing else to fill it, so I don't really understand the current set of objections to showing the languages by default. A minimalist interface design is a nice goal, but it isn't always the best pragmatically. And in this case, pragmatism should beat out idealism. MZMcBride I fully agree with that. Yann ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hello, 2010/6/4 Platonides platoni...@gmail.com: James Alexander wrote: We have a couple threads on this issue but picking the most recent :). It appears that this has now been changed ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23497 ) and so once the next revision is pushed live the interwikis would be visible by default. James Alexander Spoke too soon. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Fung hfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org This is bad. I think that interwiki links are an essential part of the Mediawiki interface. Hiding them in English Wikipedia will only reduce the accessibility of other languages, which is against our mission. Regards, Yann ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 06/04/2010 08:24 AM, Michael Peel wrote: On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote: A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard. No, the menu only stays opened until you close your browser. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 2:24 AM, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote: On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote: A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard. I would support it being expanded by default, though (even though I rarely use it myself) simply because it's a lot less intuitive to find the language links now, [snip] I think you mostly answered your own question for the most part. But I think my statement was intended to be a more general statement about comparing costs than really a statement that this makes wikipedia very hard: OTOH, if you don't read the language well and are depending on the inter-language links to get you to the right article in the right wikipedia, then the change did indeed make the site very hard to use. This is the subject of Noein's car analogy. I agree with the upthread comments on the roseate rectilinear lego-hat. It is as fertile a source of associations as any cloud could hope to be, but language is not among them. OTOH, I could make the same criticism for the watchlist star, which has the additional sin of conflicting with the use of the star iconography used for featured articles. As far as the the dynamic hiding goes, I'd like to toss in my voice against that: Determinism is very important for usability. Guessing what the user wants is great when it works but terrible when it doesn't. Computers are often _stupid_ but at least they tend to be consistent. The fact that you can learn to cope with their stupidity without much effort is often their one redeeming quality. Interface choices should favour determinism except when the cost of doing so is very high, the automatic mechanism is very very reliable, or the kind of non-determinism is very harmless and non-confusing. Anyone who has tried to get wolfram alpha to perform a specific calculation and suffered through a half hour of swapping around your word order knows of the frustration that can come from the computer trying to be smart and failing. In particular, that absence of a listing depends on an basically non-deterministic guess of what you want _AS WELL AS_ the article simply not existing is likely to be confusing. E.g. thinking an article only has a german version when the german version is featured. At the same time I think that changing the order, typeface, color, or adding iconography based on automated smarts is far less likely to result in confusion and is probably an OKAY thing to do. On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: . . . well, I can expand on this a bit. Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as Give people access to free knowledge. This can be measured lots of different ways, of course. But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected. [snip] Things like hiding inter-language links and switching to vector even though it locks out browsers used by many people more or less completely deny access to the site for people. I think it's really hard to justify effectively locking people out for the sake of the soft benefits of a great number of people. I'm not saying that there is a true hard incomparability. In general I think that denying _one_ person the ability to effectively use the site unless they understake a costly change in their client would justified by a small improvement for the bulk of the users... but only that it doesn't form a nice neat linear relationship where you can directly trade readers to usability fluidness. ... and that, as you described it, incomparability is a useful approximation much of the time. The approximation only really starts to fall down when you can make a serious argument that there is a true like for like replacement e.g. loss of life = actually saves two lives, as distinct from loss of a life = makes 2000 people live 0.1% longer. Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Vector skin on Wikisource
On 4 June 2010 03:40, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: If the interwikis are not displayed in the vector skin, either Wikisource cant use the vector skin, or Wikisource will need to move these links into the content of the pages. I've started a discussion about this on the multilingual wikisource scriptorium A question: rather than modify the main vector skin, I believe it's possible to alter the *local* vector skin for an individual site or project? See, for example, the local changes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Vector.css If so, Wikisource could set the toolbox section to be expanded by default in the same way the interaction section is... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 06/04/2010 09:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: As far as the the dynamic hiding goes, I'd like to toss in my voice against that: Determinism is very important for usability. Guessing what the user wants is great when it works but terrible when it doesn't. Computers are often _stupid_ but at least they tend to be I'd remind here that at one point Microsoft added a similar feature to menus in Microsoft Office, not showing rarely used options by default. It was universally hated. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature. Of course not, I do this all the time (I even wrote about it), but I don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians use the interwiki links in this manner. On the list of research projects I wish someone would get around to: I would love to know more about unexpected/atypical uses of the projects like this... I guess the reference desk is a similar feature, an unexpected service cropping up in the middle of the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there are. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Me three for using the interwiki links as a way of finding the word or phrase I'm looking for in another language (along with Wiktionary). Not only do they assist me in finding translations of the words or phrases I am looking for, they also give me context and relevant material for languages I'm comfortable using. They are also particularly useful for languages where I am not at all comfortable (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic) where I get results with images of the subject that confirm that I have found the right noun I need. Sometimes I get false positives, but unlike with my various dictionaries which I now rarely use, I can usually figure out pretty quickly that I have not got the translation I need. I'd be interested to know what the default languages I would get based computer profiling. Geolocating would put in me in Morocco (official language Modern Standard Arabic, though French is commonly used), browser configuration would give French, and Wikimedia system user preferences are set in English, simply because I predominantly use the English Wikipedia and English Wikinews; I'm far too lazy to have to translate the Wikimedia terminology in my head when navigating in French, German or Russian. AD 2010/6/4 phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature. Of course not, I do this all the time (I even wrote about it), but I don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians use the interwiki links in this manner. On the list of research projects I wish someone would get around to: I would love to know more about unexpected/atypical uses of the projects like this... I guess the reference desk is a similar feature, an unexpected service cropping up in the middle of the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there are. -- phoebe ___ 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] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hiding interlanguage links will worse the effect of Google search on some small language projects. See this previous thread: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-January/056671.html Present situation isn’t much better because intrelanguage links are at the end of a long list of things on the left side of the screen. It is not clear what they do, users only see a list of language names. From my point of view the “ideal” situation would be: 1) Hide the interlanguage links. 2) Guess if the user is multilingual and then highlight links to their languages. Saying clearly: You also can read this article in xxx and yyy language. There are several ways to guest the user languages: 1) Using IP address 2) History about previously visited language projects from same user or same IP 3) Allowing several languages in user preferences 4) Using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation … But if we can’t go to the “ideal “situation I think that for small language projects it is better left things as they are than hiding interlanguage links. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hoi, This would be a good idea only when you are allowed to choose the languages you do want to see. Thanks, GerardM On 3 June 2010 23:30, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 June 2010 19:04, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Yes, we discussed this internally as well as a better path to exposse Wikipedia's multilingual nature than to dump a long list of native language names in the sidebar (we might have an expansion link such as Show X other languages to indicate the large number of language versions available). This is a brilliant solution which should satisfy both concerns! How soon can we have this? - d. ___ 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] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hoi, When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will be surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people can choose the languages involved. It would make sense to combine this with the Babel extension... Thanks, GerardM On 4 June 2010 02:59, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a see other languages link which would expand to give all the other langauages. We're also looking at changing the word Languages into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do. I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links Howie On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote: It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this. My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects. In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement. The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the internal experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Funghfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org ___ 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] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will be surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people can choose the languages involved. However, 'letting people choose' is only workable for regular, logged-in users. If we're talking about anonymous users, guessing is more or less our only option. It's not an easy task, but luckily we can choose to have 3 or 4 languages rather than just one, so there is some margin of error. Still - geolocation usually doesn't go beyond country level, and for some countries we already have quite a number of languages. Usually one or a few languages will be enough to give everyone something they can speak well, but if we show only those, regional languages would not be shown to anyone at all, and thus miss out on a good advertising location. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
Ryan Kaldari wrote: If you want to challenge a takedown notice, the proper (and only) course of action is to file a counter-notice. I had work that I did on Commons taken down by a bogus DMCA takedown notice several years ago. Instead of complaining to the Foundation, which would have been pointless (as they are bound by the DMCA to comply with even the most bogus takedown notices), I mailed them a counter-notice and the work was restored in short order. Mostly yes, but sometimes no. The Foundation should still exercise due diligence before deleting. It should still review the notice to make sure that the notice includes *all* the required elements. Refusing to take down the most bogus claims could endanger its safe harbor status, but it should avoid copyright paranoia. There are several handy online guides for how to file DMCA counter-notices. It is very easy and doesn't require hiring a lawyer. The only catch is that by filing the counter-notice you are putting your money where your mouth is and legally asserting that you have the right to post the work (so make sure that this is correct or you may end up in a lawsuit). Absolutely. If more people were to accept responsibility for these materials it would spread the risk most wonderfully. One of our disadvantages is that we have a lot of people totally lacking in daily experience with the law, or whose understanding is based on watching too many cops-and-robbers TV shows. People with some legal experience know that they can push the envelope to some degree; those without that experience are easily intimidated by that. Ideally, the Foundation is an ISP with no knowledge of the material its site contains until it is brought to its attention. It's perfectly legitimate for it to do absolutely nothing until it receives a takedown notice. To some that may even seem to be an obtuse position. When it receives a takedown notice it must act, and if it chooses not to act that must be an informed decision, not a default. In practical terms it can't help but be shown the most egregious copyright violation. Taking those down is done more as an act of good faith than out of any legal obligation. Putting your money where your mouth is means to stop treating the Foundation as a nanny. We do far more for the sake of free culture by being willing to challenge bogus or borderline copyright claims than adopting tortured and self-defeating interpretations of copyright law. Failing to stand up to bogus claims encourages them. As individuals we need to have the courage not to pass the buck to the Foundation. The current situation is completely different than the NPG situation, which involved only bogus threats, not a legally binding takedown notice. I agree. Dragging in the NPG situation only confuses the present one. Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
David Gerard wrote: Yep! You want to write a first draft of a guide? I'm sure the EFF or someone like that will have something suitable to start with. We can't have a lawyer employed by the WMF look over it, but we have lots of lawyers amongst the volunteers. An important point; we musn't force the WMF lawyer into a conflict of interest The current situation is completely different than the NPG situation, which involved only bogus threats, not a legally binding takedown notice. Indeed. If they had issued a takedown notice, someone could have responded with it's not bogus. I am this person at this address. Make my day. It really feels good to be able to say Make my day. More of us should try it. Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 7:44 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: David Gerard wrote: Yep! You want to write a first draft of a guide? I'm sure the EFF or someone like that will have something suitable to start with. We can't have a lawyer employed by the WMF look over it, but we have lots of lawyers amongst the volunteers. An important point; we musn't force the WMF lawyer into a conflict of interest In cases like this, I think it would help if the WMF lawyers would tell the community, bluntly, that they can't assist the community in the matter, with a quick overview of why they cant assist. Is that possible without putting WMF lawyers in a tight spot? -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 11:37, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: The only catch is that by filing the counter-notice you are putting your money where your mouth is and legally asserting that you have the right to post the work (so make sure that this is correct or you may end up in a lawsuit). Absolutely. If more people were to accept responsibility for these materials it would spread the risk most wonderfully. The main problem is that people edit WP on their free time as a hobby, and they do not possess large sum of money of their family budget to offer to nondeterministic amount of risk. People are not familiar with the legal process and risk, as you people said, which means they cannot measure the risk either. They most often doesn't even plan to privately pay a lawyer to tell them about it, since it's not a wee amount. So either we wait until people want to spend their private money to lawyers to define the risk and only accept mostly low risk counternotices, or to enroll to be crash test dummies. Both highly unlikely. Or we can reasonably expect them to ask for real legal advice from (or paid by) the WMF and _then_ accept the _known_ risk to file a counter-notice. I do not say we have to do that, only that I believe people won't do it any other way. Peter ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Peter Gervai grin...@gmail.com wrote: .. So either we wait until people want to spend their private money to lawyers to define the risk and only accept mostly low risk counternotices, or to enroll to be crash test dummies. Both highly unlikely. Or we can reasonably expect them to ask for real legal advice from (or paid by) the WMF and _then_ accept the _known_ risk to file a counter-notice. Another option is for a chapter to engage the lawyer.. or .. as David suggested.. On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 6:59 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: .. Yep! You want to write a first draft of a guide? I'm sure the EFF or someone like that will have something suitable to start with. .. find generic legal advice ... or ... We can't have a lawyer employed by the WMF look over it, but we have lots of lawyers amongst the volunteers. .. find a lawyer among the community who can help. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hoi, It works indeed best for logged in users. However the statistics show that the main public for particular languages is not where you expect them to be. It is good to be generous in the number of languages that we show in my opinion. Thanks, GerardM On 4 June 2010 11:18, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will be surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people can choose the languages involved. However, 'letting people choose' is only workable for regular, logged-in users. If we're talking about anonymous users, guessing is more or less our only option. It's not an easy task, but luckily we can choose to have 3 or 4 languages rather than just one, so there is some margin of error. Still - geolocation usually doesn't go beyond country level, and for some countries we already have quite a number of languages. Usually one or a few languages will be enough to give everyone something they can speak well, but if we show only those, regional languages would not be shown to anyone at all, and thus miss out on a good advertising location. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ 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] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
2010/6/4 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com Hoi, It works indeed best for logged in users. However the statistics show that the main public for particular languages is not where you expect them to be. It is good to be generous in the number of languages that we show in my opinion. Thanks, GerardM Someone said earlier in the thread that the reason the links were hidden in the first place was that they weren't clicked on often in usability studies. But weren't the studies conducted on American people to see how they would edit the English Wikipedia? When you are monolingual and are already on your native language Wikipedia there isn't really a lot of use in going to another language. For multilingual people, though, that is not true at all. So assuming that I understood the reason behind it correctly, it isn't really a valid reason to hide them at all. -- Jon Harald Søby http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
