[Wikimedia-l] wikifunctions.org is gradually rolling out (with caveats)

[Denny Vrandečić]

Hello everybody,

we are pleased to announce that Wikifunctions is up and running at
http://www.wikifunctions.org/

After a few days in read-only, the website now has some limited
functionality for you to try out. Thank you to everyone who helped deploy
our first new Wikimedia project in over 12 years!

All logged-in users are able to create and edit talk pages, project pages,
help pages, call functions, etc. Only contributors with a special role will
be able to edit Objects in Wikifunctions (i.e. creating and maintaining
Functions, Tests, Implementations, etc.), for the first few weeks.

We set up a page on Wikifunctions where contributors can request this role
[1] - this will be assigned slowly at first, and ramped-up soon after, if
all goes well. The reason for this gradual roll-out is to decrease the
chance that things break too badly.

There are introductory details about the project in our latest Newsletter,
also available on the Diff blog:
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2023-08-07

* https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/08/07/wikifunctions-is-starting-up/

Please be aware that there might be minor and major bugs and/or missing
documentation, so please join the Project chat page to let us know about
any problems you find.

If you'd like to help, we are particularly looking for people who can help
with translations on translatewiki.net. [2] That would be awesome!

Enjoy editing!

[1] https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Apply_for_editing
[2] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:Translate/ext-wikilambda
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: ChatGPT as a reliable source

[Denny Vrandečić]

I think Jimmy's proposal is spot on.

A generative AI is a tool, and whoever makes the edit is fully responsible
for the edit, no matter whether the text was written by the person or with
the help of a generative tool. This has the potential to open us for people
who are not good at formulating, or who are not confident about their
writing. As long as they completely take responsibility for the written
text, all is fine.

This is similar to the approach the ACM has taken for AI generated text.
They decided that a generative model cannot be a co-author as it lacks the
ability to be morally responsible for the text. Second, anything that you
publish under your name is your responsibility.


On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 11:11 AM Todd Allen  wrote:

> Though, this does run the risk of encouraging people to take the
> "backwards" approach to writing an article--writing some stuff, and then
> (hopefully at least) trying to come up with sources for it.
>
> The much superior approach is to locate the available sources first, and
> then to develop the article based upon what those sources say.
>
> Todd
>
> On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 12:06 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
>>
>> First: Wikipedia style for dense inline citations is one of the most
>> granular and articulate around, so we're pushing the boundaries in some
>> cases of research norms for clarity in sourcing.  That's great; also means
>> sometimes we are considering nuances that may be new.
>>
>> Second: We're approaching a topic close to my heart, which is
>> distinguishing reference-sources from process-sources.  Right now we often
>> capture process sources (for an edit) in the edit summary, and this is not
>> visible anywhere on the resulting article.  Translations via a translate
>> tool; updates by a script that does a particular class of work (like
>> spelling or grammer checking); applying a detailed diff that was
>> workshopped on some other page.  An even better interface might allow for
>> that detail to be visible to readers of the article [w/o traversing the
>> edit history], and linked to the sections/paragraphs/sentences affected.
>>
>> I think any generative tools used to rewrite a section or article, or to
>> produce a sibling version for a different reading-level, or to generate a
>> timeline or other visualization that is then embedded in the article,
>> should all be cited somehow.  To Jimbo's point, that doesn't belong in a
>> References section as we currently have them.  But I'd like to see us
>> develop a way to capture these process notes in a more legible way, so
>> readers can discover them without browsing the revision history.
>>
>> People using generative tools to draft new material should find reliable
>> sources for every claim in that material, much more densely than you would
>> when summarizing a series of sources yourself.
>> However, as we approach models that can discover sources and check facts,
>> a combination of those with current generative tools could produce things
>> closer to what we'd consider acceptable drafts, and at scale could generate
>> reference works in languages that lack them.  I suggest a separate project
>> for those as the best way to explore the implications of being able to do
>> this at scale, and should capture the full model/tuning/prompt details of
>> how each edit was generated.  Such an automatically-updated resource would
>> not be a good reliable source, just as we avoid citing any tertiary
>> sources, but could be a research tool for WP editors and modelers alike.
>>
>> SJ
>>
>> On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 9:27 AM Jimmy Wales 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> One way I think we can approach this is to think of it as being the
>>> latest in this progression:
>>>
>>> spellchecker -> grammar checker -> text generation support
>>>
>>> We wouldn't have any sort of footnote or indication of any kind that a
>>> spellchecker or grammar checker was
>>> used by an editor, it's just built-in to many writing tools.  Similarly,
>>> if writing a short prompt to generate a longer
>>> text is used, then we have no reason to cite that.
>>>
>>> What we do have, though, is a responsibility to check the output.
>>> Spellcheckers can be wrong (suggesting the correct
>>> spelling of the wrong word for example).  Grammar checkers can be wrong
>>> (trying to correct the grammar of a direct quote
>>> for example).  Generative AI models can be wrong - often simply making
>>> things up out of thin air that sound plausible.
>>>
>>> If someone uses a generative AI to help them write some text, that's not
>>> a big deal.  If they upload text without checking
>>> the facts and citing a real source, that's very bad.
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2023-05-17 11:51, The Cunctator wrote:
>>>
>>> Again at no point should even an improved version be considered a
>>> source; at best it would be a research or editing tool.
>>>
>>> On Wed, May 17, 2023, 4:40 AM Lane Chance  wrote:
>>>
 Keep in mind how fast these tools change. ChatGPT, Bard and
 competitors understa

[Wikimedia-l] Re: [Marketing Mail] Re: License for Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

inst more powerful media who sought to limit the possibilities of
> people around the world to build knowledge products together. Today, the
> fight is a new one, and Wikipedia must adapt in order to survive.
>
>
>
> "Sitting back and allowing platform companies to ingest Wikipedia’s
> knowledge and represent it as the incontrovertible truth rather than the
> messy and variable truths it actually depicts is an injustice. It is an
> injustice not only for Wikipedians but also for people around the world who
> use the resource — either directly on Wikimedia servers or indirectly via
> other platforms like search."
>
>
>
> ---o0o---
>
>
>
> There is a lot at stake in this discussion.
>
>
>
> Andreas
>
>
>
>
>
> [1] https://hfordsa.medium.com/rise-of-the-underdog-92565503e4af
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 9:25 PM Denny Vrandečić 
> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> Here is a conversation and decision we need to have before launch of
> Wikifunctions:
>
> *How should the contents of Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions be
> licensed?*
>
> Since the discussion is expected to be potentially complicated, let us
> keep a single place of record for discussing this question:
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing_discussion
>
> We would like the discussion to go on for four weeks and that we have some
> form of consensus by December 20th. This is not planned to be a vote
> (although it might have votes in it and it might even be closed by a vote
> in case no other form of consensus finding works out).
>
> I hope to see you all on wiki!
> Denny
>
>
>
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[Wikimedia-l] License for Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Hello all,

Here is a conversation and decision we need to have before launch of
Wikifunctions:

*How should the contents of Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions be
licensed?*

Since the discussion is expected to be potentially complicated, let us keep
a single place of record for discussing this question:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing_discussion

We would like the discussion to go on for four weeks and that we have some
form of consensus by December 20th. This is not planned to be a vote
(although it might have votes in it and it might even be closed by a vote
in case no other form of consensus finding works out).

I hope to see you all on wiki!
Denny
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees new resolution on branding

[Denny Vrandečić]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2021 at 2:35 AM Andy Mabbett 
wrote:

> Can they not do that already?
>

They already may.

This resolution by the Board directs the Foundation to offer support for
this task to the affiliates.
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: (How) can I see the early revision history?

[Denny Vrandečić]

Awesome, thank you! I checked the WayBack machine, but must have done it
wrong.

Thank you Brewster!

And thanks Benjamin,
Denny


On Thu, Oct 7, 2021 at 6:18 PM Benjamin Ikuta 
wrote:

>
>
> Looks like it's in the WayBack Machine:
>
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20110614170356/http://noc.wikimedia.org/~tstarling/wikipedia-logs-2001-08-17.7z
>
> But it would still be nice to know that the archives are still maintained
> by Wikimedia though.
>
>
>
> On Oct 7, 2021, at 8:58 PM, Denny Vrandečić 
> wrote:
>
> Or even better, if there is a Web accessible version of these early edits.
>
> On Thu, Oct 7, 2021 at 5:57 PM Denny Vrandečić 
> wrote:
>
>> I wanted to see the beginning of the article about Jupiter.
>>
>> When I go to Jupiter's revision history and click on oldest, I get here:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jupiter&dir=prev&action=history
>>
>>
>> which takes me to the revision as of November 5, 2001:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jupiter&oldid=332461507
>>
>> Given that the the article at this point doesn't look like this were the
>> original edition, I expect more history to be in the UseMod archives.
>>
>> I remembered Tim Starling announced a few years ago that he found a few
>> old archives:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia%27s_oldest_articles
>>
>>
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063088.html
>>
>> Unfortunately, that link has gone stale.
>>
>> Does anyone know where these archives are?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Denny
>>
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: (How) can I see the early revision history?

[Denny Vrandečić]

Or even better, if there is a Web accessible version of these early edits.

On Thu, Oct 7, 2021 at 5:57 PM Denny Vrandečić 
wrote:

> I wanted to see the beginning of the article about Jupiter.
>
> When I go to Jupiter's revision history and click on oldest, I get here:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jupiter&dir=prev&action=history
>
>
> which takes me to the revision as of November 5, 2001:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jupiter&oldid=332461507
>
> Given that the the article at this point doesn't look like this were the
> original edition, I expect more history to be in the UseMod archives.
>
> I remembered Tim Starling announced a few years ago that he found a few
> old archives:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia%27s_oldest_articles
>
>
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063088.html
>
> Unfortunately, that link has gone stale.
>
> Does anyone know where these archives are?
>
> Cheers,
> Denny
>
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[Wikimedia-l] (How) can I see the early revision history?

[Denny Vrandečić]

I wanted to see the beginning of the article about Jupiter.

When I go to Jupiter's revision history and click on oldest, I get here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jupiter&dir=prev&action=history

which takes me to the revision as of November 5, 2001:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jupiter&oldid=332461507

Given that the the article at this point doesn't look like this were the
original edition, I expect more history to be in the UseMod archives.

I remembered Tim Starling announced a few years ago that he found a few old
archives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia%27s_oldest_articles

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063088.html

Unfortunately, that link has gone stale.

Does anyone know where these archives are?

Cheers,
Denny
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing a new Wikimedia project: Abstract Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Scott,

thank you for raising this really important issue, and I whole-heartedly
agree. Since I heard of Ibram X. Kendi's argument to not just be not racist
but rather be actively anti-racist, I thought a lot about it (I have a long
essay trying to sort my thoughts on that, but I am not sure my voice is
helpful in that conversation). But yes, I agree with the sentiment and the
idea.

Another statement that has deeply influenced my thinking in preparation for
this project was the statement "nothing about us without us", and the
implications of that for the Abstract Wikipedia project (and how,
currently, we are not really achieving it).

So, in short, yes, I want to commit to both of these as guidelines for how
the project will unfold.

Having a specific, non-European and underrepresented language as a
first-class development target is a great suggestion, and having someone on
the core team with a native-level grasp of that language is, I think, a
very good suggestion. Whether and when we can actually implement this
depends on a number of factors, such as funding, but yes, ensuring such
representation is very much a high priority for myself, and I am very much
(and painfully) aware that we are not fulfilling this promise yet.

For the choice of language I hope to go through a process similar as we did
for Wikidata, where we worked with the Wikipedia communities to identify
potential language communities that would be interested and willing to work
together with us. I am planning for us to have a similar process within the
next few months.

One advantage of the current state is that the focus for the first part of
the project will be solely on the wiki of functions, not yet on the part
that generates natural language, and that the current plan calls for
additional hires when this second part starts. So all of these decisions
and preparations are not blockers during the first part of the project, but
will be so for the second - and obviously I want to have them resolved well
before.

Also, one correction - we are fortunately not blocked by the availability
of language models in a given language. Since the natural language
generation, as we plan it, is developed by the communities using functions,
we do not need to have a good language model, or in fact, any language
model at all, for the system to work. So we have that going for us.

Finally, as answered to Phoebe, I want to tackle these issues heads-on with
a call for discussing the ethical implications of this project. Your
suggestions are good, and will inform our planning and development, but I
am also aware that, in order to have a fuller picture, we need to hear more
voices and figure out how to have these conversations. This will happen
within the next few months.

Thanks again for raising this important issue! I hope my thoughts on that
make sense, and I am happy to further work on them,
Denny




On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 11:19 PM Nick Wilson (Quiddity) <
nwil...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 2:01 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
> > We used to have a roughly weighted list of major world languages by
> > (spoken, written; primary, secondary) and how well covered they were by
> wp
> > (articles, contributors).  Is there something like that still?
> >
>
> I think you might be referring to the links in the 3rd and 4th line of
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Lists_of_Wikipedias ?
> Looking more closely, it appears that the "speakers per article" listing is
> unfortunately a few years out of date, as the column of "Speakers" was
> being manually updated from Ethnologue stats (which are now paywalled).
> I've started a tangential discussion on the talkpage there, about using
> Wikidata instead.
> Additionally, none of those links contain the "primary / secondary
> language" statistics, for which I think we'd need to cross-reference with
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
> (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1394450) Or perhaps Wikidata can resolve
> it
> again, as at least some languages' items include a split of the statistics
> for that, e.g. Q150. Let's discuss further onwiki?
>
> And +1 to the overall recommendation from C. Scott. :)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The Government of Navarre will fund BWUG

[Denny Vrandečić]

Congratulations! Looking forward to see the results of this initiative!

On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 2:54 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
> It is a real pleasure to announce the agreement reached between Basque
> Wikimedians User Group and the Government of Navarre to finance projects
> for the knowledge of Wikimedia platforms in that region.
>
> The agreement, of an initial duration of 6 months and endowed with
> 25,000€, will serve to initiate work related to local knowledge, GLAM and
> to multiply the educational program that we have already been carrying out.
>
> You can read more about this agreement in our blog:
> http://wikimedia.eus/2020/07/wikipedian-euskarazko-eduki-digitalak-sortu-zabaldu-eta-kontsumitzea-sustatuko-du-nafarroako-gobernuak/
>
> And you can learn more about it in Spanish in the Governments website:
> https://www.navarra.es/es/noticias/2020/07/23/el-gobierno-de-navarra-fomentara-la-creacion-difusion-y-consumo-de-contenidos-digitales-en-euskera-en-wikipedia
>
> Sincerely
>
> Galder
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing a new Wikimedia project: Abstract Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thank you Gnangarra! And Butch, and Lodewijk, and Brion, and Erik, and
Joāo, and Christophe, and Isaac, and Galder, and Daniel, and SJ, and
Phoebe, and everyone else, thank you all for the congratulations, and for
your interest!

I am also very excited, and looking forward to it - and thanks in
particular to everyone who expressed willingness to help - there will be
plenty of opportunity for that :)

Thank you all,
Denny



On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 10:05 PM Gnangarra  wrote:

> sounds like a wonderful project that will help connect cultures and
> languages in a helpful way for the users, look forward to seeing and
> helping its development
>
> On Fri, 3 Jul 2020 at 09:26, Butch Bustria  wrote:
>
> > Congratulations on this new opportunity!
> >
> > Once it rolls out to us content contributors, we will be glad to be a
> part
> > of it.
> >
> >
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> > Butch Bustria
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 3, 2020, 12:39 AM Denny Vrandečić 
> wrote:
> >
> > > Katherine, thank you for the warm welcome and your kind words!
> > >
> > > I am very happy to be given the opportunity to start this new project,
> > and
> > > deeply honored by the trust and confidence of the Board and the
> > Foundation.
> > >
> > > Thanks to the many who have listened to me talking about this project
> in
> > > the last few years, read my papers and plans, commented on them,
> > > scrutinized them, and offered encouragement, criticism, and advice.
> > Thanks
> > > to everyone who expressed their support and raised their concerns on
> the
> > > proposal page on Meta [1]. It is thanks to you that the Board was
> > confident
> > > enough to make this decision.
> > >
> > > There is a lot of work in front of us, and I will continue to rely on
> > your
> > > guidance and collective wisdom. We will need to foster a new community.
> > > Just as with Wikidata, I hope that some of you will become active in
> the
> > > new community, and I also want to make sure that we will be welcoming
> to
> > > new contributors. We want to extend and grow the Wikimedia movement not
> > > only with new functionalities, but also with new people.
> > >
> > > Settling in this new position will take quite a bit of my attention in
> > the
> > > next few weeks, so please forgive me if I may be slow with answering
> your
> > > questions between now and then. One of the first things we’ll do is to
> > set
> > > up new communication channels. We will continue discussing the project
> > and
> > > planning on Meta [2] for now and also welcome you to the new, dedicated
> > > mailing list [3].
> > >
> > > One of our first tasks together will be to find a name for the
> project. A
> > > first set of proposals have already been made [4], and I invite you all
> > to
> > > come up with more ideas. We will start that off in July or August. Did
> I
> > > mention that you can join us on Meta [2] to discuss proposals for
> names,
> > > the project itself, and much more?
> > >
> > > Again, thank you all! I am super excited about figuring this thing out
> > with
> > > you, and am looking forward to coming back to Wikimedia full-time.
> > >
> > > Stay safe,
> > > Denny
> > >
> > > [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abstract_Wikipedia
> > > [2]
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_Wikipedia
> > > [3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/abstract-wikipedia
> > > [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Name
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 9:24 AM Brion Vibber 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'm extremely excited about this project!
> > > >
> > > > Not only will this be directly useful on its own (and a fascinating
> > > project
> > > > in its own right!), but it will help our volunteer editors to ramp up
> > > good
> > > > base material to work with on the "prose" Wikipedias we already know
> > and
> > > > love.
> > > >
> > > > The idea is really to make the structured data we've all been putting
> > > into
> > > > Wikidata available in a human-readable form at a big scale, that's
> > still
> > > > able to be shaped and made into something real and readable by human
> > > > editors. By moving around where in the chain 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing a new Wikimedia project: Abstract Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

eryone in the world has access to knowledge, in
> their own language; we believe in an aspirational better world. As a part
> of this mission, we must take questions of ethics seriously -- and we do.
> We have collectively spent thousands of hours trying to expand our
> contributor base; thinking about systemic bias; thinking about sources and
> provenance; trying to open up copyright to make knowledge accessible;
> working with communities on indigenous knowledge; building UIs that are
> easier to contribute to. These are all efforts related to our ethics and
> values. With our new projects, we can set precedent. We can explore the
> problems that we face today on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons and
> consider not just how to avoid them but how to build a better project. We
> can do this in a multilingual context with perspectives from volunteers and
> staff around the world, in a way that almost no other projects online --
> certainly no single university or research group -- can. We can, without
> much legacy infrastructure to hamper us, spin out worst-case and best case
> scenarios, ask questions about our data and who might participate, think
> about downstream consequences. And *that* is truly exciting.
>
> best,
> -- Phoebe
>
>
> [1]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Computer_Science_and_Artificial_Intelligence_Laboratory
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 12:04 PM Katherine Maher 
> wrote:
>
>> (A translatable version of this announcement can be found on Meta [1])
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> It is my honor to introduce Abstract Wikipedia [1], a new project that
>> has been unanimously approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
>> Trustees. Abstract Wikipedia proposes a new way to generate baseline
>> encyclopedic content in a multilingual fashion, allowing more contributors
>> and more readers to share more knowledge in more languages. It is an
>> approach that aims to make cross-lingual cooperation easier on our
>> projects, increase the sustainability of our movement through expanding
>> access to participation, improve the user experience for readers of all
>> languages, and innovate in free knowledge by connecting some of the
>> strengths of our movement to create something new.
>>
>> This is our first new project in over seven years. Abstract Wikipedia was
>> submitted as a project proposal by Denny Vrandečić in May of 2020 [2] after
>> years of preparation and research, leading to a detailed plan and lively
>> discussions in the Wikimedia communities. We know that the energy and the
>> creativity of the community often runs up against language barriers, and
>> information that is available in one language may not make it to other
>> language Wikipedias. Abstract Wikipedia intends to look and feel like a
>> Wikipedia, but build on the powerful, language-independent conceptual
>> models of Wikidata, with the goal of letting volunteers create and maintain
>> Wikipedia articles across our polyglot Wikimedia world.
>>
>> The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an
>> article using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses
>> conceptual models that are meant to be universal across languages, it
>> should be possible to use and extend these building blocks of knowledge to
>> create models for articles that also have universal value. Using code,
>> volunteers will be able to translate these abstract “articles” into their
>> own languages. If successful, this could eventually allow everyone to read
>> about any topic in Wikidata in their own language.
>>
>> As you can imagine, this work will require a lot of software development,
>> and a lot of cooperation among Wikimedians. In order to make this effort
>> possible, Denny will join the Foundation as a staff member in July and lead
>> this initiative. You may know Denny as the creator of Wikidata, a long-time
>> community member, a former staff member at Wikimedia Deutschland, and a
>> former Trustee at the Wikimedia Foundation[3]. We are very excited that
>> Denny will bring his skills and expertise to work on this project alongside
>> the Foundation’s product, technology, and community liaison teams.
>>
>> It is important to acknowledge that this is an experimental project and
>> that every Wikipedia community has different needs. This project may offer
>> some communities great advantages. Other communities may engage less. Every
>> language Wikipedia community will be free to choose and moderate whether or
>> how they would use content from this project.
>>
>> We are excited that this new wiki-project has the possibility to advance

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing a new Wikimedia project: Abstract Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thank you SJ, thank you all, for your very welcoming words, and your
congratulations!

Regarding Wikispore, yes, this is one of the first conversations that we
will have - where the preparatory discussions should happen. I am very much
in favor of Wikispore for that, as it is literally meant for that, but we
need to figure out a few things together.

I'll kick that off next week :)

And I agree, this way we can help each other to create even more fertile
ground for new ideas. I am very excited about that!


On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 10:25 AM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> Best news all year. Thank you for moving swiftly on this :)
>
> It has been a fine thing too, to see WikiLambda experiments on Wikispore.
> https://wikispore.wmflabs.org
>
> I hope this may Herald a new wave of new and complementary projects.
> There are yet so many types of knowledge that have not found a home in our
> wikiverse -- we are devising more every year (here's looking at you,
> thingiverse & ML model hubs) -- and most of them do not naturally end up
> with free knowledge platforms of their own.
>
> SJ
>
> 🌍🌏🌎🌑
>
> On Thu., Jul. 2, 2020, 12:04 p.m. Katherine Maher, 
> wrote:
>
>> (A translatable version of this announcement can be found on Meta [1])
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> It is my honor to introduce Abstract Wikipedia [1], a new project that
>> has been unanimously approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
>> Trustees. Abstract Wikipedia proposes a new way to generate baseline
>> encyclopedic content in a multilingual fashion, allowing more contributors
>> and more readers to share more knowledge in more languages. It is an
>> approach that aims to make cross-lingual cooperation easier on our
>> projects, increase the sustainability of our movement through expanding
>> access to participation, improve the user experience for readers of all
>> languages, and innovate in free knowledge by connecting some of the
>> strengths of our movement to create something new.
>>
>> This is our first new project in over seven years. Abstract Wikipedia was
>> submitted as a project proposal by Denny Vrandečić in May of 2020 [2] after
>> years of preparation and research, leading to a detailed plan and lively
>> discussions in the Wikimedia communities. We know that the energy and the
>> creativity of the community often runs up against language barriers, and
>> information that is available in one language may not make it to other
>> language Wikipedias. Abstract Wikipedia intends to look and feel like a
>> Wikipedia, but build on the powerful, language-independent conceptual
>> models of Wikidata, with the goal of letting volunteers create and maintain
>> Wikipedia articles across our polyglot Wikimedia world.
>>
>> The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an
>> article using words and entities from Wikidata. Because Wikidata uses
>> conceptual models that are meant to be universal across languages, it
>> should be possible to use and extend these building blocks of knowledge to
>> create models for articles that also have universal value. Using code,
>> volunteers will be able to translate these abstract “articles” into their
>> own languages. If successful, this could eventually allow everyone to read
>> about any topic in Wikidata in their own language.
>>
>> As you can imagine, this work will require a lot of software development,
>> and a lot of cooperation among Wikimedians. In order to make this effort
>> possible, Denny will join the Foundation as a staff member in July and lead
>> this initiative. You may know Denny as the creator of Wikidata, a long-time
>> community member, a former staff member at Wikimedia Deutschland, and a
>> former Trustee at the Wikimedia Foundation[3]. We are very excited that
>> Denny will bring his skills and expertise to work on this project alongside
>> the Foundation’s product, technology, and community liaison teams.
>>
>> It is important to acknowledge that this is an experimental project and
>> that every Wikipedia community has different needs. This project may offer
>> some communities great advantages. Other communities may engage less. Every
>> language Wikipedia community will be free to choose and moderate whether or
>> how they would use content from this project.
>>
>> We are excited that this new wiki-project has the possibility to advance
>> knowledge equity through increased access to knowledge. It also invites us
>> to consider and engage with critical questions about how and by whom
>> knowledge is constructed. We look forward to working in cooperation with
>> the communities 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing a new Wikimedia project: Abstract Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Katherine, thank you for the warm welcome and your kind words!

I am very happy to be given the opportunity to start this new project, and
deeply honored by the trust and confidence of the Board and the Foundation.

Thanks to the many who have listened to me talking about this project in
the last few years, read my papers and plans, commented on them,
scrutinized them, and offered encouragement, criticism, and advice. Thanks
to everyone who expressed their support and raised their concerns on the
proposal page on Meta [1]. It is thanks to you that the Board was confident
enough to make this decision.

There is a lot of work in front of us, and I will continue to rely on your
guidance and collective wisdom. We will need to foster a new community.
Just as with Wikidata, I hope that some of you will become active in the
new community, and I also want to make sure that we will be welcoming to
new contributors. We want to extend and grow the Wikimedia movement not
only with new functionalities, but also with new people.

Settling in this new position will take quite a bit of my attention in the
next few weeks, so please forgive me if I may be slow with answering your
questions between now and then. One of the first things we’ll do is to set
up new communication channels. We will continue discussing the project and
planning on Meta [2] for now and also welcome you to the new, dedicated
mailing list [3].

One of our first tasks together will be to find a name for the project. A
first set of proposals have already been made [4], and I invite you all to
come up with more ideas. We will start that off in July or August. Did I
mention that you can join us on Meta [2] to discuss proposals for names,
the project itself, and much more?

Again, thank you all! I am super excited about figuring this thing out with
you, and am looking forward to coming back to Wikimedia full-time.

Stay safe,
Denny

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abstract_Wikipedia
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_Wikipedia
[3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/abstract-wikipedia
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Name



On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 9:24 AM Brion Vibber  wrote:

> I'm extremely excited about this project!
>
> Not only will this be directly useful on its own (and a fascinating project
> in its own right!), but it will help our volunteer editors to ramp up good
> base material to work with on the "prose" Wikipedias we already know and
> love.
>
> The idea is really to make the structured data we've all been putting into
> Wikidata available in a human-readable form at a big scale, that's still
> able to be shaped and made into something real and readable by human
> editors. By moving around where in the chain the data gets expressed as
> human language, we hope to make something that's just as editable but much
> more maintainable in the future and across multiple languages.
>
> -- brion
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 9:04 AM Katherine Maher 
> wrote:
>
> > (A translatable version of this announcement can be found on Meta [1])
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > It is my honor to introduce Abstract Wikipedia [1], a new project that
> has
> > been unanimously approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.
> > Abstract Wikipedia proposes a new way to generate baseline encyclopedic
> > content in a multilingual fashion, allowing more contributors and more
> > readers to share more knowledge in more languages. It is an approach that
> > aims to make cross-lingual cooperation easier on our projects, increase
> the
> > sustainability of our movement through expanding access to participation,
> > improve the user experience for readers of all languages, and innovate in
> > free knowledge by connecting some of the strengths of our movement to
> > create something new.
> >
> > This is our first new project in over seven years. Abstract Wikipedia was
> > submitted as a project proposal by Denny Vrandečić in May of 2020 [2]
> after
> > years of preparation and research, leading to a detailed plan and lively
> > discussions in the Wikimedia communities. We know that the energy and the
> > creativity of the community often runs up against language barriers, and
> > information that is available in one language may not make it to other
> > language Wikipedias. Abstract Wikipedia intends to look and feel like a
> > Wikipedia, but build on the powerful, language-independent conceptual
> > models of Wikidata, with the goal of letting volunteers create and
> maintain
> > Wikipedia articles across our polyglot Wikimedia world.
> >
> > The project will allow volunteers to assemble the fundamentals of an
> > article using words and enti

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal for a multilingual Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thank you so much for your encouraging words, SJ!

I am still trying to figure out how to proceed, and it depends on how the
proposal is received (so please, take a look and vote!). As I said
previously, I also have talked with people at the Foundation to see what
can be done to turn this from a silly Denny-idea to a proper project, and
all the feedback on the material so far has been super useful. I am not
sure if we should start with the P1.1 - which has a number of legal and
trademark considerations and would benefit from the Foundation already be
committed - but P1.2 is certainly something where we could start.

Regarding the abstracttext code base, I am super happy to see already
people making it easier to dockerize (Thank you Arthur!) and fixing errors
in the spec (Thank you Lucas!), which is awesome. I still feel very wary
about offering a publicly editable instance due to the security issues, but
I am thinking about having a read-only public instance or a
restricted-write public instance.

I am not sure how we could drive it on Wikispore, given that it needs so
much additional software, and it would be rather unwise to add abstracttext
to Wikispore I guess. Did you have something in mind?

Again, thank you!
Denny






On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 4:44 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> Great!  The time seems right.  Is the idea to begin with P1.1 and P1.2, on
> a test wiki, and have a branch of abstracttext that anyone can submit
> functions to, while working on the proposal and setting this up formally as
> a sibling projet?
>
> Is there anything Wikispore could do to help get something like this
> underway?  //S
>
> On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 3:28 PM Denny Vrandečić 
> wrote:
>
> > Hello all,
> >
> > after talking about it a few times here, the official proposal for
> creating
> > the multilingual Wikipedia proposal is now on Meta.
> >
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda
> >
> > The idea is to create abstract, language-independent content in Wikidata,
> > and then translate it into natural language using function. These
> functions
> > will be defined and maintained in a new Wikimedia project, which I
> > preliminary called Wikilambda.
> >
> > Wikilambda will be a new Wikimedia project that allows to create,
> maintain,
> > catalog, and evaluate functions about all kind of things. You can find a
> > lot of further details in the link above. If you have any questions, I am
> > happy to answer them.
> >
> > The official project proposal process basically says, make the proposal
> > here, and then go and tell everyone, and at some point, the Board might
> > look at this and say, yes good idea.
> >
> > So I would love to collect many of your voices and support signatures, so
> > that I can go to the Board and tell them look at this :) So please sign
> > here:
> >
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda
> >
> > Thank you,
> > Denny
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>
>
>
> --
> Samuel Klein  @metasj   w:user:sj  +1 617 529 4266
> ___
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[Wikimedia-l] Proposal for a multilingual Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Hello all,

after talking about it a few times here, the official proposal for creating
the multilingual Wikipedia proposal is now on Meta.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda

The idea is to create abstract, language-independent content in Wikidata,
and then translate it into natural language using function. These functions
will be defined and maintained in a new Wikimedia project, which I
preliminary called Wikilambda.

Wikilambda will be a new Wikimedia project that allows to create, maintain,
catalog, and evaluate functions about all kind of things. You can find a
lot of further details in the link above. If you have any questions, I am
happy to answer them.

The official project proposal process basically says, make the proposal
here, and then go and tell everyone, and at some point, the Board might
look at this and say, yes good idea.

So I would love to collect many of your voices and support signatures, so
that I can go to the Board and tell them look at this :) So please sign
here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda

Thank you,
Denny
___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thank you, Scott,

this is a great and important question. I go into more detail about the
changes to the incentives structures for the contributors in the
Wikipedia @ 20 essay here:

https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/vyf7ksah

In short: it relies heavily on getting the user experience just right, and
this will be one of the hardest parts of the project. But there are a few
forces that conspire to improve the incentives for the contributors, such
as more reach, making a current and complete Wikipedia in a smaller
language editions seem feasible, reactivating previous contributors, and
tailor a user experience for mobile devices.

In the end, only the future will tell, but I certainly hope that this will
lead to a vibrant and large community with thousands of contributors.