2010/6/4 Jon Harald Søby jhs...@gmail.com: When you are monolingual and are already on your native language Wikipedia there isn't really a lot of use in going to another language. What's more, when that language is the one with the largest Wikipedia, you're likely to find the most comprehensive article of any language. Pretty much every time I see a non-Anglophone Wikimedian look something up on Wikipedia, though, they look it up in their native language first, then look for a link to the same article on enwiki (where there's probably a bigger article by virtue of sheer size) or another language they speak (for regional topics; e.g. a Flemish speaker checking frwiki for information on a city in Belgium). Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 4 June 2010 13:00, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/6/4 Jon Harald Søby jhs...@gmail.com: When you are monolingual and are already on your native language Wikipedia there isn't really a lot of use in going to another language. What's more, when that language is the one with the largest Wikipedia, you're likely to find the most comprehensive article of any language. Pretty much every time I see a non-Anglophone Wikimedian look something up on Wikipedia, though, they look it up in their native language first, then look for a link to the same article on enwiki (where there's probably a bigger article by virtue of sheer size) or another language they speak (for regional topics; e.g. a Flemish speaker checking frwiki for information on a city in Belgium). Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review. I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors. -- Andrew Garrett http://werdn.us/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.orgwrote: On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review. I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors. In that case, I would also be interested to know whether the behaviour was any different on projects other than the English Wikipedia... (and whether there was any variation in the click rates based on country of origin or browser language). -- Bence Damokos ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Andrew Garrett wrote: On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review. I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors. Ah. But were they sampled percentage of *sessions* that clicked an interwiki link at least once, or just percentage of clicks from the gross amount of clicks? I think the former is significant, while the latter is much less so. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
Ray Saintonge writes: An important point; we musn't force the WMF lawyer into a conflict of interest The issue is only partly conflict of interest, and it often isn't that. It's primarily that WMF is not insured to give legal advice to community members. We run an encyclopedia, not a free legal clinic. (By comparison, when I worked for EFF, I was actually empowered to give free legal advice to people who called in for help.) It really feels good to be able to say Make my day. More of us should try it. You'll be pleased, I know, to know that I do get to say something similar quite frequently. There are plenty of bogus legal threats directed to WMF. John Vandenberg writes: In cases like this, I think it would help if the WMF lawyers would tell the community, bluntly, that they can't assist the community in the matter, with a quick overview of why they cant assist. See above. It's also no secret that we have referred community members to lawyers in the past because we could not represent or counsel those members. This is what we did with regard to NPG. Is that possible without putting WMF lawyers in a tight spot? Sometimes. Sometimes not. (The issue is not so much putting lawyers in a tight spot as it is one of making WMF more vulnerable, e.g., by revealing defense strategies.) Peter Gervai writes: Or we can reasonably expect them to ask for real legal advice from (or paid by) the WMF and _then_ accept the _known_ risk to file a counter-notice. What happens if they follow the legal advice from WMF and then face liability anyway? (This sometimes happens even when the best advice is given.) WMF is not insured against the malpractice lawsuit that community members might bring in that case. John Vandenberg writes: .. find generic legal advice ... or ... .. find a lawyer among the community who can help. There is plenty of generic legal advice about how to respond to takedown notices. A little Googling will turn up some for you. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 15:54, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: We run an encyclopedia, not a free legal clinic. (By comparison, when I worked for EFF, I was actually empowered to give free legal advice to people who called in for help.) Couldn't we then use EFF for this specific occasion? Aren't they willing? Peter Gervai writes: Or we can reasonably expect them to ask for real legal advice from (or paid by) the WMF and _then_ accept the _known_ risk to file a counter-notice. What happens if they follow the legal advice from WMF and then face liability anyway? (This sometimes happens even when the best advice is given.) I'm sure that the advice would've been detailed this possible outcome as well, weighting its probability. The problem is that average editor have close to zero knowledge about the chances; either it's 80% that you'll get sued successfully, 50% that it's gonna happen or 5% (or maybe 0%). WMF is not insured against the malpractice lawsuit that community members might bring in that case. I'm sure you have at least a dozen way to phrase your possible disclaimer. :-))) But I was mainly referred to the request to people to back up their claim with counternotices, and why this wasn't realistic. If nobody can give advice then I don't expect people to take undefined risks. And I do not expect WMF to be able to give that advice, acknowledged. We're clearly not equipped for that. Peter ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: Is that possible without putting WMF lawyers in a tight spot? Sometimes. Sometimes not. (The issue is not so much putting lawyers in a tight spot as it is one of making WMF more vulnerable, e.g., by revealing defense strategies.) Surely having a known defense strategy would beat having no defense strategy at all, which basically is the situation now. I can accept that the WMF cannot refuse take-down notices itself, because that would increase its liability not only to the current claim, but to future claims as well. But why not support the community in issuing counter-claims, by telling them that the possibility is there, and what the consequences are (both the positive one that the WMF is then likely to re-instate the material, and the negative one that the one doing the claim will be the one liable to get sued if the other party decides to do so). The situation now is that a single take down notice will have the WMF take down the material, basically saying to the community we have to do this. How do you expect people to issue counter-claims if they don't even know about the possibility of doing so? Or we can reasonably expect them to ask for real legal advice from (or paid by) the WMF and _then_ accept the _known_ risk to file a counter-notice. What happens if they follow the legal advice from WMF and then face liability anyway? (This sometimes happens even when the best advice is given.) WMF is not insured against the malpractice lawsuit that community members might bring in that case. I'm sorry, but I am getting more and more the feeling that for the board and the executive the foundation is more important than the projects. To me, this answer is an example to that. Surely, it is easy enough to put an answer in such wordings that the likelihood of losing such a suit (in the already unlikely circumstance that such a suit would actually be brought forward) are negligible. And because of the remaining minute chance that there is a minute chance that the foundation loses a non-negligible sum of money, you leave the community on its own. It's sad. The foundation exists to support the projects, not the projects to give the foundation a reason to exist. John Vandenberg writes: .. find generic legal advice ... or ... .. find a lawyer among the community who can help. There is plenty of generic legal advice about how to respond to takedown notices. A little Googling will turn up some for you. So that's the foundation's reaction? If you don't like us taking down material, just find out yourself what can be done about that - and then find out how that something is done that can be done about that? You seem to be more tightly bedded with not only valid but also invalid copyright claimers than I ever had thought possible. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 8:05 AM, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: Surely having a known defense strategy would beat having no defense strategy at all, which basically is the situation now. I'm afraid I must deny that we have no defense strategy. But why not support the community in issuing counter-claims, by telling them that the possibility is there, and what the consequences are (both the positive one that the WMF is then likely to re-instate the material, and the negative one that the one doing the claim will be the one liable to get sued if the other party decides to do so). If I were you, I would not assume that this is something WMF would never do. As has been made clear before now, we consulted with French lawyers before complying with the takedown notice in this instance, to assess how seriously to take the copyright claims. The situation now is that a single take down notice will have the WMF take down the material, basically saying to the community we have to do this. I disagree with this characterization of the situation. How do you expect people to issue counter-claims if they don't even know about the possibility of doing so? Are you saying that the possibility of responding to a DMCA (or equivalent) takedown notice has been a secret until now? My experience has been the converse -- that any copyright advocate who knows enough to track copyright dates and to post dozens or hundreds of texts to Wikisource is likely to know the basics of takedown notices and counter-claims, or is able quickly to determine on his own what can be done in response. I'm sorry, but I am getting more and more the feeling that for the board and the executive the foundation is more important than the projects. This seems disingenuous to me. You seem to be saying that all collaborative projects must provide you with legal representation and advice. I'm pretty sure the Free Software Foundation does not do this, and that Creative Commons doesn't do it either. There are organizations that do provide such services, like EFF (my former employer). It seems to me to be a mistake to try to turn the Wikimedia Foundation into another EFF, or to say that the Foundation is more important than the projects because it does not try to be EFF. To me, this answer is an example to that. Surely, it is easy enough to put an answer in such wordings that the likelihood of losing such a suit (in the already unlikely circumstance that such a suit would actually be brought forward) are negligible. The issue is not the losing of such a suit. We'd likely win it. The issue is the cost of winning it. There is plenty of generic legal advice about how to respond to takedown notices. A little Googling will turn up some for you. So that's the foundation's reaction? I'm avoiding giving you legal advice while dropping broad hints about where you can find good legal advice for free. Of course, I can't compel you to take the hint. If you don't like us taking down material, just find out yourself what can be done about that - and then find out how that something is done that can be done about that? Other Wikimedians don't seem to find this as tricky as you do. You seem to be more tightly bedded with not only valid but also invalid copyright claimers than I ever had thought possible. This seems to be an inference that is insupportable on the basis of the facts you have. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
Peter Gervai wrote: On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 15:54, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: We run an encyclopedia, not a free legal clinic. (By comparison, when I worked for EFF, I was actually empowered to give free legal advice to people who called in for help.) Couldn't we then use EFF for this specific occasion? Aren't they willing? Can I suggest this is more likely much more the cup of tea for the Chilling Effects site folks? Google, or wikipedia for them, if you aren't familiar with them yet. I very much think their site will at the very least have plenty of links you can follow, to find what you wish for. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Office action
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 1:08 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: The Right Honourable Mr Godwin: In the world outside this mailing list, the fact that I'm responding to this extent to these criticisms would itself be taken as proof of transparency, not disproof. Well yes, but after the fact. If I'm reading the criticism correctly the point being made is that within the process there might be some room for *including* the community in these actions... Personally I'm in favour of a strong legal lead to protect the community. If there's a debate to be had, I'd rather see action taken and then the discussion had afterwards as to whether we have a strong community feeling for those things to then be replaced. To do it the other way, by community consensus *first*... well, the overwhelming majority are not lawyers and even fewer will be cognisant of the laws pertaining to copyright or other issues that hit Wikipedia. So I trust Mike Godwin to protect us all and *then* be challenged on his actions whilst, in the interim, we lose the content under discussion. User:Bodnotbod ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:37 AM, Joan Goma jrg...@gmail.com wrote: Hiding interlanguage links will worse the effect of Google search on some small language projects. It makes no difference to Google. The links are only hidden with JavaScript, and Googlebot mostly doesn't use JavaScript, so it will see them just the same. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Communication
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional. I think you're wrong. Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity. The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's unthinkable you'd write to ATT and get a response from the CEO. Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they. However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate with you because they have to come to know and respect you. To illustrate; I worked on the Wikimedia Strategy website for two or three months. During that time I had a few exchanges with Philippe who is now full-time (he was a contractor, I believe, when I was interacting with him)... and I just know that if I have any deep-seated problem, something I think is important *that the community can't answer for* I can go to him. And I can say to him Hey, here's this thing. Who would you recommend I contact on this issue? However, that's on the trust that I won't pester him on any old thing that crosses my mind. It would have to be something big. And for the most part I would go to the community first, and if I felt there were a groundswell of opinion behind me I'd write to someone in the WMF and say hey, look, there's a couple hundred people here taking one side on this issue and I think someone at WMF should take a look. We cannot expect such a tiny staff to be open to all of us. You have to build out from your own opinion/idea, nurture and grow it and if it gains ground then go to the WMF. User:Bodnotbod ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh, imagine someone links you to an article on physics at ka.wikipedia. If there were a link that said English, you'd know what that meant, but if there's just a button that says ენები (Georgian for Languages), how are you going to know to click that rather than any of the other words on the page that to you probably appear little more than gibberish? (assuming you don't read Georgian - if I'm wrong, substitute it for any language that you don't know) Mark On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: You can attempt a weighted cost comparison: Num_interwiki_users * Cost_of_hiding vs Everyone_else * Cost_of_clutter. But even that will inevitably lead to bad conclusions for some issues because the costs are usually not linear things: A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand, ... because a zillion tiny benefits can often never really offset a smaller number of big costs. They can't? Why not? . . . well, I can expand on this a bit. Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as Give people access to free knowledge. This can be measured lots of different ways, of course. But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected. If we can get an extra piece of useful information to a billion people over the course of a year, why isn't that a billion times better on average than getting an extra piece of useful information to one person, for any definition of useful? If it isn't exactly a billion times, why should we believe that it's less than a billion (as you seem to suggest) rather than more? Cost-benefit analyses involving death are the same. People would like to claim that lives and money are incommensurable, say, but that's patently false. No one would advocate spending a trillion dollars to save one person's life -- if nothing else, you could save many people's lives for the same amount. Even if your only goal is to save lives in the short term, a life is worth *at most* X dollars, because you can straightforwardly exchange dollars for lives saved. In practice, X is probably less than 1,000 if you spend it right. When you deal with everyday situations, then saying lives and money are incommensurable is a good enough approximation. It doesn't work if you have lots of lives, or lots of money, or ways to exchange lives and money that don't come up in everyday situations. On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: When you enter your car and drive to your destination, you make hundreds of gestures but use only once the key, at the beginning. And it would be a mistake to omit the keyhole altogether, or to make it hard to find if you look. But there's no need to make it as obtrusive and easy to reach as the steering wheel or the pedals. Indeed, you shouldn't, because that would take away attention and space from things that are more often used. A probable scenario: people reaching wikipedia on a foreign language click just once on the correct language, then may browse hundreds of articles without changing the language again. Is this probable? What are people's reasons for using interlanguage links? How many people miss them now that they're collapsed -- among the readership as a whole, not the extremely vocal and committed editors who read foundation-l and will find them easily anyway? ___ 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] Communication
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:11 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're wrong. Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity. The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's unthinkable you'd write to ATT and get a response from the CEO. Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they. However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate with you because they have to come to know and respect you. To illustrate; I worked on the Wikimedia Strategy website for two or three months. During that time I had a few exchanges with Philippe who is now full-time (he was a contractor, I believe, when I was interacting with him)... and I just know that if I have any deep-seated problem, something I think is important *that the community can't answer for* I can go to him. And I can say to him Hey, here's this thing. Who would you recommend I contact on this issue? However, that's on the trust that I won't pester him on any old thing that crosses my mind. It would have to be something big. And for the most part I would go to the community first, and if I felt there were a groundswell of opinion behind me I'd write to someone in the WMF and say hey, look, there's a couple hundred people here taking one side on this issue and I think someone at WMF should take a look. We cannot expect such a tiny staff to be open to all of us. You have to build out from your own opinion/idea, nurture and grow it and if it gains ground then go to the WMF. User:Bodnotbod It doesn't make sense to compare the WMF to ATT. I agree that compared with large corporations nationwide, the WMF is enormously communicative and transparent. On the other hand, it is after all a corporation designed to promote and preserve a set of community developed projects; the community in this case is not a group of passive consumers, but the most essential element of the entire corporate mission. More importantly, criticism of communication is not generalized pissyness - it is prompted by specific actions of the WMF or its staff / board on the projects, and applies to imperfect or incomplete communication around those actions. When the WMF makes a decision to intervene in the projects, full and informative communication isn't just a nice-if-you-can-get-it side benefit of dealing with a small company - it's essential to maintaining the fabric of a massively participatory and cooperative endeavor. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
That's not good enough. First of all, people who don't speak a language won't recognize the text see other languages, or even languages. Could you pick the word ენები out of a page full of text in a foreign language and understand that clicking it would lead you to a link to the English version of an article? The reason your proposal to use geolocation or browser language is not good enough is that would still result in reducing the visibility of many, many Wikipedias. I think there are many users who would prefer to read articles in Catalan whose default browser language is set to ES, and geolocation will probably not solve that problem either. I think it is a mistake to hide ANY interwikis. clutter is not a huge sacrifice for people to make to vastly increase INTERNATIONAL usability. M. On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a see other languages link which would expand to give all the other langauages. We're also looking at changing the word Languages into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do. I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links Howie On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote: It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this. My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects. In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement. The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the internal experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Funghfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org ___ 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] Communication
Bod Notbod wrote: On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional. I think you're wrong. To paraphrase a common bromide in Finnish, I think he is right, wrong, and grand-daddys long-johns. Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity. The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's unthinkable you'd write to ATT and get a response from the CEO. Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they. I think the big issue is that communication goes upwards, downwards, and laterally, and those are three issues that correctly shouldn't be mixed up, when examining how well we as a whole are doing in the field of internal communication. However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate with you because they have to come to know and respect you. Absolutely true, but when the information is going downstream, there have been instances where there hasn't been a clear presumption that people in the various communities themselves know what they are doing, as a default, taken as a whole. I genuinely think this is just a learning curve people who have come from more traditional top-down organizations have to pass through; and I have seen very encouraging signs that the staff can learn new tricks, and are gradually getting it. The big unadressed problem is lateral communication between particular organs. Top-down and bottom-up communication are things that generally tend to have a dynamic that is self-correcting (though sometimes drama-filled). But communication between parts that are nominally on the same level, is not so easily fixed. Chapters are organizing as a conduit for such communication between languages -- though it has to be said at a snails pace, and in fits and starts. On the foundation top level we all know that there is on-going work on how to optimize the advisory committees usefulness. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
On 6/4/10 3:41 AM, Peter Gervai wrote: Or we can reasonably expect them to ask for real legal advice from (or paid by) the WMF and_then_ accept the_known_ risk to file a counter-notice. The Wikimedia Foundation cannot simultaneously act as an impartial (and therefore non-liable) host and as legal council for one of the parties. John's suggestion is good advice - seek legal council from among the community. In the meantime, I'll try to put together a quick guide for filing counter-notices with the Foundation when I get some free time. Ryan Kaldari ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Mark Williamson wrote: That's not good enough. First of all, people who don't speak a language won't recognize the text see other languages, or even languages. Could you pick the word ენები out of a page full of text in a foreign language and understand that clicking it would lead you to a link to the English version of an article? Very well said. Indeed, the interwiki links are pointedly presented in the relevant languages/scripts, and the readers for whom they're most useful are among the least likely to comprehend the label under which they've been hidden. The reason your proposal to use geolocation or browser language is not good enough is that would still result in reducing the visibility of many, many Wikipedias. I think there are many users who would prefer to read articles in Catalan whose default browser language is set to ES, and geolocation will probably not solve that problem either. It appears that the idea's ramifications haven't been fully considered (in part because it's difficult for speakers of one language to appreciate the needs of another language's speakers). I think it is a mistake to hide ANY interwikis. clutter is not a huge sacrifice for people to make to vastly increase INTERNATIONAL usability. Furthermore, I don't recall _ever_ encountering a complaint about this so-called clutter. But I certainly have seen numerous complaints about the interwiki links' sudden removal (as many have perceived the change). Perhaps a suitable compromise can be devised, but in the meantime, the only appropriate solution is to display the interwiki links by default. It's unfortunate that this fix was reverted, let alone in the name of usability. David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 4 June 2010 19:58, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps a suitable compromise can be devised, but in the meantime, the only appropriate solution is to display the interwiki links by default. It's unfortunate that this fix was reverted, let alone in the name of usability. Indeed. Could someone please answer: * What was the precise usability penalty of the interlanguage links being visibie by default? * What are the numbers behind this decision? And, most importantly, and the key question which people have been iteratively trying to find the answer to: * What would it take for the Foundation to agree to the interlanguage links being made visible by default once more? I hope the usability team can answer the above questions with as much detail as possible. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Communication
Nathan writes: When the WMF makes a decision to intervene in the projects, full and informative communication isn't just a nice-if-you-can-get-it side benefit of dealing with a small company - it's essential to maintaining the fabric of a massively participatory and cooperative endeavor. I think if you look at what we did with regard to the Gallimard takedowns -- 1) Consulting with French legal experts before taking any action 2) Compelling Gallimard to narrow and specify their takedown demands 3) Enlisting community members to implement the takedowns 4) Including (though not required to do so) contact and identifying information for Gallimard 5) Providing a complete list of what Gallimard demanded to be taken down -- you see both a high degree of deliberation on our part (we didn't simply jump to comply) and an effort to make clear to the community what we were doing and why, and to involve the community, even at the same point in time at which we followed through on the takedown demands. You may remember than Yann originally asserted some kind of double standard (maybe that we're more afraid of French publishers than of British museums?), and Andre suggested that we simply (and fearfully) comply with facially invalid takedown requests. Neither notion is true. Somehow those notions didn't exactly feel cooperative. I think it's essential to maintaining the fabric of a massively participatory and cooperative endeavor that one first give some attention to the full facts of how we responded, rather than jumping to (negative) conclusions about our motivations and interests. My view is that, to the extent possible, I want to minimize the exposure of community members to legal risk even as I'm doing the same for the Foundation. Partly this means adhering to the framework of the applicable laws, including copyright laws -- so, yes, we will normally comply with a formally correct takedown notice, just as we will comply with a formally correct put up demand. We'll also help targeted community members find independent legal counsel when we can, and we'll support chapters that seek to provide professional legal advice to the community as well. We do generally have to obey the rules, however, and we didn't create them. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Wow, we get it. *No one* likes the hidden interwiki language link. Bottom line, the only people who may be annoyed(though I doubt really any are, and this was rather a decision to simply neaten the overall look of the en site) by the long list of languages are the regular users! Those people who can afford to hide it because they are familiar with WP in general. When I first started using WP, it was one of the LAST things I noticed about the surrounding links/tools; imagine if it were hidden Enough about supposed numbers and statistics, it just needs to be fixed. SOLUTION (as said by many before me) default: show interwiki language one click (if so desired by user/ip address): hidden ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: Aryeh, imagine someone links you to an article on physics at ka.wikipedia. Why would anyone link me to an article on ka.wikipedia? That's not a reasonable thing to imagine. I don't think I know anyone who speaks Georgian, and if I do, they wouldn't have any reason to link me to an article in Georgian. If they did, I'd probably use Google Translate. There are obviously going to be some cases where users wind up at a wiki they don't understand, for some strange reason. In such a case, having a pre-expanded language list is obviously useful. Even if they could figure out what other languages means, it's much harder to spot when collapsed. The question is whether the significant utility to this small group outweighs the slight disutility to a much larger group. On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 2:58 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Furthermore, I don't recall _ever_ encountering a complaint about this so-called clutter. But I certainly have seen numerous complaints about the interwiki links' sudden removal (as many have perceived the change). Of course. Users don't explicitly complain about small things. They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things. But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users. Basing development decisions on who complains the loudest is what results in software packed with tons of useless and confusing features and lousy UI. Like most open-source software, including MediaWiki. Good design requires systematic analysis, ignoring user complaints if the evidence indicates they're not representative. Now, mind you, I don't necessary support getting rid of the interlanguage links. I'm mostly objecting to the reasoning being brought forward for that point, which seems to be mostly: * Some unknown number of users might somehow end up at a wiki they don't understand and not be able to find the wiki they really want. Maybe. Except we have no data to suggest that this happens with non-negligible frequency. The evidence apparently indicates that few people use the interlanguage links. * Lots of people have complained, therefore it must be a bad change. * Interface clutter isn't important anyway. The last two arguments are completely wrongheaded. The first might or might not have merit -- but no one has even attempted to propose what evidence we could gather to check it (I think). Most of the people making the first argument seem to assume without question that there *must* be a lot of people using the interlanguage links for this, or at least a significant number. This is not the way to conduct an informed discussion. In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Communication
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: I think if you look at what we did with regard to the Gallimard takedowns -- 1) Consulting with French legal experts before taking any action 2) Compelling Gallimard to narrow and specify their takedown demands 3) Enlisting community members to implement the takedowns 4) Including (though not required to do so) contact and identifying information for Gallimard 5) Providing a complete list of what Gallimard demanded to be taken down -- you see both a high degree of deliberation on our part (we didn't simply jump to comply) and an effort to make clear to the community what we were doing and why, and to involve the community, even at the same point in time at which we followed through on the takedown demands. You may remember than Yann originally asserted some kind of double standard (maybe that we're more afraid of French publishers than of British museums?), and Andre suggested that we simply (and fearfully) comply with facially invalid takedown requests. Neither notion is true. Somehow those notions didn't exactly feel cooperative. I think it's essential to maintaining the fabric of a massively participatory and cooperative endeavor that one first give some attention to the full facts of how we responded, rather than jumping to (negative) conclusions about our motivations and interests. My view is that, to the extent possible, I want to minimize the exposure of community members to legal risk even as I'm doing the same for the Foundation. Partly this means adhering to the framework of the applicable laws, including copyright laws -- so, yes, we will normally comply with a formally correct takedown notice, just as we will comply with a formally correct put up demand. We'll also help targeted community members find independent legal counsel when we can, and we'll support chapters that seek to provide professional legal advice to the community as well. We do generally have to obey the rules, however, and we didn't create them. --Mike At this point I'm familiar with what the Foundation did and did not do in this particular instance; while my note mentioned that the complaints about communication directed towards the WMF were usually prompted by specific instances, my point about the general responsibility of the WMF to communicate fully is just that - a general point, and not an implied restatement of Yann's complaint. On the other hand, while no one can say that the Foundation did not attempt to inform the French Wikisource community at all, the steps you did take are still open to some criticism and suggestions for improvement. Cary posted a very brief summary of the rationale for the takedown notice, Gallimard's name and contact information, and a list of content deleted. He did not describe the Foundation's effort to limit the scope of the demand, or its contact with French counsel (which was described later, on the talk page, in the form of a copy of an e-mail from you mentioning Hugot Avocats), nor was any effort made to inform project participants how they could contest or counter Gallimard's demands. You can argue, and have argued, that participants should know this already or can easily discover the relevant information with some digging. But why not spare them the effort? It's fully possible that the folks most interested in the specific content are no longer paying close attention, or will be discouraged enough to just give up. Is posting a link to a useful description of put-up procedures really a liability for the WMF? The idea here is that some communication is not necessarily ideal communication, and we can acknowledge that an effort was made while still asking for just a little bit more. -- Your donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation today: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 3:39 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.comsimetrical%2bwikil...@gmail.com wrote: In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe. It isn't a bad argument, I know I consider it a good one, but the biggest problem I see at the moment is that I don't think normal users have any IDEA that they are hidden over there. I have yet to meet a reader who realizes that. I said earlier that I had had 5 people ask me why we got rid of the language links. I've had 2 more ask since then ask and 2 of the original 5 call me up and ask me to explain where the button was to show the languages because even after I told them it was there they couldn't find it. I would love to see a survey that asked readers if they saw them but I don't know exactly how you could word it. Obviously I'm someone who wants them there (for many reasons, the international component not a small one among them) and so am bias about it but I just don't see the argument that having them there causes to many issues. I also don't totally understand the the user just has to click once and then they're set argument. I've found that even as a user who is wandering around logged in I find myself having to click to open up the language links several times a day. I keep forgetting to throw something into my global.js so that it isn't an issue for me personally but :/ James Alexander james.alexan...@rochester.edu jameso...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Communication
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: You can argue, and have argued, that participants should know this already or can easily discover the relevant information with some digging. But why not spare them the effort? It's fully possible that the folks most interested in the specific content are no longer paying close attention, or will be discouraged enough to just give up. Is posting a link to a useful description of put-up procedures really a liability for the WMF? I see nothing preventing the community from adopting a template including information about put-up procedures. If the community were to do this, it would not create liability for WMF. I believe David Gerard has suggested something similar. The idea here is that some communication is not necessarily ideal communication, and we can acknowledge that an effort was made while still asking for just a little bit more. I'm pleased, of course, that a few people do acknowledge that the effort was made. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:39 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.comsimetrical%2bwikil...@gmail.com wrote: Why would anyone link me to an article on ka.wikipedia? That's not a reasonable thing to imagine. I don't think I know anyone who speaks Georgian, and if I do, they wouldn't have any reason to link me to an article in Georgian. If they did, I'd probably use Google Translate. Just to illustrate this possibility: If I search for Fizika Wikipédia (Physics Wikipedia in Hungarian) the third result from the top is the Kikongo Wikipedia article - and there are other cases where Google offers Wikipedia results in unexpected languages especially if the search term's language and the Google interface language mismatches or if accent marks are ignored. Best regards, Bence ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh Gregor wrote: Users don't explicitly complain about small things. At the English Wikipedia, this is not so. If we had a bike shed, there would be daily complaints about its color. They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things. I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter. But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users. I realize that, and I once had a high-profile edit reverted because a tiny number of users (out of a very large number affected) complained. However, assuming that the interwiki links benefit a relatively small percentage of users (still a non-negligible number in absolute terms), I've yet to see evidence that displaying them by default is problematic. Like David Gerard, I desire access to the data behind this decision. David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Communication