Stay safe,
Denny



On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 4:54 PM Info WorldUniversity <
i...@worlduniversityandschool.org> wrote:

> Denny, and Wikimedians,
>
> How to maintain the diversity of contributions, edits, individual knowledge
> generators / writers, et al, on the human side of Wikipedia, by many
> different language communities if these were to grow, I wonder? Is this
> already part of your proposal, which I haven't come across yet? Thank you
> for this great development!
>
> Cheers,
> Scott
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 5:49 PM Denny Vrandečić 
> wrote:
>
> > Elevator pitch:
> >
> > Many Wikipedia language editions have large gaps in knowledge. We want to
> > close these gaps by allowing to create and maintain content in one place
> > and allow the Wikipedias to use this content if they choose so, instead
> of
> > doing that in each of the Wikipedia language editions individually. This
> > will allow more people to access and create more knowledge in more
> > languages in the Wikipedias.
> >
> > In order to do this, we need to represent the content in a way that can
> be
> > translated to many different natural languages with high fidelity. We do
> > this by introducing a new project that allows to create, maintain,
> > catalogue and evaluate functions as a new form of knowledge the
> communities
> > work on. This will allow completely new use cases, and allow more people
> to
> > share in more forms of knowledge than today.
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 2:48 PM Andy Mabbett 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 01:52, Denny Vrandečić 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a
> multilingual
> > > > Wikipedia for a few years now.
> > >
> > > What's the elevator pitch for this?
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Andy Mabbett
> > > @pigsonthewing
> > > http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
> > >
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>
>
>
> --
>
> --
> - Scott MacLeod - Founder & President
> - https://twitter.com/WorldUnivAndSch
> - World University and School
> - http://worlduniversityandschool.org
> - http://scottmacleod.com
>
> - CC World University and School - like CC Wikipedia with best STEM-centric
> CC OpenCourseWare - incorporated as a nonprofit university and school in
> California, and is a U.S. 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt educational organization.
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Denny Vrandečić]

ople of local Wikipedia can ask people on Abstract WP and
> Wikilambda. You would need enough volunteers on AWP-WL to help; and you
> would need at least some people on local WP who can communicate its wishes
> to the helpers on AWP-WL. For very small WP communities, that would be an
> enourmous challenge.
>

Agreed. Both Wikidata and English Wikipedia have managed to create such
environments to help contributors, be it the Teahouse or the "Ask a SPARQL
query" page. I very much hope that we will foster a community that will
live this spirit.

But I do think that this project is more complicated than any of the other
projects we currently have, and I think that it would be important to
initially provide this kind of support also coming from the development
team. I hope that from this seed, a community-owned support system will
grow.


>
> My personal approach would be the following, based on experiences with
> German language encyclopedia for children, Klexikon. It would be great for
> small Wikipedias to find a corpus of ca. 3000-5000 encyclopedic articles.
> Well chosen by relevance for at least most parts of the world. In
> easy-to-understand English, not too long, with a good strcuture, written in
> a way that you can easily translate and adapt them for your own language.
> (Many people will now say: "Simple English Wikipedia already exists", but I
> think it is not there yet.)


> Those 3000-5000 articles would be a wonderful encyclopedia already. The
> local Wikipedians would enrich the content then with some hundred or
> thousand articles of their own. In my experience, you do not need millions
> of articles to fulfill the knowledge hunger of most readers.
>

I see and understand your approach, but respectfully disagree. I do not
think that, whoever runs the development of this project, should be in the
business of guiding the content creation of the project. I firmly believe
that creating the content and deciding on which content to create should be
solely in the hand of the community.

Having said that, I also will absolutely welcome community members from
initiating a project where they decide on a corpus of say 3000-5000
encyclopaedic articles chosen by relevance for at least most parts of the
world, and make it their aim to create a good structure for these and adapt
them to their own languages. In fact, I hope that people who have
experience with running such projects will become contributors and do that.
I do think that this would be a promising early strategy to create content.

But such a project obviously should not be exclusive.


>
> I think that your "content translation framework" approach goes a little
> bit into this direction. Part of the framework could be to make suggestions
> about "localization". For example, the article about "Dogs" could have a
> note saying: "After this paragraph, you could add some sentences with
> regard to dogs in your own country/region."
>

Whereas I would love to claim that the content translation framework is
mine, it very much isn't. There is a wonderful team at the Foundation that
has created and maintained this over years, and they recently had a rather
stormy uptick in translations, having lead to more than 600,000 translated
articles. I cannot praise their hard work enough, and I am thankful to them
for having enabled so many people to create so much content in so many
languages already.


>
> Kind regards,
> Ziko
>

Thank you for your comments, and stay safe,
Denny


>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Am Di., 14. Apr. 2020 um 02:53 Uhr schrieb Denny Vrandečić <
> vrande...@gmail.com>:
>
> > As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
> > Wikipedia for a few years now. Two other publications on this are here, I
> > have bothered you with mails about it here previously too:
> >
> > https://research.google/pubs/pub48057/
> >
> > https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/vyf7ksah
> >
> > I've also been giving talks about the topic in several places about this
> > idea, some of them have also been recorded:
> >
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzVA7YLwhTE
> >
> >
> >
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLiJ6E9sG6U&list=PLQVG_tuf3Q2fji-CwqEDRJpZuf23wevrq&index=13
> >
> > I gathered some awesome feedback in those few years (also from some
> members
> > of this list, thank you!), and I also implemented a few prototypes trying
> > out the idea, learning a lot from that.
> >
> > All of this has helped to sharpen the idea and come up with a more
> concrete
> > proposal. In short, the proposal is that we do a two-step approach:
> first,
> &

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Denny Vrandečić]

Elevator pitch:

Many Wikipedia language editions have large gaps in knowledge. We want to
close these gaps by allowing to create and maintain content in one place
and allow the Wikipedias to use this content if they choose so, instead of
doing that in each of the Wikipedia language editions individually. This
will allow more people to access and create more knowledge in more
languages in the Wikipedias.

In order to do this, we need to represent the content in a way that can be
translated to many different natural languages with high fidelity. We do
this by introducing a new project that allows to create, maintain,
catalogue and evaluate functions as a new form of knowledge the communities
work on. This will allow completely new use cases, and allow more people to
share in more forms of knowledge than today.


On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 2:48 PM Andy Mabbett 
wrote:

> On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 01:52, Denny Vrandečić  wrote:
>
> > As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
> > Wikipedia for a few years now.
>
> What's the elevator pitch for this?
>
>
> --
> Andy Mabbett
> @pigsonthewing
> http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Denny Vrandečić]

Yay! Thanks for the positive note! This is appreciated!

Stay safe,
Denny

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 1:44 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Based on my first read-through of the paper, I think this would be
> something worth doing.
> Cheers,
> Peter.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Denny Vrandecic
> Sent: 14 April 2020 02:53
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new
> Wikipedia project
>
> As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
> Wikipedia for a few years now. Two other publications on this are here, I
> have bothered you with mails about it here previously too:
>
> https://research.google/pubs/pub48057/
>
> https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/vyf7ksah
>
> I've also been giving talks about the topic in several places about this
> idea, some of them have also been recorded:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzVA7YLwhTE
>
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLiJ6E9sG6U&list=PLQVG_tuf3Q2fji-CwqEDRJpZuf23wevrq&index=13
>
> I gathered some awesome feedback in those few years (also from some members
> of this list, thank you!), and I also implemented a few prototypes trying
> out the idea, learning a lot from that.
>
> All of this has helped to sharpen the idea and come up with a more concrete
> proposal. In short, the proposal is that we do a two-step approach: first,
> allow for capturing Wikipedia content in an abstract notation, and second,
> allow for creating functions that translate this abstract notation into
> natural language (For simplicity, I gave this two steps names, Abstract
> Wikipedia for step 1, and Wikilambda for step 2. I realize that both names
> are not perfect, but that is just one of the many things that we can figure
> out together on the way).
>
> I wrote up this proposal in a paper, which I uploaded to my Website almost
> two weeks ago, and I also submitted it to Arxiv. And as soon as it was
> published on Arxiv, I wanted to share it with you and see what you folks
> think (I wanted to wait for it as Arxiv would allow the URLs to remains
> table - my Website has gone down before and might so again).
>
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733
>
> The new proposal is much more concrete than the previous proposals (and
> therefore there is much more to criticize). Also, obviously, nothing of
> this is set in stone, and just like the names, I am very much looking
> forward to hear suggestions for how to improve the whole thing, and I will
> blatantly steal every good idea and proposal. I am not even sure what a
> good venue for this discussion is, I guess, eventually it should be on
> Meta?, but also about that I would like to hear proposals.
>
> Abstract Wikipedia is a proposed extension to Wikidata that would capture
> the content next to the Wikidata items. Think of it as a new namespace,
> where we could create, maintain, and collaborate on the abstract content.
> Similar to the Wikidata-bridge, there should be a way to allow
> contributions from the Wikipedias to flow back without too much friction.
> The individual Wikipedias - and I cannot stress this enough - have the
> choice to use some or any or all or none of the content from Abstract
> Wikipedia, but I most definitely do not expect the content of the current
> Wikipedias to be replaced by this. In fact, I have no doubt that any decent
> article in any language Wikipedia will remain superior to the outcome of
> the proposed new architecture by far. This is a proposal for the places
> where the current system left us with gaps, not a proposal to turn the
> parts that are already brilliant today dull and terrible tomorrow.
>
> Wikilambda is a proposed new Wikimedia project that allows us to share in a
> new form of knowledge assets, functions. You can think of it as similar to
> Modules or Templates, but a bit extended, with places for tests, different
> languages, evaluation, and also for all kind of functions, not only those
> that are immediately useful for one of the Wikimedia projects, and most
> importantly, shared among the projects. So one of the first goals would be
> to increasingly allow fo a place to have global templates, another idea
> that has been discussed and asked for for a very long time. Wikilambda,
> just as Wikidata, is expected to start as a project supporting the
> immediate needs of the sister projects, and over time to grow to a project
> that stands on its own merits as well.
>
> We don't really have an effective process for starting new projects, so I
> am trying to follow a similar path that we took for Wikidata back then. And
> back then it all started with Markus Krötzsch, me and others talking about
> the idea to anyone who would listen until everyone was bored of hearing it,
> trying out prototypes, and then talking about it even more, and improving
> all of it constantly based on your feedback. And t

[Wikimedia-l] Proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia and a new Wikipedia project

[Denny Vrandečić]

As some of you know, I have been working on the idea of a multilingual
Wikipedia for a few years now. Two other publications on this are here, I
have bothered you with mails about it here previously too:

https://research.google/pubs/pub48057/

https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/vyf7ksah

I've also been giving talks about the topic in several places about this
idea, some of them have also been recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzVA7YLwhTE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLiJ6E9sG6U&list=PLQVG_tuf3Q2fji-CwqEDRJpZuf23wevrq&index=13

I gathered some awesome feedback in those few years (also from some members
of this list, thank you!), and I also implemented a few prototypes trying
out the idea, learning a lot from that.

All of this has helped to sharpen the idea and come up with a more concrete
proposal. In short, the proposal is that we do a two-step approach: first,
allow for capturing Wikipedia content in an abstract notation, and second,
allow for creating functions that translate this abstract notation into
natural language (For simplicity, I gave this two steps names, Abstract
Wikipedia for step 1, and Wikilambda for step 2. I realize that both names
are not perfect, but that is just one of the many things that we can figure
out together on the way).

I wrote up this proposal in a paper, which I uploaded to my Website almost
two weeks ago, and I also submitted it to Arxiv. And as soon as it was
published on Arxiv, I wanted to share it with you and see what you folks
think (I wanted to wait for it as Arxiv would allow the URLs to remains
table - my Website has gone down before and might so again).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733

The new proposal is much more concrete than the previous proposals (and
therefore there is much more to criticize). Also, obviously, nothing of
this is set in stone, and just like the names, I am very much looking
forward to hear suggestions for how to improve the whole thing, and I will
blatantly steal every good idea and proposal. I am not even sure what a
good venue for this discussion is, I guess, eventually it should be on
Meta?, but also about that I would like to hear proposals.

Abstract Wikipedia is a proposed extension to Wikidata that would capture
the content next to the Wikidata items. Think of it as a new namespace,
where we could create, maintain, and collaborate on the abstract content.
Similar to the Wikidata-bridge, there should be a way to allow
contributions from the Wikipedias to flow back without too much friction.
The individual Wikipedias - and I cannot stress this enough - have the
choice to use some or any or all or none of the content from Abstract
Wikipedia, but I most definitely do not expect the content of the current
Wikipedias to be replaced by this. In fact, I have no doubt that any decent
article in any language Wikipedia will remain superior to the outcome of
the proposed new architecture by far. This is a proposal for the places
where the current system left us with gaps, not a proposal to turn the
parts that are already brilliant today dull and terrible tomorrow.

Wikilambda is a proposed new Wikimedia project that allows us to share in a
new form of knowledge assets, functions. You can think of it as similar to
Modules or Templates, but a bit extended, with places for tests, different
languages, evaluation, and also for all kind of functions, not only those
that are immediately useful for one of the Wikimedia projects, and most
importantly, shared among the projects. So one of the first goals would be
to increasingly allow fo a place to have global templates, another idea
that has been discussed and asked for for a very long time. Wikilambda,
just as Wikidata, is expected to start as a project supporting the
immediate needs of the sister projects, and over time to grow to a project
that stands on its own merits as well.

We don't really have an effective process for starting new projects, so I
am trying to follow a similar path that we took for Wikidata back then. And
back then it all started with Markus Krötzsch, me and others talking about
the idea to anyone who would listen until everyone was bored of hearing it,
trying out prototypes, and then talking about it even more, and improving
all of it constantly based on your feedback. And then making increasingly
concrete proposals until we managed to show some kind of consensus from the
communities, you, and the Foundation to actually do it. And then, well, do
it.

So, I've done some of the talking, with researchers, with the public, with
some of you, and also with folks at the Foundation, to figure out what next
steps could be, and how this can be made to work. Here's a more concrete
proposal. Now I am here to see whether we can find consensus and be bold. I
want to hear from you. I want to hear what you think what the right place
is to discuss this (here, this list? Another mailing list? Meta? Wikidata?
Some Telegram or Facebook group? (OK, I was joking about the latter)).
Whic

[Wikimedia-l] Feedback for chapter: "Collaborating on the sum of all knowledge across languages"

[Denny Vrandečić]

Hi all!

I really try not to spam the chat too much with pointers to my work on the
Abstract Wikipedia, but this one is probably also interesting for Wikidata
contributors. It is the draft for a chapter submitted to Koerner and
Reagle's Wikipedia@20 book, and talks about knowledge diversity under the
light of centralisation through projects such as Wikidata.

Public commenting phase is open until July 19, and very welcome:
"Collaborating on the sum of all knowledge across languages"

About the book: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia@20
Link to chapter: https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/vyf7ksah

Cheers,
Denny
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia in an abstract language

[Denny Vrandečić]

> different communities of readers, and the language of the text is only one
> part of that.
>
> On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 8:40 AM Leila Zia  wrote:
>
> > Denny, thanks for writing and rewriting this piece. I finally got a
> chance
> > to go through it end-to-end. Challenge accepted! :)
> >
> > Here are a few early thoughts, and I look forward to discussing it with
> you
> > and others further.
> >
> > * I tend to agree with you that the challenges of artificial intelligence
> > are a superset of the challenges of bringing to life the abstract
> > Wikipedia. Quite a few items you list in "Unique advantages" section make
> > the abstract-Wikipedia space more easily approachable.
> >
> > * I agree with you that if we are to take the content of Wikipedia to
> many
> > of the languages spoken in the world today, and engage their speakers to
> > share in, the current model won't work/scale (at least soon enough).
> >
> > * You've raised a great point about "Graceful degradation". A very nice
> > challenge.
> >
> > * In "Unique advantages" you talk about "a single genre of text,
> > encyclopedias" and I wonder what it takes to expand our thinking to
> include
> > images as well. Will we need to rethink your current construct? Including
> > images is attractive for at least two reasons: Because in terms of
> learning
> > people have different needs and we will likely need to (continue to)
> > include images as we create the abstractions, but also because one can
> > potentially think of images as representations that are already abstract.
> >
> > Best,
> > Leila
> >
> > --
> > Leila Zia
> > Senior Research Scientist, Lead
> > Wikimedia Foundation
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 10:13 AM Dariusz Jemielniak 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > an interesting concept indeed!
> > >
> > > dj
> > >
> > > On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 5:36 PM Denny Vrandečić  > > <mailto:vrande...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > > The extended whitepaper that was presented at the DL workshop is now
> > > available here:
> > >
> > > http://simia.net/download/abstractwikipedia_whitepaper.pdf
> > >
> > > Still not a proper scientific paper (no references, notv situated in
> > > related work), but going into a bit more detail on the ideas on the
> first
> > > paper published previously.
> > >
> > > On Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 11:32 Denny Vrandečić   > > vrande...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Semantic Web languages allow to express ontologies and knowledge
> bases
> > in
> > > > a way meant to be particularly amenable to the Web. Ontologies
> > formalize
> > > > the shared understanding of a domain. But the most expressive and
> > > > widespread languages that we know of are human natural languages, and
> > the
> > > > largest knowledge base we have is the wealth of text written in human
> > > > languages.
> > > >
> > > > We looks for a path to bridge the gap between knowledge
> representation
> > > > languages such as OWL and human natural languages such as English. We
> > > > propose a project to simultaneously expose that gap, allow to
> > collaborate
> > > > on closing it, make progress widely visible, and is highly attractive
> > and
> > > > valuable in its own right: a Wikipedia written in an abstract
> language
> > to
> > > > be rendered into any natural language on request. This would make
> > current
> > > > Wikipedia editors about 100x more productive, and increase the
> content
> > of
> > > > Wikipedia by 10x. For billions of users this will unlock knowledge
> they
> > > > currently do not have access to.
> > > >
> > > > My first talk on this topic will be on October 10, 2018, 16:45-17:00,
> > at
> > > > the Asilomar in Monterey, CA during the Blue Sky track of ISWC. My
> > > second,
> > > > longer talk on the topic will be at the DL workshop in Tempe, AZ,
> > October
> > > > 27-29. Comments are very welcome as I prepare the slides and the
> talk.
> > > >
> > > > Link to the paper: http://simia.net/download/abstractwikipedia.pdf
> > > >
> > > > Cheers,
> > > > Denny
> > > >
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines a

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia in an abstract language

[Denny Vrandečić]

The extended whitepaper that was presented at the DL workshop is now
available here:

http://simia.net/download/abstractwikipedia_whitepaper.pdf

Still not a proper scientific paper (no references, notv situated in
related work), but going into a bit more detail on the ideas on the first
paper published previously.

On Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 11:32 Denny Vrandečić  Semantic Web languages allow to express ontologies and knowledge bases in
> a way meant to be particularly amenable to the Web. Ontologies formalize
> the shared understanding of a domain. But the most expressive and
> widespread languages that we know of are human natural languages, and the
> largest knowledge base we have is the wealth of text written in human
> languages.
>
> We looks for a path to bridge the gap between knowledge representation
> languages such as OWL and human natural languages such as English. We
> propose a project to simultaneously expose that gap, allow to collaborate
> on closing it, make progress widely visible, and is highly attractive and
> valuable in its own right: a Wikipedia written in an abstract language to
> be rendered into any natural language on request. This would make current
> Wikipedia editors about 100x more productive, and increase the content of
> Wikipedia by 10x. For billions of users this will unlock knowledge they
> currently do not have access to.
>
> My first talk on this topic will be on October 10, 2018, 16:45-17:00, at
> the Asilomar in Monterey, CA during the Blue Sky track of ISWC. My second,
> longer talk on the topic will be at the DL workshop in Tempe, AZ, October
> 27-29. Comments are very welcome as I prepare the slides and the talk.
>
> Link to the paper: http://simia.net/download/abstractwikipedia.pdf
>
> Cheers,
> Denny
>
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[Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia in an abstract language

[Denny Vrandečić]

Semantic Web languages allow to express ontologies and knowledge bases in a
way meant to be particularly amenable to the Web. Ontologies formalize the
shared understanding of a domain. But the most expressive and widespread
languages that we know of are human natural languages, and the largest
knowledge base we have is the wealth of text written in human languages.

We looks for a path to bridge the gap between knowledge representation
languages such as OWL and human natural languages such as English. We
propose a project to simultaneously expose that gap, allow to collaborate
on closing it, make progress widely visible, and is highly attractive and
valuable in its own right: a Wikipedia written in an abstract language to
be rendered into any natural language on request. This would make current
Wikipedia editors about 100x more productive, and increase the content of
Wikipedia by 10x. For billions of users this will unlock knowledge they
currently do not have access to.

My first talk on this topic will be on October 10, 2018, 16:45-17:00, at
the Asilomar in Monterey, CA during the Blue Sky track of ISWC. My second,
longer talk on the topic will be at the DL workshop in Tempe, AZ, October
27-29. Comments are very welcome as I prepare the slides and the talk.

Link to the paper: http://simia.net/download/abstractwikipedia.pdf

Cheers,
Denny
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikidata] Solve legal uncertainty of Wikidata

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thank you for your answer, Sebastian.

Publishing the Gutachten would be fantastic! That would be very helpful and
deeply appreciated.

Regarding the relicensing, I agree with you. You can just go and do that,
and given that you ask for attribution to DBpedia, and not to Wikipedia, I
would claim that's what you're doing. And I think that's fine.

Regarding attribution, commonly it is assumed that you have to respect it
transitively. That is one of the reasons a license that requires BY sucks
so hard for data: unlike with text, the attribution requirements grow very
quickly. It is the same as with modified images and collages: it is not
sufficient to attribute the last author, but all contributors have to be
attributed.

This is why I think that whoever wants to be part of a large federation of
data on the web, should publish under CC0.

That is very different from licensing texts or images. But for data
anything else is just weird and will bite is in the long run more than we
might ever benefit.

So, just to say it again: if the Gutachten you mentioned could be made
available, that would be very very awesome!

Thank you, Denny



On Thu, May 17, 2018, 23:06 Sebastian Hellmann <
hellm...@informatik.uni-leipzig.de> wrote:

> Hi Denny,
>
> On 18.05.2018 02:54, Denny Vrandečić wrote:
>
> Rob Speer wrote:
> > The result of this, by the way, is that commercial entities sell modified
> > versions of Wikidata with impunity. It undermines the terms of other
> > resources such as DBPedia, which also contains facts extracted from
> > Wikipedia and respects its Share-Alike terms. Why would anyone use
> DBPedia
> > and have to agree to share alike, when they can get similar data from
> > Wikidata which promises them it's CC-0?
>
> The comparison to DBpedia is interesting: the terms for DBpedia state
> "Attribution in this case means keep DBpedia URIs visible and active
> through at least one (preferably all) of @href, , or "Link:". If
> live links are impossible (e.g., when printed on paper), a textual
> blurb-based attribution is acceptable."
> http://wiki.dbpedia.org/terms-imprint
>
> So according to these terms, when someone displays data from DBpedia, it
> is entirely sufficient to attribute DBpedia.
>
> What that means is that DBpedia follows exactly the same theory as
> Wikidata: it is OK to extract data from Wikipedia and republish it as your
> own dataset under your own copyright without requiring attribution to the
> original source of the extraction.
>
> (A bit more problematic might be the fact that DBpedia also republishes
> whole paragraphs of Text under these terms, but that's another story)
>
>
> My understanding is that all that Wikidata has extracted from Wikipedia is
> non-copyrightable in the first place and thus republishing it under a
> different license (or, as in the case of DBpedia for simple triples, with a
> different attribution) is legally sound.
>
>
> In the SmartDataWeb project https://www.smartdataweb.de/ we hired lawyers
> to write a legal review about the extraction situation. Facts can be
> extracted and republished under CC-0 without problem as is the case of
> infoboxes.. Copying a whole database is a different because database rights
> hold. If you only extract ~ two sentences it falls under citation, which is
> also easy. If it is more than two sentence, then copyright applies.
>
> I can check whether it is ready and shareable. The legal review
> (Gutachten) is quite a big thing as it has some legal relevancy and can be
> cited in court.
>
> Hence we can switch to ODC-BY with facts as CC-0 and the text as
> share-alike. However the attribution mentioned in the imprint is still
> fine, since it is under database and not the content/facts.
> I am still uncertain about the attribution. If you remix and publish you
> need to cite the direct sources. But if somebody takes from you, does he
> only attribute to you or to everybody you used in a transitive way.
>
> Anyhow, we are sharpening the whole model towards technology, not
> data/content. So the databus will be a transparent layer and it is much
> easier to find the source like Wikipedia and Wikidata and do contributions
> there, which is actually one of the intentions of share-alike (getting work
> pushed back/upstream).
>
> All the best,
> Sebastian
>
>
> If there is disagreement with that, I would be interested which content
> exactly is considered to be under copyright and where license has not been
> followed on Wikidata.
>
> For completion: the discussion is going on in parallel on the Wikidata
> project chat and in Phabricator:
>
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193728#4212728
>
> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Solve legal uncertainty of Wikidata

[Denny Vrandečić]

Rob Speer wrote:
> The result of this, by the way, is that commercial entities sell modified
> versions of Wikidata with impunity. It undermines the terms of other
> resources such as DBPedia, which also contains facts extracted from
> Wikipedia and respects its Share-Alike terms. Why would anyone use DBPedia
> and have to agree to share alike, when they can get similar data from
> Wikidata which promises them it's CC-0?

The comparison to DBpedia is interesting: the terms for DBpedia state
"Attribution in this case means keep DBpedia URIs visible and active
through at least one (preferably all) of @href, , or "Link:". If
live links are impossible (e.g., when printed on paper), a textual
blurb-based attribution is acceptable."
http://wiki.dbpedia.org/terms-imprint

So according to these terms, when someone displays data from DBpedia, it is
entirely sufficient to attribute DBpedia.

What that means is that DBpedia follows exactly the same theory as
Wikidata: it is OK to extract data from Wikipedia and republish it as your
own dataset under your own copyright without requiring attribution to the
original source of the extraction.

(A bit more problematic might be the fact that DBpedia also republishes
whole paragraphs of Text under these terms, but that's another story)

My understanding is that all that Wikidata has extracted from Wikipedia is
non-copyrightable in the first place and thus republishing it under a
different license (or, as in the case of DBpedia for simple triples, with a
different attribution) is legally sound.

If there is disagreement with that, I would be interested which content
exactly is considered to be under copyright and where license has not been
followed on Wikidata.

For completion: the discussion is going on in parallel on the Wikidata
project chat and in Phabricator:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193728#4212728
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Wikipedia_and_other_Wikimedia_projects


I would appreciate if we could keep the discussion in a single place.

Gnom1 on Phabricator has offered to actually answer legal questions, but we
need to come up with the questions that we want to ask. If it should be,
for example, as Rob Speer states on the bug, "has the copyright of
interwiki links been breached by having them be moved to Wikidata?", I'd be
quite happy with that question - if that's the disagreement, let us ask
Legal help and see if my understanding or yours is correct.

Does this sound like a reasonable question? Or which other question would
you like to ask instead?


On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 4:15 PM Rob Speer  wrote:

> > As always, copyright is predatory. As we can prove that copyright is the
> enemy of science and knowledge
>
> Well, this kind of gets to the heart of the issue, doesn't it.
>
> I support the Creative Commons license, including the share-alike term,
> which requires copyright in order to work, and I've contributed to multiple
> Wikimedia projects with the understanding that my work would be protected
> by CC-By-SA.
>
> Wikidata is engaged in a project-wide act of disobedience against CC-By-SA.
> I would say that GerardM has provided an excellent summary of the attitude
> toward Creative Commons that I've encountered on Wikidata: "it's holding us
> back", "it's the enemy", "you can't copyright knowledge", "you can't make
> us follow it", etc.
>
> The result of this, by the way, is that commercial entities sell modified
> versions of Wikidata with impunity. It undermines the terms of other
> resources such as DBPedia, which also contains facts extracted from
> Wikipedia and respects its Share-Alike terms. Why would anyone use DBPedia
> and have to agree to share alike, when they can get similar data from
> Wikidata which promises them it's CC-0?
>
> On Wed, 16 May 2018 at 21:43 Gerard Meijssen 
> wrote:
>
> > Hoi,
> > Thank you for the overly broad misrepresentation. As always, copyright is
> > predatory. As we can prove that copyright is the enemy of science and
> > knowledge we should not be upset that *copyright *is abused we should
> > welcome it as it proves the point. Also when we use texts from everywhere
> > and rephrase it in Wikipedia articles "we" are not lily white either.
> >
> > In "them old days" generally we felt that when people would use
> Wikipedia,
> > it would only serve our purpose; share the sum of all knowledge. I still
> > feel really good about that. And, it has been shown that what we do;
> > maintain / curate / update that data that it is not easily given to do as
> > well as "we" do it.
> >
> > When we are to be more precise with our copyright, there are a few things
> > we could do to make copyright more transparent. When data is to be
> uploaded
> > (Commons / Wikipedia or Wikidata) we should use a user that is OWNED and
> > operated by the copyright holder. The operation may be by proxy and as a
> > consequence there is no longer a question about copyright as the
> copyright
> > holder can do as we wants. 

[Wikimedia-l] Request for status update on CC-BY-SA 4.0

[Denny Vrandečić]

About one and a half years ago, there was a consultation process about
updating the Wikimedia Terms of Use to move from CC 3.0 to 4.0 licenses.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use/Creative_Commons_4.0

I would like to ask what the status of this proposal is, and whom to bother
to get this unstuck in case it is stuck.

Cheers,
Denny
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Tool to help reaching community consensus

[Denny Vrandečić]

Ah, thanks for the clarification. Sorry for having missed the irony.

Cheers,
Denny


On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 2:39 AM mathieu stumpf guntz <
psychosl...@culture-libre.org> wrote:

>
>
> Le 07/12/2017 à 18:12, Denny Vrandečić a écrit :
>
> Mathieu,
>
> you wrote
>
>
> Despite the fact that reaching community consensus is an easy task,
>
> I just wanted to check whether that was a typo, irony, or actually meant
> that way. In the latter case, I would like to ask for {{cn}}.
>
> Sorry, some emoticon was missing here to make things more clear. It's
> plain irony here.
>
> Reaching and establishing community consensus seems to me one of the
> hardest tasks we are facing, which is why this sentence astonished me, and
> made me think whether I missed something fundamental.
>
> I completely agree with you that this is among the most hardest tasks.
> More broadly, to my mind, communication and empathy are among the less well
> developed topic in education relatively to their prominent importance in
> all domain where humans have to pay attention.
>
> Kind regards
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Tool to help reaching community consensus

[Denny Vrandečić]

Mathieu,

you wrote

> Despite the fact that reaching community consensus is an easy task,

I just wanted to check whether that was a typo, irony, or actually meant
that way. In the latter case, I would like to ask for {{cn}}.

Reaching and establishing community consensus seems to me one of the
hardest tasks we are facing, which is why this sentence astonished me, and
made me think whether I missed something fundamental.

Cheers,
Denny

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 8:56 AM Kunal Mehta  wrote:

> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
> Hash: SHA512
>
> Hi,
>
> On 12/07/2017 04:51 AM, mathieu stumpf guntz wrote:
> > Loomio offers free use for community cases. But it's non-free
> > software, as far as I can see, but I didn't made deep inquiry. So I
> > wondered if anyone was aware of a free software equivalent.
>
> Loomio is free software, it's licensed under the GNU Affero General
> Public License[1][2].
>
> [1] https://github.com/loomio/loomio/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
> [2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html
>
> - -- Legoktm
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
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> y/LyCtbnXfSa3URSKq5OSXNGXRbqETJsEWwIscCmeRko/jQhJxv44Avu9Qm27czM
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> KE+A98lbh5YyWUj1BCFdMIODwUE6ld7hUa9SMx7QENzp0pqDURnmshVLJXpgtFxo
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> 8PtQSKEA8FHMF6KJFMQ=
> =GzLD
> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikidata] An answer to Lydia Pintscher regarding its considerations on Wikidata and CC-0

[Denny Vrandečić]

Scott,

The NC license clause is problematic in a number of jurisdictions. For
example, at least in Germany, as I remember from my law classes, it also
would definitively include not-for-profits, NGOs, and even say bloggers,
with or without ads on their sites. One must always be careful in the
choice of a license in order to avoid unintended consequences.

Just food for thought
Denny

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 20:51 John Erling Blad  wrote:

> My reference was to in-place discussions at WMDE, not the open meetings
> with Markus. Each week we had an open demo where Markus usually attended.
> As I remember the May-discussion, it was just a discussion in the office,
> there was a reference to an earlier meeting. It is although easy to mix up
> old memories, so what happen first and what happen next should not be taken
> to be facts. If Markus also says the same it is although a reasonable
> chance we have got it right.
>
> As to the questions about archives on open discussions with the community.
> This was in April-May 2012. There was no community, there were only
> concerned individuals. The community started to emerge in August with the
> first attempts to go public. On Wikidata_talk:Introduction there are some
> posts from 15. August 2012,[1] while first post on the subject page is from
> 30. October. The stuff from before October comes from a copy-paste from
> Meta.[3] Note that Denny writes "The data in Wikidata is published under a
> free license, allowing the reuse of the data in many different scenarios."
> but Whittylama changes this to "The data in Wikidata is published under [
> http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ a free license],
> allowing
> the reuse of the data in many different scenarios.",[4] and at that point
> there were a community on an open site and had been for a week. When
> Whittylama did his post it was the 4504th post on the site, so it was
> hardly the first! The license was initially a CC-SA.[8] I'm not quite sure
> when it was changed to CC0 in the footer,[9] but it seems to have happen
> before 31 October 2012, at 19:09. First post on Q1 is from 29. October
> 2012,[5] this is one of several items updated this evening.
>
> It is quite enlightening to start at oldid=1 [6] and stepping forward. You
> will find that our present incarnation went live 25. October 2012. So much
> for the "birthday". To ask for archived community discussions before 25th
> October does not make sense, there were no site, and the only people
> involved were mostly devs posting at Meta. Note for example that the page
> Wikidata:Introduction is from Meta.[7]
>
> [1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Introduction
> [2]
> https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Introduction&oldid=2677
> [3]
>
> https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata_talk:Introduction&diff=133569705&oldid=128154617
> [4]
>
> https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Introduction&diff=next&oldid=4504
> [5] https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q1&oldid=103
> [6] https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?oldid=1
> [7]
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata/Introduction&oldid=4030743
> [8]
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20121027015501/http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
> [9]
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20121102074347/http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
>
> On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 1:18 AM, Markus Krötzsch <
> mar...@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:
>
> > Dear Mathieu,
> >
> > Your post demands my response since I was there when CC0 was first chosen
> > (i.e., in the April meeting). I won't discuss your other claims here --
> the
> > discussions on the Wikidata list are already doing this, and I agree with
> > Lydia that no shouting is necessary here.
> >
> > Nevertheless, I must at least testify to what John wrote in his earlier
> > message (quote included below this email for reference): it was not
> Denny's
> > decision to go for CC0, but the outcome of a discussion among several
> > people who had worked with open data for some time before Wikidata was
> > born. I have personally supported this choice and still do. I have never
> > received any money directly or indirectly from Google, though -- full
> > disclosure -- I got several T-shirts for supervising in Summer of Code
> > projects.
> >
> > At no time did Google or any other company take part in our discussions
> in
> > the zeroth hour of Wikidata. And why should they? From what I can see on
> > their web page, Google has no problem with all kinds of different license
> > terms in the data they display. Also, I can tell you that we would have
> > reacted in a very allergic way to such attempts, so if any company had
> > approached us, this would quite likely have backfired. But, believe it or
> > not, when we started it was all but clear that this would become a
> relevant
> > project at all, and no major company even cared to lobby us. It was still
> > mostly a few hackers getting togethe

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Exciting update about development of structured data on Commons

[Denny Vrandečić]

Hi Rogol,

that is why I pointed you to the links in that document, which go all the
way back to 2004 discussions of such a project, and further discussions
over the years. These pretty much establish for me that this item has been
a topic for commons for more than a decade now. But it seems I am
misunderstanding you, and you are not looking for a documentation of the
shared understanding of the roadmap for Commons and other Wikimedia
products, but for a singular Foundation-written document that fixes the
Wikimedia product roadmap over several years instead?