Hello, 2010/6/5 Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com: Nathan writes: When the WMF makes a decision to intervene in the projects, full and informative communication isn't just a nice-if-you-can-get-it side benefit of dealing with a small company - it's essential to maintaining the fabric of a massively participatory and cooperative endeavor. I think if you look at what we did with regard to the Gallimard takedowns -- 1) Consulting with French legal experts before taking any action 2) Compelling Gallimard to narrow and specify their takedown demands 3) Enlisting community members to implement the takedowns Yes, but the community was only informed _after_ the texts were deleted. What's surprising to me, and most members of French Wikisource, is that some of the deleted pages are in the public domain in France (works by Jean de La Ville de Mirmont and Charles Péguy, who both died in 1914, so their works became public domain in October 2009). If actually you contacted the community _before_ deleting these pages, you could have informed Gallimard about that, and avoid deleting them. We still don't understand how the French lawyers made this mistake. Did you know that some of the deleted pages were in the public domain in France? Do you understand that is what led us to think that the decision was not well informed? (...) --Mike Regards, Yann ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Texts deleted on French Wikisource
Peter Gervai wrote: On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 11:37, Ray Saintonge wrote: The only catch is that by filing the counter-notice you are putting your money where your mouth is and legally asserting that you have the right to post the work (so make sure that this is correct or you may end up in a lawsuit). Absolutely. If more people were to accept responsibility for these materials it would spread the risk most wonderfully. The main problem is that people edit WP on their free time as a hobby, and they do not possess large sum of money of their family budget to offer to nondeterministic amount of risk. People are not familiar with the legal process and risk, as you people said, which means they cannot measure the risk either. They most often doesn't even plan to privately pay a lawyer to tell them about it, since it's not a wee amount. The procedure for putting up a counter-notice is very simple, and costs nothing ... unless you send it by snail-mail and have the cost of a stamp. There have already been excellent suggestions to describe the process in an article on Meta. A person who is seriously considering a counter-notice will probably have given some consideration to his chances of success, more so than with an original posting of the material to the site. Personally, it would not bother me to post questionable material just to flush out the rights owner of a possibly orphan work. If the owner issues a takedown order you know he exists, and publishing the order insures that that information becomes public whether or not you take the matter any further. The level of risk will vary with each individual work being considered. Compared to speaking on your cell phone while driving there isn't much risk at all, and even the highest degree of risk is not likely to be fatal. The permutations of what can happen are endless. If you are in country A issuing a counter-notice regarding a rights claimant in country B granting jurisdiction to a United States court over a site in the US when neither of you are there what's the likelihood that it will ever really get to court? It's going to cost the rights claimant too to go to court. How much is he going to want to invest in time, money and travel to prosecute his case when winning is highly uncertain? He has to pay his money before you do just to get a case filed. I believe that it's much easier to be a defendant than a plaintiff in such cases. If it gets this far, then what? You could play to win, and maybe get your costs covered if the judge deems the case bogus. You might even get pro bono legal help, or be able to get people to help your defence because they believe in your cause. (If you get more than it cost you, the ethical thing might be to give the excess to the cause. :-) ) Another possibility is that you might concede the case and the plaintiff would get a default judgement. That could result in an order of the court to take down the material, which only puts us back to where we were before you filed the counter-claim. The court could award damages but there are limitations here too. Then, what do they do to collect that money when you aren't even in the United States? In other words most of the difficulties that can be encountered tend to favour the defendant. You can't depend on the lawyer to evaluate your risk. If he evaluates wrongly you are still the one to pay. Unless you do something abominably stupid the risks will be low, and there are plenty of Wikimedians available that will always be more than willing to tell you when you are being stupid. If you still don't believe that the risk is low, you might as well keep talking on the phone while driving. So either we wait until people want to spend their private money to lawyers to define the risk and only accept mostly low risk counternotices, or to enroll to be crash test dummies. Both highly unlikely. That you will accept to file low-risk counternotices shows a glimmer of hope. Or we can reasonably expect them to ask for real legal advice from (or paid by) the WMF and _then_ accept the _known_ risk to file a counter-notice. My willingness to accept the WMF as my nanny is on a par with my willingness to accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour. I do not say we have to do that, only that I believe people won't do it any other way. Yes, that fairly represents a very sad state of affairs. Ray ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh Gregor wrote: Now, mind you, I don't necessary support getting rid of the interlanguage links. I'm mostly objecting to the reasoning being brought forward for that point, which seems to be mostly: * Some unknown number of users might somehow end up at a wiki they don't understand and not be able to find the wiki they really want. Maybe. Except we have no data to suggest that this happens with non-negligible frequency. The evidence apparently indicates that few people use the interlanguage links. * Lots of people have complained, therefore it must be a bad change. * Interface clutter isn't important anyway. The last two arguments are completely wrongheaded. The first might or might not have merit -- but no one has even attempted to propose what evidence we could gather to check it (I think). Most of the people making the first argument seem to assume without question that there *must* be a lot of people using the interlanguage links for this, or at least a significant number. This is not the way to conduct an informed discussion. It was requested somewhere on this thread to publish the data of the interwiki usage before CollapsibleNav and after. The difference should give an estimate of people which would have used it but was unable to find it out (as opposed to those who found it but needed an extra click for that). Since I was asked how would I search now? when showing the new look, I can understand that people don't find the interwikis, which are less prominent than the search bar! How many? I don't have enough data. I consider James and Casey reports quite important, since they will be people actually reaching us, which reports are a tiny percentage of affected people (even from the community, but specially from the large mass). In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe. That's an interesting point. I was also wondering how it related to the accuracy perception. A fluent wikipedian probably consider an topic better (or improvable) if it has many interwikis. Or many FAs. As opposed to an interwikiless article, which is deemed of poor quality. These are probably automatisms we aren't aware of, so I don't see how it could be measured. Gregory wrote: Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? Add me to the list of people which hover the interwikis to find out a translation. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
The Usability team discussed this issue at length this afternoon. We listened closely to the feedback and have come up with solution which we hope will work for everyone. It's not a perfect solution, but we think it's a reasonable compromise. First, some background on the problem we're addressing and the design principle that we used. Every situation is unique, but in the case of the interwikilinks, we believe the sheer number of language links, especially within the context of an information-heavy page, makes users numb to the list. When people see large collections of things, they tend to group them all together as one object and not identify the individual parts that make the whole. As the number of items in the list decreases the likelihood of a person identifying the individual items increases. This is similar to how viewing a traffic jam appears as a long line of generic vehicles, while seeing just a few cars driving down the road might be comprehended in more granular detail (a motorcycle, a truck and a sports car). While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data. Regarding the data behind the decision. First, let me apologize for the tardiness. The engineer who implemented the clicktracking of the left nav recently returned from vacation, so you can probably imagine how things might be a little difficult to find after being away for a while. Please see [1] for more details, but a quick summary is that we measured the click behavior for two groups of English Wikipedia users, Monobook and Vector (Vector users are primarily those who participated in the beta). Of Monobook and Vector users, 0.95% and 0.28% clicked on the language links (out of 126,180 and 180,873 total clicks), respectively. We felt that fewer than 1% of Monobook clicks was a reasonable threshold for hiding the Language links, especially when taken in the context of the above design principle and the implementation (state persists after expanding). We do, however, recognize the concern that was voiced by a number of our community members. When the language links are in a collapsed state however, there is not enough information to explain