Cheers,
Denny


On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:00 AM Rogol Domedonfors 
wrote:

> Denny
>
> Thank you but the link you provide appears to be to be "Our high-level
> roadmap for developing the project", namely the Structured Data in Commons
> project.  Since Lisa wrote "Structured Data on Commons was in our product
> roadmap" I was referring to the product roadmap on which the Structured
> Data in Commons project is included -- that is, I was asking for a pointer
> to the roadmap for "features both on the Wikidata development roadmap, and
> in other products supported by the Wikimedia Foundation" referred to in Wes
> Moran's initial post on this topic:
>
> But I appreciate the speed of your reply.
>
> "Rogol"
>
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 5:46 PM, Denny Vrandečić 
> wrote:
>
> > Rogol,
> >
> > this was the link previously provided on this project:
> > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Overview
> > including
> > links to previous documents.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Denny
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 9:32 AM Rogol Domedonfors  >
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Lisa
> > >
> > > You say that "Structured Data on Commons was in our product roadmap, so
> > > this grant is not diverting our attention.  The grant simply enables us
> > to
> > > accelerate the work we were planning to do".  Please would you publish,
> > or
> > > point to, a version of that product roadmap that can inform the
> > community's
> > > participation in such planning exercises as the 2017 Wikimedia Movement
> > > Strategy and other more tactical product planning processes.
> > >
> > > Thanks in advance
> > > "Rogol"
> > >
> > > On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 11:01 PM, Lisa Gruwell 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi Pete and Gerard-
> > > >
> > > > I just wanted to give my thoughts on restricted gifts.  Like most
> > things,
> > > > there are both good and bad restricted gifts.  They can be bad if a
> > > funder
> > > > is making a well-intentioned gift that none-the-less pulls the
> > > organization
> > > > in direction that they were not planning to go.  Or even worse, when
> a
> > > > funder pays for something outside of an org's plans that has ongoing
> > > > maintenance cost that are not covered in the grant.
> > > >
> > > > This is why the WMF board reviews all restricted grants per our gift
> > > policy
> > > > <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Gift_policy>.  Those are the
> > types
> > > > of
> > > > dynamics that the board considers when they review a restricted
> grant.
> > > >
> > > > Structured Data on Commons was in our product roadmap, so this grant
> is
> > > not
> > > > diverting our attention.  The grant simply enables us to accelerate
> the
> > > > work we were planning to do.  In terms of restrictions, we have to
> > follow
> > > > through with the plan we submitted.  In other words, do what we said
> we
> > > are
> > > > going to do.  I think that accountability is a good thing.  And the
> > Sloan
> > > > Foundation is a great long-term funder of WMF.  If something changes
> as
> > > the
> > > > work progress, I have no doubt we could have a reasonable
> conversation
> > > with
> > > > them about adjusting the plan.
> > > >
> > > > Best,
> > > > Lisa
> > > >
> > > > On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
> > > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com
> > > > >
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Hoi,
> > > > > Maybe restricted but the subject matter is exactly what we want
> > anyway.
> > > > > Where I have my reservations is that Wikidata will be set in stone
> > and
> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Exciting update about development of structured data on Commons

[Denny Vrandečić]

Rogol,

this was the link previously provided on this project:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Overview including
links to previous documents.

Cheers,
Denny


On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 9:32 AM Rogol Domedonfors 
wrote:

> Lisa
>
> You say that "Structured Data on Commons was in our product roadmap, so
> this grant is not diverting our attention.  The grant simply enables us to
> accelerate the work we were planning to do".  Please would you publish, or
> point to, a version of that product roadmap that can inform the community's
> participation in such planning exercises as the 2017 Wikimedia Movement
> Strategy and other more tactical product planning processes.
>
> Thanks in advance
> "Rogol"
>
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 11:01 PM, Lisa Gruwell 
> wrote:
>
> > Hi Pete and Gerard-
> >
> > I just wanted to give my thoughts on restricted gifts.  Like most things,
> > there are both good and bad restricted gifts.  They can be bad if a
> funder
> > is making a well-intentioned gift that none-the-less pulls the
> organization
> > in direction that they were not planning to go.  Or even worse, when a
> > funder pays for something outside of an org's plans that has ongoing
> > maintenance cost that are not covered in the grant.
> >
> > This is why the WMF board reviews all restricted grants per our gift
> policy
> > .  Those are the types
> > of
> > dynamics that the board considers when they review a restricted grant.
> >
> > Structured Data on Commons was in our product roadmap, so this grant is
> not
> > diverting our attention.  The grant simply enables us to accelerate the
> > work we were planning to do.  In terms of restrictions, we have to follow
> > through with the plan we submitted.  In other words, do what we said we
> are
> > going to do.  I think that accountability is a good thing.  And the Sloan
> > Foundation is a great long-term funder of WMF.  If something changes as
> the
> > work progress, I have no doubt we could have a reasonable conversation
> with
> > them about adjusting the plan.
> >
> > Best,
> > Lisa
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com
> > >
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hoi,
> > > Maybe restricted but the subject matter is exactly what we want anyway.
> > > Where I have my reservations is that Wikidata will be set in stone and
> > > stuff that just is not right will be with us for forever. With more
> money
> > > it does not need to be a huge problem because it makes it more
> > manageable.
> > > Thanks,
> > >   GerardM
> > >
> > > On 9 January 2017 at 21:52, Pete Forsyth 
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Structured data on Commons is a huge and important area -- for one
> > thing,
> > > > the whole Media Viewer project would have gone much more smoothly if
> > > there
> > > > were underlying structured data to rely on. Kudos to WMF and Sloan
> for
> > > the
> > > > focus on this issue!
> > > >
> > > > If I'm not mistaken, this is by far the most extravagant restricted
> > grant
> > > > in the history of the WMF. I believe the Stanton Foundation's
> usability
> > > > grant ($890k in 2008)[1] and Public Policy Initiative grant ($1.2
> > million
> > > > in 2010)[2] are the only ones that comes close. In the past, WMF
> board
> > > > members have expressed great skepticism about -- specifically -- the
> > > Sloan
> > > > Foundation's influence, when it sought to place an observer in WMF
> > board
> > > > meetings. A former WMF Executive Director has written at length about
> > the
> > > > dangers of restricted grants.
> > > >
> > > > It appears there is a new theory in play around restricted grants.
> Will
> > > > somebody be expressing it publicly? Will the past practice of
> > publishing
> > > > the details of the grant expectations be followed?[3]
> > > >
> > > > -Pete
> > > > --
> > > > [[User:Peteforsyth]]
> > > >
> > > > [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/12/03/improved-usability-
> > > > in-our-future/
> > > > [2]
> > > > https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/May_
> > > > 2010_Wikimedia_Foundation_will_engage_academic_experts_
> > > > and_students_to_improve_public_policy_information
> > > > [3]
> > > > https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_
> > > > Initiative_project_details
> > > >
> > > > On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 11:48 AM, Wes Moran 
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Hello Wikimedia community,
> > > > >
> > > > > It’s our delight to inform you that we received a US$3,015,000
> grant
> > > from
> > > > > the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
> > > > >  [1] to
> > > > expedite
> > > > > development of structured data on Commons. The grant will be given
> > over
> > > > the
> > > > > course of three years, and will allow us to develop a team, in
> > > > > collaboration with the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Deutschland, that
> > can
> > > > > focus on integrating the structured data features of Wikidata in

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Exciting update about development of structured data on Commons

[Denny Vrandečić]

Also, to add, for this particular grant I can really only look positively
at the openness surrounding the writing of the grant. There have been
emails on this list inviting input and discussion when the grant proposal
was underway, a lot of content was available on-wiki, and an effort was
made to ensure that the project was not only aligned with the planning of
the Foundation but also with the community - which is indeed particularly
important given the restricted nature of the funding.

I congratulate everyone involved for securing this grant, for the process
with its improved transparency, and I am very much looking forward to see
the project implemented!

Denny




On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 3:01 PM Lisa Gruwell  wrote:

Hi Pete and Gerard-

I just wanted to give my thoughts on restricted gifts.  Like most things,
there are both good and bad restricted gifts.  They can be bad if a funder
is making a well-intentioned gift that none-the-less pulls the organization
in direction that they were not planning to go.  Or even worse, when a
funder pays for something outside of an org's plans that has ongoing
maintenance cost that are not covered in the grant.

This is why the WMF board reviews all restricted grants per our gift policy
.  Those are the types of
dynamics that the board considers when they review a restricted grant.

Structured Data on Commons was in our product roadmap, so this grant is not
diverting our attention.  The grant simply enables us to accelerate the
work we were planning to do.  In terms of restrictions, we have to follow
through with the plan we submitted.  In other words, do what we said we are
going to do.  I think that accountability is a good thing.  And the Sloan
Foundation is a great long-term funder of WMF.  If something changes as the
work progress, I have no doubt we could have a reasonable conversation with
them about adjusting the plan.

Best,
Lisa

On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Gerard Meijssen 
wrote:

> Hoi,
> Maybe restricted but the subject matter is exactly what we want anyway.
> Where I have my reservations is that Wikidata will be set in stone and
> stuff that just is not right will be with us for forever. With more money
> it does not need to be a huge problem because it makes it more manageable.
> Thanks,
>   GerardM
>
> On 9 January 2017 at 21:52, Pete Forsyth  wrote:
>
> > Structured data on Commons is a huge and important area -- for one
thing,
> > the whole Media Viewer project would have gone much more smoothly if
> there
> > were underlying structured data to rely on. Kudos to WMF and Sloan for
> the
> > focus on this issue!
> >
> > If I'm not mistaken, this is by far the most extravagant restricted
grant
> > in the history of the WMF. I believe the Stanton Foundation's usability
> > grant ($890k in 2008)[1] and Public Policy Initiative grant ($1.2
million
> > in 2010)[2] are the only ones that comes close. In the past, WMF board
> > members have expressed great skepticism about -- specifically -- the
> Sloan
> > Foundation's influence, when it sought to place an observer in WMF board
> > meetings. A former WMF Executive Director has written at length about
the
> > dangers of restricted grants.
> >
> > It appears there is a new theory in play around restricted grants. Will
> > somebody be expressing it publicly? Will the past practice of publishing
> > the details of the grant expectations be followed?[3]
> >
> > -Pete
> > --
> > [[User:Peteforsyth]]
> >
> > [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/12/03/improved-usability-
> > in-our-future/
> > [2]
> > https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/May_
> > 2010_Wikimedia_Foundation_will_engage_academic_experts_
> > and_students_to_improve_public_policy_information
> > [3]
> > https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_
> > Initiative_project_details
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 11:48 AM, Wes Moran  wrote:
> >
> > > Hello Wikimedia community,
> > >
> > > It’s our delight to inform you that we received a US$3,015,000 grant
> from
> > > the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
> > >  [1] to
> > expedite
> > > development of structured data on Commons. The grant will be given
over
> > the
> > > course of three years, and will allow us to develop a team, in
> > > collaboration with the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Deutschland, that
can
> > > focus on integrating the structured data features of Wikidata into
> > > describing the media files on Commons.
> > >
> > > This work will allow us to expedite features both on the Wikidata
> > > development roadmap, and in other products supported by the Wikimedia
> > > Foundation. The grant also provides funding to ensure that movement
> > > stakeholders, like Wiki Loves Monuments and GLAM-Wiki program leaders,
> > and
> > > external partners who contribute heavily to Commons, such as GLAMs,
can
> > be
> > > involved in the development.
> > >
> > > We have drafted a 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikidata] GPS data shift

[Denny Vrandečić]

Uh, I leave the details to someone who knows better :) - it is a while
since I checked, and it might indeed be underspecified right now.

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one widely used coordinate
system for each Mars and Titan. I might be wrong. But in the worst case we
would need to specify the default system for either.

I am not saying that the whole thing is not a problem - I am just saying
that the data model, as spec'ed and implemented, has a space for solving
it. It is obvious that without support in the UI the whole thing is
slightly moot anyway.



On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 2:23 PM Jan Macura  wrote:

>
> 2016-10-07 20:34 GMT+02:00 Denny Vrandečić :
>
> Wikidata allows to set a coordinate system - it is called a globe or
> coordinate system - on every coordinate. This would be the natural place to
> specify whether it is WGS84 or GDA94 or another system. Most of them are
> Q2, which, as per data model, is indeed WGS84
>
>
> Hi Denny,
>
> can you be more specific about this? So when there is no explicit value in
> the *globe* parametre of GlobeCoordinate, then it is treated as Q2 (this
> corelates with the dumps and every RDF serialization)? It would imply
> geographic coordinates (not the same as WGS84!!). Or is it considered to be
> specifically WGS84, which is Q11902211?
> And how you tell the coordinate system for other celestial bodies like
> Q111 (Mars) or Q2565 (Titan)?
>
> Thanks a lot
>  Jan
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] GPS data shift

[Denny Vrandečić]

Wikidata allows to set a coordinate system - it is called a globe or
coordinate system - on every coordinate. This would be the natural place to
specify whether it is WGS84 or GDA94 or another system. Most of them are
Q2, which, as per data model, is indeed WGS84.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel#Geographic_locations

Unfortunately this is currently not being displayed or edited in the UI,
but the backend has the data. In theory.



On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 10:17 PM Sam Klein  wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 2:01 AM, Joseph Seddon 
> wrote:
>
> > currently there is no clear indication within Wikipedia articles
> > and as far as I can tell within Wikidata as to both what *datum* and what
> > *version* any particular coordinate relates to, there is no guarantee
> that
> > any particular coordinate would be any more correct than it was before.
> >
>
> This definitely should be fixed on the wikidata side.  Whether article
> editors are savvy enough to know and enter this data is another question;
> but at least the geotemplates should have fields for it and you can assume
> that if those are empty some {person/bot hybrid} that understands that
> nuance should fill them in.
>
> ~S
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Account of the events leading to James Heilman's removal

[Denny Vrandečić]

Just a few points of clarification:

* I have, to the best of my memory, passed on information only with the
understanding of my sources. If any of my sources disagrees with that,
please send me a message - I want to know and understand that I made a
mistake there.
* We are not talking about the information being shared with the whole
Board (this was not clear from my account, sorry). No one was asked to
forward information to the whole Board. Instead, external legal counsel was
collecting the documents: they were sent to the lawyers, under
attorney-client privilege, not to the whole Board or the Task Force.
* I am surprised to see James state that he was informed at a later point
that his duty as a trustee is towards the WMF, although that explains a few
things. He was sitting in the same room when we received legal training at
our first Board meeting, and he also signed (and, I assume, read) the same
documents I had.

I am rather sad to see so many assumptions of bad faith. I was hoping that
by being more open about the events, it would help with transparency and
healing. It was not easy to have this account published in the first place,
and now I start to see that it was possibly a mistake.

It strengthens my resolution to stay away from Wikimedia politics, and I
hope that this will free up the time and energy to get more things done. I
am thankful and full of respect for anyone who is willing to deal with that
topic in a constructive manner.


On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 3:46 AM Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:

> 04.05.2016 22:00 "Katie Horn"  napisał(a):
>
> >
> > Either way, I would be deeply encouraged to see progress in creating a
> more
> > robust and predictable connection between the board and WMF staff.
> Whether
> > that connection ends up being a board liaison or something else, I
> suspect
> > that well-established lines of communication would go a very long way
> > toward eliminating the possibility that large numbers of staff will feel
> > like they have to disassemble the whistleblower policy in the first
> place.
>
> A conversation on how to address (a) connection with the staff and (b)
> revise the whistleblower policy has started and we will try to address both
> of these issues in the near future.
> Best,
>
> Dj
>
> >
> > -Katie
> >
> > On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Tim Starling 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > On 04/05/16 12:02, MZMcBride wrote:
> > > > https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Whistleblower_policy
> > > >
> > > > You mention anonymous complaints and serious concerns, but the
> current
> > > > whistleblower policy seems to be pretty clear that it only applies to
> > > > laws, rules, and regulations. The text of the policy indicates, to me
> at
> > > > least, that even alleged violations of other Wikimedia Foundation
> > > policies
> > > > would not be covered by the whistleblower policy. Would you extend
> the
> > > > Wikimedia Foundation whistleblower policy to cover regular (i.e.,
> > > > non-legal and non-regulatory) grievances?
> > >
> > > The third and fourth paragraphs are not so narrow, but otherwise, yes,
> > > I think it should be extended.
> > >
> > > > My understanding is that the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
> > > sought
> > > > out and then appointed a tech-minded chief executive, who came from a
> > > tech
> > > > organization, in order to "transform" the Wikimedia Foundation from
> an
> > > > educational non-profit to be more like a traditional tech company.
> Many
> > > > employees of the Wikimedia Foundation disagreed with this decision
> and
> > > the
> > > > chief executive made a series of poor hires who ran amok (looking at
> you,
> > > > Damon), but I don't think anything rose to the level of illegal
> behavior.
> > >
> > > You are just regurgitating Lila's email. No transformation was
> > > attempted or executed. The first time I heard about this supposed
> > > conflict over strategy was when Lila posted her claims about it to
> > > this list, shortly before her resignation.
> > >
> > > In fact, employees disagreed with Lila's decision to pursue large
> > > restricted grants for a stupid pet project, in secret, supported by
> > > almost nobody, without Board knowledge let alone approval. This has
> > > nothing to do with education versus technology (if such a dichotomy
> > > can even be said to exist).
> > >
> > > Damon merely suggested the project in question, he did not "run amok".
> > >
> > > -- Tim Starling
> > >
> > >
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > 
> > >
> > ___
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> > New mess

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Account of the events leading to James Heilman's removal

[Denny Vrandečić]

The protection of any personal or confidential information was, to the best
of my knowledge, at all time guaranteed and has not been compromised. The
official task force, set up by the Trustees, worked under the standards of
keeping confidentiality, obviously. I thought this goes without saying, but
I am explicating it.



On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 10:44 AM Adam Wight  wrote:

> What Michel said...  This is a very interesting story, but I'm left to
> imagine some crucial, looming details.
>
> I have no first-hand knowledge of what really happened, but your
> description of staff contacting a small number of Board members, and asking
> for confidentiality, strongly indicates that the staff were fearful of some
> sort of retribution, and each chose Board members who they personally
> believed would protect them.  This is an educated guess, based on our siege
> mentality at the Foundation last November.
>
> When the four of you were asked to hand over all information about the
> case, that would naturally include any personal email communications.  If I
> were in your position, I would have respected the agreement of confidence
> with anyone who had contacted me, up to and maybe even beyond a subpoena,
> unless I had the authors' permission to release.  If there is some legal
> reason the Board members are not allowed behave according to this standard,
> we need to make it very clear going forward.  I doubt the staff would have
> had these conversations if this is the case, and they had been informed so.
>
> I'm also concerned that there seems to be a conflation between several
> incidents--the original "Gang of Four" investigation was clearly a huge
> mess and I would hope that apologies were made all around for what happened
> there.  However, protecting some sort of possibly compromising or personal
> information is another thing entirely.
>
> Hoping for more clarity,
> Adam
>
> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 10:39 AM, Michel Vuijlsteke 
> wrote:
>
> > Just to be sure I understand the issue: staff members reached out
> > specifically to the four of you and asked for confidentiality, and then
> the
> > Board demanded 'all documents', presumably including some confidential
> > staff information, and James only very reluctantly shared it?
> >
> > Michel
> > On 2 May 2016 19:10, "Denny Vrandečić"  wrote:
> >
> > > In the following I want to present a personal account of events leading
> > to
> > > James’ removal as a Board member, as I remember them. It was written
> > while
> > > I was still on the Board, and the Board agreed on having it sent. The
> > text
> > > was heavily discussed and edited amongst members of the Board, but in
> the
> > > end it remains my personal account. I realize that it potentially
> > includes
> > > post-factum sensemaking, affecting my recollection of events.
> > >
> > > October 1 and 2 2015, Dariusz, James, Patricio and I received phone
> calls
> > > from a small number of Wikimedia Foundation staff expressing concerns
> > about
> > > the Foundation. They asked explicitly for confidentiality. I wanted to
> > > approach the whole Board immediately, but due to considerations for
> > > confidentiality, the sensitive nature of the topic, and the lack of an
> HR
> > > head at the time, the others decided against at this moment.
> Effectively,
> > > this created a conspiracy within the Board from then on for the
> following
> > > weeks.
> > >
> > > With Patricio’s approval, Dariusz and James started to personally
> collect
> > > and ask for reports from staff. Unfortunately, this investigation was
> not
> > > formally approved by the whole Board. It was also conducted in a manner
> > > that would not secure a professional and impartial process. After a few
> > > weeks, we finally reached out to the rest of Board members. They
> > > immediately recognized the necessity for a separate formal task force
> > which
> > > was set up very quickly.
> > >
> > > The formal task force was created end of October. This task force
> > involved
> > > outside legal counsel and conducted professional fact finding. The
> first
> > > request of the task force to the Board members was to ask for all
> > documents
> > > and notes pertaining to the case. Unfortunately, although there has
> been
> > > more than a week of time, this has not happened in full.
> > >
> > > The task force presented its result at the November Board meeting,
> where
> > it
> > > was di

[Wikimedia-l] Account of the events leading to James Heilman's removal

[Denny Vrandečić]

In the following I want to present a personal account of events leading to
James’ removal as a Board member, as I remember them. It was written while
I was still on the Board, and the Board agreed on having it sent. The text
was heavily discussed and edited amongst members of the Board, but in the
end it remains my personal account. I realize that it potentially includes
post-factum sensemaking, affecting my recollection of events.

October 1 and 2 2015, Dariusz, James, Patricio and I received phone calls
from a small number of Wikimedia Foundation staff expressing concerns about
the Foundation. They asked explicitly for confidentiality. I wanted to
approach the whole Board immediately, but due to considerations for
confidentiality, the sensitive nature of the topic, and the lack of an HR
head at the time, the others decided against at this moment. Effectively,
this created a conspiracy within the Board from then on for the following
weeks.

With Patricio’s approval, Dariusz and James started to personally collect
and ask for reports from staff. Unfortunately, this investigation was not
formally approved by the whole Board. It was also conducted in a manner
that would not secure a professional and impartial process. After a few
weeks, we finally reached out to the rest of Board members. They
immediately recognized the necessity for a separate formal task force which
was set up very quickly.

The formal task force was created end of October. This task force involved
outside legal counsel and conducted professional fact finding. The first
request of the task force to the Board members was to ask for all documents
and notes pertaining to the case. Unfortunately, although there has been
more than a week of time, this has not happened in full.

The task force presented its result at the November Board meeting, where it
was discovered during the second day of the Board meeting that the previous
investigation has not provided all available information. Thus, the fact
finding had to be extended into the Board meeting. At the Board meeting
itself, James in particular was repeatedly asked to share his documents,
which only happened on the very last day of the retreat and after several,
increasingly vigorous requests. Some members of the Board were left with an
impression that James was reluctant to cooperate, even though it was
expected that since he participated in an investigation done in an improper
manner, that he would be more collaborative to make up for these mistakes.

Due to that lack of transparency and information sharing, the Board retreat
in November turned out to be extremely ineffective. If we had all
information that was gathered available to the Board in due time, and if
that information was gathered more openly in the first place, the Board
could have acted more effectively.

I was worried that the confidentiality of the Board would not be
maintained, and I was particularly worried about James’ lack of
understanding of confidential matters, a perception also fueled by his
noncooperation and conduct. Some of his behaviour since unfortunately
confirmed my worries. I raised this as an issue to the Board.

While discussing the situation, James remained defensive, in my eyes
answered questions partially, and, while formally expressing apologies,
never conveyed that he really took ownership of his actions or understood
what he did wrong. This lead to a malfunctioning Board, and in order to fix
the situation I suggested James’ removal.

I voted for James’ removal from the Board because of his perceived
reluctance to cooperate with the formal investigation, his withholding of
information when asked for, his secrecy towards other Board members, even
once the conspiracy was lifted, and him never convincingly taking
responsibility for and ownership of his actions and mistakes. This is why I
get triggered if he positions himself as an avatar of transparency. The
whole topic of the Knowledge Engine - although it played a part in the
events that lead to the November meeting - did not, for me, in any way
influence the vote on James’ removal. It was solely his conduct during and
following the November meeting.

I am glad to see that, since James’ removal until I left, the Board has
been functioning better.

I hope that this account helps a little bit towards renewing our culture of
transparency, but even more I hope for understanding. The Board consists of
volunteers and of humans - they cannot react in real-time to events, as the
Board was never set up to do so. Trustees - myself included - made
mistakes. By opening up about them, I hope that we can facilitate a faster
and more complete healing process, and also have this knowledge and
experience available for future Board members and the community.

Denny
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quality issues

[Denny Vrandečić]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 4:18 AM Andreas Kolbe  wrote:

> According to Denny, Wikidata, under its CC0 licence, must not import data
> from Share-Alike sources. He reconfirmed this yesterday when I asked him
> whether he still stood by that.
>
> In practice though we have Wikidata importing massive amounts of data from
> Wikipedia, which was a Share-Alike source last time I looked. Isn't
> Wikidata then infringing Wikipedia contributors' rights?
>
> Why is it okay to import data from the CC BY-SA Wikipedia, but not from
> European CC BY-SA population statistics?
>
>
Andreas, what I said was that Wikidata must not import data from a data
source licensed under Share-Alike date source.

The important thing that differentiates what I said from what you think I
said is "import data from a data source". Wikipedia is not a data source,
but text. Extracting facts or data from a text is a very different thing
than taking data from one place and put it in another place. There was no
database that contains the content of Wikipedia and that can be queried.
Indeed, that is the whole reason why Wikidata has been started in the first
place.

In fact, extracting facts or data from one text and then writing a
Wikipedia article is what Wikipedians do all the time, and the license of
the original text we read has no effect on the license of the output text.

So, there is no such thing as an import of data from Wikipedia, because
Wikipedia is not a database.

I have repeatedly pointed you to
   http://simia.net/wiki/Free_data
and you yourself have repeatedly pointed to
   https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights
so I would assume that you would have by now read these and developed an
understanding of these issues. I am not a lawyer, and my understanding of
these issues is also lacking, but I wanted at least to point out that you
are misquoting me.

Please, would you mind to correct your misquoting of me in the places where
you did so, or at least point to this email for further context?
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[Wikimedia-l] On toxic communities

[Denny Vrandečić]

Very interesting read (via Brandon Harris):

http://recode.net/2015/07/07/doing-something-about-the-impossible-problem-of-abuse-in-online-games/

"the vast majority of negative behavior ... did not originate from the
persistently negative online citizens; in fact, 87 percent of online
toxicity came from the neutral and positive citizens just having a bad day
here or there."

"... incidences of homophobia, sexism and racism ... have fallen to a
combined 2 percent of all games. Verbal abuse has dropped by more than 40
percent, and 91.6 percent of negative players change their act and never
commit another offense after just one reported penalty."

I have plenty of ideas how to apply this to Wikipedia, but I am sure Dario
and his team as well :) - and some opportunity for the communities to use
such results.

Cheers,
Denny
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] GA Stats using Wikimedia Stats

[Denny Vrandečić]

Wikidata should know whether an article has a badge or not (see here:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1156 )


On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 4:14 AM Tito Dutta  wrote:

> Thanks a lot. It was very helpful
> No, most of these Wikipedias don't have such categories. I'll check
> further.
> Regards.
>
> On 19 August 2015 at 16:40, Erik Zachte  wrote:
>
> > Hi Tito,
> >
> > Wikistats can collect pageviews for a certain category and its
> > subcategories.
> >
> > In English Wikipedia I just ran the script for categories
> > WikiProject_Featured_articles and WikiProject_Good_articles
> >
> > Featured articles, 1 pageviews 2 categories included
> > 1
> >
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2015-06/pageviews_wp-en_cat_WikiProject_Featured_articles_2015-06.html
> > 2
> >
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2015-06/categories_wp-en_cat_WikiProject_Featured_articles_2015-06.html
> >
> > Good articles, 1 pageviews 2 categories included
> > 1
> >
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2015-06/pageviews_wp-en_cat_WikiProject_Good_articles_2015-06.html
> > 2
> >
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2015-06/categories_wp-en_cat_WikiProject_Good_articles_2015-06.html
> >
> > I you have similar categories for the Indian languages I can try to parse
> > those  as well
> > (I say 'try' as I vaguely remember an open bug with non western letters
> in
> > category name not being parsed well, I might need to look into that)
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Erik
> >
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
> > wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Asaf Bartov
> > Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 4:39
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] GA Stats using Wikimedia Stats
> >
> > No.  That site does not provide that data.
> >
> >A.
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:33 AM, Tito Dutta  wrote:
> >
> > > Hello,
> > > Is there any way to find Good article stats/details (of mainly Indian
> > > Language Wikis) using http://stats.wikimedia.org/?
> > > ___
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Asaf Bartov
> > Wikimedia Foundation 
> >
> > Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
> > sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
> > https://donate.wikimedia.org
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] While Election committee counts the votes...

[Denny Vrandečić]

25% turnout is amazing!! Thank you, and congratulations to WM UA,
particularly given the political situation at home.

I also collected a few thoughts about the elections here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny/Thoughts_Board_Election_2015

Thanks to the Election Committee and everyone else out there getting the
word out, fellow voters, and fellow candidates!



On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 5:34 PM James Alexander 
wrote:

> On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 3:20 PM, James Alexander  >
> wrote:
>
> > Ukraine has done great this year! Your work clearly paid off, currently
> > 11.74% of the eligible users on ukWiki have voted (making it one of the
> > highest % wikis, and the highest if you only count medium/large wikis
> some
> > of the smaller ones get an advantage when % is factored in). It also
> > accounts for 2.58% of the total votes compared to less then 1% (.99%) of
> > the whole electorate.
> >
> >
> Mea Culpa: For the record I was double counting many of the eligible voters
> here (we had an old voter list that was also being counted). The correct
> numbers for ukWiki would be just over 25% of eligible voters voting and
> 2.61% of the total votes (still .99% of the electorate).
>
> We will certainly be releasing more detailed results for projects with
> results and in the post mortem.
>
> James Alexander
> Community Advocacy
> Wikimedia Foundation
> (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A transition and a new chapter.

[Denny Vrandečić]

Erik,

thank you! Thank you for so many, many things. Even though we did not
always agree in all details, I was always very happy to know to have
someone who believes in the same ideals and who is effective in promoting
actions towards common goals.

WMF will be a different place without you.

Again, thank you for your service to our vision,
Denny



On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 3:30 AM Quim Gil  wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 3:10 AM, phoebe ayers 
> wrote:
>
> > Every so often when we talk, you will surprise me by telling me about
> > one more thing in the Wikimedia universe that you thought of or
> > created or were involved in over the past many years that I didn't
> > realize you had a role in. It seems the list is never-ending.
> >
>
> /me looks at the MediaWiki logo [1], thinking that perhaps *now* really
> starts to be the time to update it...  ;)
>
> > I’m very interested in the technical challenges of federated
> collaboration
>
> See you in the Federation, then (pun intended, but below two layers of joke
> I'm serious). Something tells me that it will be very difficult for you to
> stop contributing to Wikimedia in innovative ways. When you joined, the
> innovative way of contributing was from the inside. Chances are that
> nowadays the innovative collaboration will come increasingly from the
> outside, through APIs and, er, federated collaboration. Let's have a
> conversation with beer, or vice versa.
>
> But what I'm really really curious about is what Erik Möller will do when
> he recovers his individual freedom, not having to act and speak on behalf
> of hundred employees and 'the movement'. Ten years is a lot of time [2],
> but then again not so much. Thank you, good luck, and please send a URL to
> subscribe to or watch.
>
> [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MediaWiki_logo.png
> [2] http://www.infoanarchy.org/en/User:Erik (shared with tremendous
> respect
> and a smile)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Q on the 2013 elections re voter breakdown

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thanks, Katie, James,

yes, the list on vote.wikimedia.org was quite useful for a first check.
What I was looking for was exactly such a list, but annotated with which
requirements they fulfilled, but as James says, it can be surmised mostly.