what the list will be if you were to expand it. In all likelihood, we won't be able to get the verbiage to the point where it's sufficiently descriptive of the inter-language links. A list of languages is probably more effective as it *shows* the user that there are other languages available (rather than *telling* the user via a Language, In other languages etc. link). However, exposing all of the languages can potentially be just as ineffectual as showing none of them. A more effective approach would be to balance the two, by showing just enough links to clearly illustrate the meaning of the list. So our proposal is to show a list of, say, 5 languages with a more link. We think that a list of 5 languages should be sufficient to communicate to the user that there are other language versions available. If the language they want is not on the list, they may click more to see the full list. There are numerous ways we can populate the list of 5. The simplest way is to populate based on the current order, but we can also do it based on size of the wiki, browser language, geo IP, etc. Our proposal is to go with something simple for now, and then continue to explore options for greater customization. We hope this compromise addresses the most pressing concerns that have been raised. I will update the page on the usability wiki with the above information [2]. Please direct discussion/feedback to that page. Thank you for your input. Howie, on behalf of the User Experience Team at WMF [1] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Left_Nav_Click_Data [2] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links On 6/4/10 3:21 PM, Platonides wrote: Aryeh Gregor wrote: Now, mind you, I don't necessary support getting rid of the interlanguage links. I'm mostly objecting to the reasoning being brought forward for that point, which seems to be mostly: * Some unknown number of users might somehow end up at a wiki they don't understand and not be able to find the wiki they really want. Maybe. Except we have no data to suggest that this happens with non-negligible frequency. The evidence apparently indicates that few people use the interlanguage links. * Lots of people have complained, therefore it must be a bad change. * Interface clutter isn't important anyway. The last two arguments are completely wrongheaded. The first might or might not have merit -- but no one has even attempted to propose what evidence we could gather to check it (I think). Most of the people making the first argument
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
A minimalist design is a good goal to strive for. As many people do mot use them, it may be a good cleanup of the interface. Howver, for its afficionados the developers might create an option in the user preferences to show all interwiki links directly instead of hiding them. Personally I find them very useful when i got to translate things, much better then wiktionary, both by the size of the wikis and by the accompanying text which helps sorting out any homonym problems. On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 2:55 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 5 June 2010 01:03, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: First, some background on the problem we're addressing and the design principle that we used. Every situation is unique, but in the case of the interwikilinks, we believe the sheer number of language links, especially within the context of an information-heavy page, makes users numb to the list. When people see large collections of things, they tend to group them all together as one object and not identify the individual parts that make the whole. We believe = no data, then? In a list of language links, people will immediately notice the one that they can read: their own language, i.e. the one they're looking for. While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data. You've just said it was on judgement and *not at all* on any data. Thank you for your input. This is implemented in each wiki's [[MediaWiki:vector.css]]. As such, if a wiki votes to reverse this interface change, and your proposed compromise solution - will they be able to do so, or will the Foundation impose the change upon them regardless? i.e., is this content control by the WMF? I ask based on the preremptory tone used by Trevor Parscal in reverting the original change. - d. ___ 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] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Howie, Thanks for your detailed message. I appreciate your efforts of trying to listen to the feedback from the community. However, even after listening to the discussion in the office today, and after reading your message, I still fail to understand the logic behind these decisions. I'm going to try and summarize your paragraphs into a few sentences; please tell me if I got something wrong In a paragraph, you explain it is your belief that in Monobook, the long list of languages made it difficult for the user to identify this area as a list of languages. In the following paragraph, you say you tracked the clicks in the sidebar in Monobook, and found that less than 1% of users clicked on a language link. You then explain you hid the list of languages because this number showed it wasn't used. Perhaps I'm just beating a dead horse, but, looking at these two arguments, a fairly reasonable hypothesis to make is that users don't click on the languages links *because* they don't realize it's there. A fairly reasonable design decision would be to try and make it more discoverable, and you could measure the impact easily by seeing if more users click on the language links. Instead, you chose to hide the list completely. I still fail to see how this decision could be an attempt at fixing the issue you had discovered. Maybe users don't think of a traffic jam as a list of cars. But showing an empty road hardly makes things better. -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] http://www.gpaumier.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
[replying here and at http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion_Language_Links] Howie Fung wrote: First, some background on the problem we're addressing and the design principle that we used. Every situation is unique, but in the case of the interwikilinks, we believe the sheer number of language links, especially within the context of an information-heavy page, makes users numb to the list. I regard this as an unreasonable assumption. In my experience/observation, readers saw the links and recognized them as a list of articles in various languages. Most didn't wish to view such articles, so they paid no further attention to the list until such time as they did. (No harm done.) Meanwhile, users wishing to view articles in other languages (a small percentage, but a large number in absolute terms) knew exactly where to look. To equate this unusual type of list with large blocks of text in general (without any data to demonstrate the principle's applicability) is to completely ignore context. When people see large collections of things, they tend to group them all together as one object and not identify the individual parts that make the whole. As the number of items in the list decreases the likelihood of a person identifying the individual items increases. This is similar to how viewing a traffic jam appears as a long line of generic vehicles, while seeing just a few cars driving down the road might be comprehended in more granular detail (a motorcycle, a truck and a sports car). This analogy fails to consider a very important distinction. Unlike the motor vehicles, one (or a small number) of the links on the list are meaningfully different from the user's perspective. To a reader of Japanese, the 日本語 link stands out in much the same way that an ice cream van would stand out in the aforementioned traffic jam. The other links, being foreign to this particular user, do not compete for attention (and therefore are less of a distraction than the random cars surrounding the ice cream van are). While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data. Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were used relatively infrequently. Apparently, there is absolutely no data suggesting that the full list's display posed a problem. Rather, this is a hunch based upon the application of a general design principle whose relevance has not been established. Aryeh Gregor: You cited the importance of data (and the systematic analysis thereof). In light of this explanation, what is your opinion now? A more effective approach would be to balance the two, by showing just enough links to clearly illustrate the meaning of the list. So our proposal is to show a list of, say, 5 languages with a more link. We think that a list of 5 languages should be sufficient to communicate to the user that there are other language versions available. If the language they want is not on the list, they may click more to see the full list. If the language that the user seeks is not visible, why do you assume that he/she will recognize the list's nature? Imagine seeing the following on a page full of similarly unintelligible text: Ectbadi Feskanalic Ibsterglit Kreviodeil Tionevere Straknaj 6 tak Would you recognize the first five items as languages and the last as Show 6 more? Compare the above to this: Bacruhy Ectbadi English Feskanalic Ibsterglit Kreviodeil Nuprevnu Ootredi Rozlovatom Tionevere Zidentranou And keep in mind that the above allows for the use of Ctrl-F to find English on the page. There are numerous ways we can populate the list of 5. The simplest way is to populate based on the current order, but we can also do it based on size of the wiki, browser language, geo IP, etc. Browser language and location detection are the best of the above options, but they're far from flawless. It's been explained that there are reasons for speakers of some languages to set their browsers to other languages. Location detection is not entirely reliable and only enables en educated guess as to the language that someone speaks. To me, all of this comes across as a manufactured problem in search of a solution (while the initial change was a solution in search of a problem). Our proposal is to go with something simple for now, and then continue to explore options for greater customization. Or you could simply restore the one-line code modification that provided the default behavior requested by the community (pending evidence that an alternative setup is beneficial). David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