I was curious whether staff and contractors of the Foundation or the
MediaWiki developers had a particularly large impact on the results,
especially considering that the number of voters have declined so much last
time, but looking through that list it does not seem like that.

Thank you for the help,
Denny


On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 5:25 PM James Alexander 
wrote:

> Aye, as Katie said we do not keep track of who voted under what
> requirements (and many of them are, indeed, eligible under multiple
> requirements). You can see a list at
> https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/list/290 and probably
> surmise some of it from there but once they voted, if they were eligible,
> they went into one giant bucket.
>
> James Alexander
> Community Advocacy
> Wikimedia Foundation
> (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
>
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Katie Chan  wrote:
>
> > On 06/04/2015 18:14, Denny Vrandečić wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > regarding the Wikimedia Foundation elections 2013, I was trying to
> find a
> > > breakdown of the voters, i.e. how many voted based on which
> requirements,
> > > i.e. as editors, developers, staff and contractors, and board members,
> > but
> > > I could not find anything.
> > >
> > > I would appreciate a pointer to that data.
> >
> > As far as I can remember, that's not something that's collected. A list
> > of eligible voters are created and fed to the software, which either let
> > or don't let someone vote. All votes are recorded the same regardless of
> > how someone is qualified to vote, which may of course be via more than
> > one way.
> >
> > Katie
> >
> >
> > --
> > Katie Chan
> > Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the
> > author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the
> > author is associated with or employed by.
> >
> >
> > Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
> > - Heinrich Heine
> >
> > ---
> > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
> > http://www.avast.com
> >
> >
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[Wikimedia-l] Q on the 2013 elections re voter breakdown

[Denny Vrandečić]

Hi,

regarding the Wikimedia Foundation elections 2013, I was trying to find a
breakdown of the voters, i.e. how many voted based on which requirements,
i.e. as editors, developers, staff and contractors, and board members, but
I could not find anything.

I would appreciate a pointer to that data.

Cheers,
Denny
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Wikidata-l] Birthday gift: Missing Wikipedia links (was Re: Wikidata turns two!)

[Denny Vrandečić]

Forwarding to Wikimedia-l to five context to James' reply. Sorry for
cross-posting.

-- Forwarded message -
From: Denny Vrandečić 
Date: Wed Oct 29 2014 at 10:56:48 AM
Subject: [Wikidata-l] Birthday gift: Missing Wikipedia links (was Re:
Wikidata turns two!)
To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. <
wikidat...@lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia Mailing List <
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


Folks,

as you know, many Googlers are huge fans of Wikipedia. So here’s a little
gift for Wikidata’s second birthday.

Some of my smart colleagues at Google have run a few heuristics and
algorithms in order to discover Wikipedia articles in different languages
about the same topic which are missing language links between the articles.
The results contain more than 35,000 missing links with a high confidence
according to these algorithms. We estimate a precision of about 92+% (i.e.
we assume that less than 8% of those are wrong, based on our evaluation).
The dataset covers 60 Wikipedia language editions.

Here are the missing links, available for download from the WMF labs
servers:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/merge_candidate.20141028.csv

The data is published under CC-0.

What can you do with the data? Since it is CC-0, you can do anything you
want, obviously, but here are a few suggestions:

There’s a small tool on WMF labs that you can use to verify the links (it
displays the articles side by side from a language pair you select, and
then you can confirm or contradict the merge):

https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry

The tool does not do the change in Wikidata itself, though (we thought it
would be too invasive if we did that). Instead, the results of the human
evaluation are saved on WMF labs. You are welcome to take the tool and
extend it with the possibility to upload the change directly on Wikidata,
if you so wish, or, once the data is verified, to upload the results.

Also, Magnus Manske is already busy uploading the data to the Wikidata
game, so you can very soon also play the merge game on the data directly.
He is also creating the missing items on Wikidata. Thanks Magnus for a very
pleasant cooperation!

I want to call out to my colleagues at Google who created the dataset -
Jiang Bian and Si Li - and to Yicheng Huang, the intern who developed the
tool on labs.

I hope that this small data release can help a little with further
improving the quality of Wikidata and Wikipedia! Thank you all, you are
awesome!

Cheers,
Denny



On Wed Oct 29 2014 at 10:52:05 AM Lydia Pintscher <
lydia.pintsc...@wikimedia.de> wrote:

Hey folks :)

Today Wikidata is turning two. It amazes me what we've achieved in
just 2 years. We've built an incredible project that is set out to
change the world. Thank you everyone who has been a part of this so
far.
We've put together some notes and opinions. And there are presents as
well! Check them out and leave your birthday wishes:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Second_Birthday


Cheers
Lydia

--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.

Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
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Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia and the politics of encryption

[Denny Vrandečić]

There are three groups to consider, readers, contributors without and
contributors with specific rights that allow them access to data which is
not publicly visible anyway:

For readers: Readers will not have reduced access to knowledge. I think
that runs against our mission. There are a number of possible reactions:
1) nothing, and the readers cannot access this knowledge anymore
2) readers move to alternatives like Baidu Knows
3) an HTTP proxy will be set up by a third party, giving access to readers
without the supervision and guidance of the WMF, and potentially with
technical and even more serious security issues
What is the advantage for readers to not have access to the HTTP version?

For contributors without specific rights:
 1) what they do is publicly visible anyway, and logged. What is in danger
is the connection between them and their login. Would HTTPS help with that?
2) most of these contributors do not touch sensitive issues. Why block them
out? For what advantage?

For contributors with specific rights:
1) HTTPS only. Putting the contributors themselves in risk is bad enough,
but compromising further contributors is not acceptable.
2) How many would be affected by this anyway? I would be pleasantly
surprised if it is more than a handful.

I think this is an important and hard discussion, and I hope for wide
participation. Thank you Erik, for starting it.

Cheers,
Denny



2013/8/31 Erik Moeller 

> Hi folks,
>
> As many of you know, this week we enabled HTTPS for logged-in users of
> Wikimedia projects. See:
>
>
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/28/https-default-logged-in-users-wikimedia-sites/
>
> We have geographically exempted users geo-located to China or Iran
> from this [1], because these countries mostly block HTTPS traffic and
> requiring HTTPS for logged-in users would make it impossible for users
> in these countries to log in.
>
> Long term, we’d like to increase HTTPS coverage further, initially by
> marking the HTTPS versions of our pages as "canonical", which would
> cause search engines to refer to them instead of the unencrypted
> content. This would make issues with countries that block HTTPS
> traffic even more complex to deal with.
>
> HTTPS for editors is important because it is otherwise trivial to
> sniff account credentials, especially when users use unencrypted
> connections such as open wireless networks. This could potentially
> enable an attacker to gain access to an account with significant
> privileges, such as checkuser credentials. Beyond that, HTTPS makes it
> harder for attackers (individuals, organizations, governments) to
> monitor user behavior of readers and editors. It’s not perfect by any
> means, but it’s a step towards more privacy and security.
>
> There are many sites on the web now that use HTTPS for all
> transactions. For example, Twitter and Facebook use HTTPS by default.
> Both sites are also completely blocked in mainland China. [2]
>
> Disabling HTTPS-by-default in regions where HTTPS is blocked for
> political reasons of course also exposes affected users to monitoring
> and credentials-theft -- which is likely part of the political
> motivation for blocking it in the first place. Therefore, our current
> exemption is an explicit choice to _not_ give users a degree of
> security that we give to everyone else, for the simple reason that
> their government would otherwise completely limit their access.
>
> If they know how to make HTTPS work in their region, these users will
> still be able to use it by explicitly visiting the HTTPS URLs or use
> an extension such as HTTPSEverywhere to enforce HTTPS usage.
>
> In the long term, the Wikimedia movement is faced with a choice, which
> is inherently political: Should we indefinitely sustain security
> exceptions for regions that prevent the use of encryption, or should
> we shift to an alternative strategy? How do we answer that question?
>
> We can, of course, ask users in the affected countries. Given that
> this may lead to degradation or loss of access, users are likely to be
> opposed, and indeed, when plans to expand HTTPS usage were announced,
> a group of Chinese Wikipedians published an open letter asking for
> exemptions to be implemented:
>
>
> https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E5%BC%BA%E5%88%B6%E5%8A%A0%E5%AF%86%E7%99%BB%E5%BD%95/openletter
>
> This was a big part of what drove the decision to implement exemptions.
>
> The bigger consideration here, however, is whether any such
> accommodation achieves positive or negative long term effects. The
> argument against it goes like this: If we accommodate the PRC’s or
> Iran’s censorship practices, we are complicit in their attempts to
> monitor and control their citizenry. If a privileged user’s
> credentials (e.g. Checkuser) are misused by the government through
> monitoring of unencrypted traffic, for example, this is an action that
> would not have been possible without our exemption. This could
> potentially expose even user

Re: [Wikimedia-l] is wikipedia zero illegal because it violates net neutrality?

[Denny Vrandečić]

2013/8/27 Federico Leva (Nemo) 

> Denny Vrandečić, 27/08/2013 11:39:
>
>  That's like saying
>> "printing out an article of Wikipedia and giving it to a student is a
>> violation of net neutrality because we didn't print out the rest of the
>> Web
>> and gave it to them too".
>>
>
> This analogy doesn't work very well because the "we" here is most likely
> not an ISP and it's only ISP being subject to net neutrality.
>
> Nemo
>

Exactly. Neither is Wikipedia Zero an ISP, which is why the analogy does
work. :)

Denny
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] is wikipedia zero illegal because it violates net neutrality?

[Denny Vrandečić]

If customers would be signing up for access to the net, and if the ISP
would charge differently whether they access Wikipedia or whether they
access Facebook, yes, that would be a violation of net neutrality.

But in this case we are not talking about providing access to the net. We
are talking about providing access to Wikipedia. That's like saying
"printing out an article of Wikipedia and giving it to a student is a
violation of net neutrality because we didn't print out the rest of the Web
and gave it to them too".

I still think the question "does Wikipedia zero violate net neutrality" is
simply a categorical error (i.e. it errs in the sense that the categories
in the question do not match), and nothing I have seen convinced me
otherwise so far.

P.S., and just a sidenote: Britannica did not loose most of its reach due
to Wikipedia, but most of its business crumbled due to Encarta and cheap
CD-ROM based encyclopedias. When Wikipedia appeared in 2001, Encyclopedias
were already in a dismal state.




2013/8/27 Robert Rohde 

> On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 2:13 PM, George Herbert
>  wrote:
> 
> > Again: with Wikipedia, we do not have particular mutually beneficial
> > relationships which this would be encouraging, and the service provider
> > isn't really in a position to damage a Wikipedia competitor by doing
> this,
> > as far as I can see.
> >
> 
> >
> > If you can explain a manner in which the underlying monopoly / advantage
> > issue IS a problem here, please point it out.  If there is one that I do
> > not see then that forms a valid reason to reconsider.
>
> I'm willing to play devil's advocate here.  Personally, I don't see
> Wikipedia Zero as bad or a serious threat to net neutrality, but I can
> certainly understand the argument that free access to Wikipedia might
> disadvantage other content providers and discourage people from paying
> for mobile internet.
>
> To give a timely (if rather American) example, the Video Music Awards
> were last night.  If I wanted to know what happened, I could visit the
> VMA site, or many news sites, or Wikipedia which was updated in near
> real time.  In the framework of Wikipedia Zero, getting the info from
> Wikipedia is free which would rationally discourage traffic to other
> news sites or VMA's own site.
>
> The same argument can be made for other reference websites (e.g.
> About.com, Encyclopedia Britannica Online).  If they cost money to
> visit and we don't, then they are at a disadvantage when it comes to
> getting traffic.
>
> Free information is incredibly powerful, and I think we all agree that
> it is generally a Good Thing.  This is doubly true in many of the poor
> nations where Wikipedia Zero partnerships have been formed, as poverty
> can make data charges seem prohibitive.  However, the presence of free
> information is also disruptive to for-profit information providers.
> For example, we all know how the internet has impacted newspaper
> sales, or how the internet (and sites like Wikipedia) ultimately led
> Encyclopedia Britannica to close their print operation.  Free
> information is powerful, and sometimes that power will disrupt or
> destroy for-profit information providers.
>
> Consider for a moment, how the story might sound if we changed the
> names a bit.  Suppose National Monopoly Telecom partnered with Google
> to bring Maps and News to poor people with no data charges?  Is that
> just as good?  What if they had ads on the pages which were presented
> without data charges?  What if it were Microsoft instead of Google?
> Etc.  The end users get a free service, and presumably that service is
> useful, and quite possibly most users will be glad they have it.
> Still, it is true that Wikipedia Zero and similar programs do cause
> some content to have a privileged place in the marketplace over other
> content, and that will drive traffic to the free option and reduce
> traffic to competitors.  Depending on your point of view, maybe that's
> not a big deal, but if you are a hardcore advocate of net neutrality
> then one might well argue that ISPs should treat all content equally
> and not have different rates for equivalent amounts of data coming
> from different sources.  It is well-formed criticism of the Wikipedia
> Zero project.  Personally, I don't think the principle of net
> neutrality should be so rigidly adhered to as to discourage the broad
> dissemination of knowledge among people who have historically lacked
> access to it, but I suppose some people might disagree.
>
> -Robert Rohde
>
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Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Frei

Re: [Wikimedia-l] is wikipedia zero illegal because it violates net neutrality?

[Denny Vrandečić]

There is a crucial difference: Wikipedia Zero is not a general way to
provide access to the Internet for free, it provides access to parts of
Wikipedia for free through partnering carriers. Wikipedia Zero is not in
violation of net neutrality in the first place, as Wikipedia Zero is not an
internet service provider and thus it cannot violate net neutrality.

I cannot see how Wikipedia Zero can violate any net neutrality laws in any
countries, as they simply do not apply in this case.

Having said that, I wonder what even the motivation is in trying to suggest
to close programs that provide easier and affordable access to the contents
of Wikimedia sites to a wider population.

The usual disclaimers apply, IANAL, etc.

Cheers,
Denny




2013/8/25 rupert THURNER 

> hi,
>
> most people know some advantage of wikipedia zero and everybody can
> look up the advantages by just typing wikipedia zero into some search
> engine. as i am not sure about the answer and anyway get asked in rare
> cases what i think of wp:zero i guess it should be best answered on
> the mailing list:
>
> is wikipedia zero illegal in some countries because it violates net
> neutrality? and if it is illegal or borderline according to, say,
> netherlands, swiss, or german law, is it appropriate to do it in
> countries where the law is less developed? or should wikimedia
> foundation apply a higher moral standard and just abstain from any
> activity which might be perceived as illegal somewhere?
>
> just for the ones not so sure about net neutrality [1]:
> Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on
> the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by
> user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached
> equipment, and modes of communication.
>
> [1]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
>
> rupert.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Using a rather simple pair like Afrikaans - Dutch or a heavily researched
one like English - Spanish would be giving us a wrong impression of how
this will scale. We should at least add a few random pairs like Yoruba -
Gujarati or Kazakh - Lombard. Most of our 67,000 language pairs that we
will have to cover will fall in the latter group, not in the first two.


2013/8/23 David Cuenca 

> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
> >
> > > As with so many things, it will be hard to assess cost/benefits without
> > > making some effort. A safe bet could be to try with an existing pair or
> > > develop a pair with an estimated high demand.
> >
> > Is there a pair where some work has already been done?
> >
>
> For Apertium there are quite a few already done:
> http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page
>
> Regarding new language pairs, no idea if the priorities for Wikipedia would
> be the same as the priorities the Apertium community has.
> It might be worth considering which languages to prioritize and how to
> measure success or lack thereof.
>
> Cheers,
> Micru
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikidata-l] Meeting about the support of Wiktionary in Wikidata

[Denny Vrandečić]

[Sorry for cross-posting]

Yes, I agree that the OmegaWiki community should be involved in the
discussions, and I pointed GerardM to our proposals whenever and
discussions, using him as a liaison. We also looked and keep looking at the
OmegaWiki data model to see what we are missing.

Our latest proposal is different from OmegaWiki in two major points:

* our primary goal is to provide support for structured data in the
Wiktionaries. We do not plan to be the main resource ourselves, where
readers come to in order to look up something, we merely provide structured
data that a Wiktionary may or may not use. This parallels the role of
Wikidata has with regards to Wikipedia. This also highlights the difference
between Wikidata and OmegaWiki, since OmegaWiki's goal is "to create a
dictionary of all words of all languages, including lexical, terminological
and ontological information."

* a smaller difference is the data model. Wikidata's latest proposal to
support Wiktionary is centered around lexemes, and we do not assume that
there is such a things as a language-independent defined meaning. But no
matter what model we end up with, it is important to ensure that the bulk
of the data could freely flow between the projects, and even though we
might disagree on this issue in the modeling, it is ensured that the
exchange of data is widely possible.

We tried to keep notes on the discussion we had today: <
http://epl.wikimedia.org/p/WiktionaryAndWikidata>

My major take home message for me is that:
* the proposal needs more visual elements, especially a mock-up or sketch
of how it would look like and how it could be used on the Wiktionaries
* there is no generally accepted place for a discussion that involves all
Wiktionary projects. Still, my initial decision to have the discussion on
the Wikidata wiki was not a good one, and it should and will be moved to
Meta.

Having said that, the current proposal for the data model of how to support
Wiktionary with Wikidata seems to have garnered a lot of support so far. So
this is what I will continue building upon. Further comments are extremely
welcomed. You can find it here:



As said, it will be moved to Meta, as soon as the requested mockups and
extensions are done.

Cheers,
Denny





2013/8/10 Samuel Klein 

> Hello,
>
> > On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 6:13 PM, JP Béland  wrote:
> >> I agree. We also need to include the Omegawiki community.
>
> Agreed.
>
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Laura Hale  wrote:
> > Why? The question of moving them into the WMF fold was pretty much no,
> > because the project has an overlapping purpose with Wiktionary,
>
> This is not actually the case.
> There was overwhelming community support for adopting Omegawiki - at
> least simply providing hosting.  It stalled because the code needed a
> security and style review, and Kip (the lead developer) was going to
> put some time into that.  The OW editors and dev were very interested
> in finding a way forward that involved Wikidata and led to a combined
> project with a single repository of terms, meanings, definitions and
> translations.
>
> Recap: The page describing the OmegaWiki project satisfies all of the
> criteria for requesting WMF adoption.
> * It is well-defined on Meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Omegawiki
> * It describes an interesting idea clearly aligned with expanding the
> scope of free knowledge
> * It is not a 'competing' project to Wiktionaries; it is an idea that
> grew out of the Wiktionary community, has been developed for years
> alongside it, and shares many active contributors and linguiaphiles.
> * It started an RfC which garnered 85% support for adoption.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Adopt_OmegaWiki
>
> Even if the current OW code is not used at all for a future Wiktionary
> update -- and this idea was proposed and taken seriously by the OW
> devs -- their community of contributors should be part of discussions
> about how to solve the Wiktionary problem that they were the first to
> dedicate themselves to.
>
> Regards,
> Sam.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikidata-l] Meeting about the support of Wiktionary in Wikidata

[Denny Vrandečić]

We are keeping notes on Etherpad
http://epl.wikimedia.org/p/WiktionaryAndWikidata

If connectivity allows, you can also try to connect via Hangout or Skype or
IRC. Ping aude or me on #wikimedia-wikidata on IRC.

Cheers,
Denny




2013/8/10 Samuel Klein 

> Hello,
>
> > On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 6:13 PM, JP Béland  wrote:
> >> I agree. We also need to include the Omegawiki community.
>
> Agreed.
>
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Laura Hale  wrote:
> > Why? The question of moving them into the WMF fold was pretty much no,
> > because the project has an overlapping purpose with Wiktionary,
>
> This is not actually the case.
> There was overwhelming community support for adopting Omegawiki - at
> least simply providing hosting.  It stalled because the code needed a
> security and style review, and Kip (the lead developer) was going to
> put some time into that.  The OW editors and dev were very interested
> in finding a way forward that involved Wikidata and led to a combined
> project with a single repository of terms, meanings, definitions and
> translations.
>
> Recap: The page describing the OmegaWiki project satisfies all of the
> criteria for requesting WMF adoption.
> * It is well-defined on Meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Omegawiki
> * It describes an interesting idea clearly aligned with expanding the
> scope of free knowledge
> * It is not a 'competing' project to Wiktionaries; it is an idea that
> grew out of the Wiktionary community, has been developed for years
> alongside it, and shares many active contributors and linguiaphiles.
> * It started an RfC which garnered 85% support for adoption.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Adopt_OmegaWiki
>
> Even if the current OW code is not used at all for a future Wiktionary
> update -- and this idea was proposed and taken seriously by the OW
> devs -- their community of contributors should be part of discussions
> about how to solve the Wiktionary problem that they were the first to
> dedicate themselves to.
>
> Regards,
> Sam.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Obviously, this system should be only used as far as it carries. I don't
know how far it might carry us - it might fail miserably, and not get
beyond the "Rome is a city. Rome is in Italy. Rome is known for The
Colosseum, coffee and Vatican City (state)." stage. It might lead to a
glorious future, where we really create an open source system that allows
everyone to write in every language and express a wide range of human
thought.

I am personally hesitant about automatic translations, and whether we can
achieve the coverage (in language pairs) and the quality (of Wikipedia).
But that is only my opinion. A hybrid approach, if we can support it and
build it, would obviously be the safest bet, as both endeavors are rather
risky. I see a lot of possible space for a hybrid system, as you describe
it.

One advantage of my proposal is that it's cost is rather small. For
supporting translation I haven't seen yet a sufficiently sketched proposal
that allows to estimate the potential cost and potential benefit.

Cheers,
Denny






2013/8/7 Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada 

> Most times the best approach is a compilation of several approaches.
>
> Perhaps we can use the Denny system for the little introduction of articles
> (for example: geography, biographies) and optional automatic translation
> for the rest of the article.
>
> I mean, if you follow a red link in a little Wikipedia, it loads the i18n
> template + wikidata bits, so you have a brief summary about the topic. Then
> you can save that "live" generated stub, and expand it (using
> autotraslation from other WIkipedia).
>
>
> 2013/8/7 Anders Wennersten 
>
> > Thanks for sharing your very interesting ideas. While I am not fully
> > support your idea of implementation, I share your basic view of the need
> > and think some of the concepts you introduce has a very high potential to
> > better utilize the power of us having many versions.
> >
> > I have put in my feedback on the talkpage and hope there will be a
> > possibility to evolve this concept further in some type of workgroup. I
> > also see an interesting relation to the talk of machine translation
> where I
> > believe we can do a lot very quickly if we limit the vocabulary to be
> > included in such a tool
> >
> > Anders
> >
> >
> > Denny Vrandečić skrev 2013-08-07 02:20:
> >
> >  I have been thinking about this for a while, and now finally managed to
> >> write it down as a proposal. Details are on meta on the following link,
> >> below is the intro to the proposal:
> >>
> >> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_**
> >> multilingual_Wikipedia<
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia
> >
> >> >
> >>
> >> I tried to anticipate some possible questions and provide answers on the
> >> page. Besides that, I obviously hope that Wikimania could provide a
> place
> >> to start this conversation. And yes, I am aware that the proposal would
> >> lead to a very restrictive solution, but imagine what good it already
> >> could
> >> achieve! And since it is not meant to replace anything, but enrich our
> >> current projects... well, read for yourself.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Denny
> >>
> >>
> >> Wikipedia provides knowledge in more than 200 languages. Whereas a small
> >> number of languages are fortunate enough to have a large Wikipedia, many
> >> of
> >> the language editions are far away from providing a comprehensive
> >> encyclopedia by any measure. There are several approaches towards
> closing
> >> this gap, mostly focusing on increasing the number of contributors to
> the
> >> small language editions or to improve the provision of automatic or
> >> semi-automatic translations of articles. Both are viable. In the
> following
> >> we present a proposal for a different approach, which is based on the
> idea
> >> of multilingual Wikipedia.
> >>
> >> Imagine a small extension to the template system, where a template call
> >> like *{{F12}}* would not be expanded by a call to the template
> >> Template:F12, but rather to Template:F12/en, i.e. the template name with
> >> the selected language code of the reader of the page. A template call
> such
> >> as *{{F12:Q64|Q5519|Q183}}* can be expanded by Template:F12/en into
> >> *“Berlin
> >> is the capital of Germany.”* and by Template:F12/de into *“Berlin ist
> die
> >> Hauptstadt Deutschlands.”* (in the example, the template parameters
> Q5119,
> >>

Re: [Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thank you, Anders. Yes, I published the idea in order to garner feedback
and further evolve it. It is by no means ready-perfect-finished, it is
rather really just a first draft. So suggestions, constructive critique,
and improvements are obviously extremely welcome. --


2013/8/7 Anders Wennersten 

> Thanks for sharing your very interesting ideas. While I am not fully
> support your idea of implementation, I share your basic view of the need
> and think some of the concepts you introduce has a very high potential to
> better utilize the power of us having many versions.
>
> I have put in my feedback on the talkpage and hope there will be a
> possibility to evolve this concept further in some type of workgroup. I
> also see an interesting relation to the talk of machine translation where I
> believe we can do a lot very quickly if we limit the vocabulary to be
> included in such a tool
>
> Anders
>
>
> Denny Vrandečić skrev 2013-08-07 02:20:
>
>> I have been thinking about this for a while, and now finally managed to
>> write it down as a proposal. Details are on meta on the following link,
>> below is the intro to the proposal:
>>
>> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_**
>> multilingual_Wikipedia<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia>
>> >
>>
>> I tried to anticipate some possible questions and provide answers on the
>> page. Besides that, I obviously hope that Wikimania could provide a place
>> to start this conversation. And yes, I am aware that the proposal would
>> lead to a very restrictive solution, but imagine what good it already
>> could
>> achieve! And since it is not meant to replace anything, but enrich our
>> current projects... well, read for yourself.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Denny
>>
>>
>> Wikipedia provides knowledge in more than 200 languages. Whereas a small
>> number of languages are fortunate enough to have a large Wikipedia, many
>> of
>> the language editions are far away from providing a comprehensive
>> encyclopedia by any measure. There are several approaches towards closing
>> this gap, mostly focusing on increasing the number of contributors to the
>> small language editions or to improve the provision of automatic or
>> semi-automatic translations of articles. Both are viable. In the following
>> we present a proposal for a different approach, which is based on the idea
>> of multilingual Wikipedia.
>>
>> Imagine a small extension to the template system, where a template call
>> like *{{F12}}* would not be expanded by a call to the template
>>
>> Template:F12, but rather to Template:F12/en, i.e. the template name with
>> the selected language code of the reader of the page. A template call such
>> as *{{F12:Q64|Q5519|Q183}}* can be expanded by Template:F12/en into
>> *“Berlin
>> is the capital of Germany.”* and by Template:F12/de into *“Berlin ist die
>> Hauptstadt Deutschlands.”* (in the example, the template parameters Q5119,
>>
>> Q64 and Q183 refer to the Wikidata items for capital, Berlin and Germany
>> respectively, which the templates query for the label in the respective
>> language). Sentence by sentence could be created in order to provide for a
>> simple article.
>>
>> That wiki would consist of *content*, i.e. the article pages, possibly
>> just
>> a simple series of template calls, and *frames*, i.e. the templates that
>>
>> lexicalize the parameters of a given template call into a sentence (Note
>> that “sentence” here should not be considered literally. It could be a
>> table, an image, anything). The implementation of the frames can be done
>> in
>> normal wiki template syntax, in Lua, in a novel mechanism, or a mix of
>> these. This would be up to the communities creating them.
>>
>> Read the rest here:
>> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_**
>> multilingual_Wikipedia<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia>
>> >
>>
>>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

I thought so myself, but then I did a bit of research to figure out the
state of natural language generation. I could not find easily a current
state of the art, but I found this list of examples on the KPML website
that is linked from the proposal, they are from 1998:

<
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/langpro/kpml/genbank/R3b12-English/Docu/ENGLISH-reuters-mismatches-19981209/index.html
>
<
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/langpro/kpml/genbank/R3b12-English/Docu/ENGLISH-nigel-exerciseset-mismatches-19981209/index.html
>

There are examples like:
"Analysts say that the private position is far more sensible, because it
leads to much needed capital for European computer and semiconductor
companies, while giving them a toehold in the lucrative Japanese domestic
market."

"Because of its importance, any reaction of the sixty people whose
televisions are attached to the system is monitored closely."

Since they managed it 15 years ago, I believe we can do it too. At least
try and fail.
Even if the complexity of our sentences does not raise that high, it seems
to me that there is plenty of content that would be beneficial to make
available.

Cheers,
Denny





2013/8/7 Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada 

> This may work very fine for little stubs about repetitive stuff, like the
> introductions of cities (location, population, foundation date, country,
> etc). But, how will that work for the rest of sections of Berlin (history,
> geography, politics...)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin
>
>
> 2013/8/7 Denny Vrandečić 
>
> > I have been thinking about this for a while, and now finally managed to
> > write it down as a proposal. Details are on meta on the following link,
> > below is the intro to the proposal:
> >
> > <
> >
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia
> > >
> >
> > I tried to anticipate some possible questions and provide answers on the
> > page. Besides that, I obviously hope that Wikimania could provide a place
> > to start this conversation. And yes, I am aware that the proposal would
> > lead to a very restrictive solution, but imagine what good it already
> could
> > achieve! And since it is not meant to replace anything, but enrich our
> > current projects... well, read for yourself.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Denny
> >
> >
> > Wikipedia provides knowledge in more than 200 languages. Whereas a small
> > number of languages are fortunate enough to have a large Wikipedia, many
> of
> > the language editions are far away from providing a comprehensive
> > encyclopedia by any measure. There are several approaches towards closing
> > this gap, mostly focusing on increasing the number of contributors to the
> > small language editions or to improve the provision of automatic or
> > semi-automatic translations of articles. Both are viable. In the
> following
> > we present a proposal for a different approach, which is based on the
> idea
> > of multilingual Wikipedia.
> >
> > Imagine a small extension to the template system, where a template call
> > like *{{F12}}* would not be expanded by a call to the template
> > Template:F12, but rather to Template:F12/en, i.e. the template name with
> > the selected language code of the reader of the page. A template call
> such
> > as *{{F12:Q64|Q5519|Q183}}* can be expanded by Template:F12/en into
> > *“Berlin
> > is the capital of Germany.”* and by Template:F12/de into *“Berlin ist die
> > Hauptstadt Deutschlands.”* (in the example, the template parameters
> Q5119,
> > Q64 and Q183 refer to the Wikidata items for capital, Berlin and Germany
> > respectively, which the templates query for the label in the respective
> > language). Sentence by sentence could be created in order to provide for
> a
> > simple article.
> >
> > That wiki would consist of *content*, i.e. the article pages, possibly
> just
> > a simple series of template calls, and *frames*, i.e. the templates that
> > lexicalize the parameters of a given template call into a sentence (Note
> > that “sentence” here should not be considered literally. It could be a
> > table, an image, anything). The implementation of the frames can be done
> in
> > normal wiki template syntax, in Lua, in a novel mechanism, or a mix of
> > these. This would be up to the communities creating them.
> >
> > Read the rest here:
> > <
> >
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia
> > >
> >
> > --
> > Project director Wikidata
> > Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
> > 

[Wikimedia-l] A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

I have been thinking about this for a while, and now finally managed to
write it down as a proposal. Details are on meta on the following link,
below is the intro to the proposal:



I tried to anticipate some possible questions and provide answers on the
page. Besides that, I obviously hope that Wikimania could provide a place
to start this conversation. And yes, I am aware that the proposal would
lead to a very restrictive solution, but imagine what good it already could
achieve! And since it is not meant to replace anything, but enrich our
current projects... well, read for yourself.

Cheers,
Denny


Wikipedia provides knowledge in more than 200 languages. Whereas a small
number of languages are fortunate enough to have a large Wikipedia, many of
the language editions are far away from providing a comprehensive
encyclopedia by any measure. There are several approaches towards closing
this gap, mostly focusing on increasing the number of contributors to the
small language editions or to improve the provision of automatic or
semi-automatic translations of articles. Both are viable. In the following
we present a proposal for a different approach, which is based on the idea
of multilingual Wikipedia.

Imagine a small extension to the template system, where a template call
like *{{F12}}* would not be expanded by a call to the template
Template:F12, but rather to Template:F12/en, i.e. the template name with
the selected language code of the reader of the page. A template call such
as *{{F12:Q64|Q5519|Q183}}* can be expanded by Template:F12/en into *“Berlin
is the capital of Germany.”* and by Template:F12/de into *“Berlin ist die
Hauptstadt Deutschlands.”* (in the example, the template parameters Q5119,
Q64 and Q183 refer to the Wikidata items for capital, Berlin and Germany
respectively, which the templates query for the label in the respective
language). Sentence by sentence could be created in order to provide for a
simple article.

That wiki would consist of *content*, i.e. the article pages, possibly just
a simple series of template calls, and *frames*, i.e. the templates that
lexicalize the parameters of a given template call into a sentence (Note
that “sentence” here should not be considered literally. It could be a
table, an image, anything). The implementation of the frames can be done in
normal wiki template syntax, in Lua, in a novel mechanism, or a mix of
these. This would be up to the communities creating them.

Read the rest here:


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Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why the WP will never be a real encyclopaedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Rui,

as others are trying to tell you in this thread, I do not consider the
manner you are raising this topic to be helpful or constructive, and I
don't think that your continued defense of your approach will help or get
us anywhere.

Whereas anecdotal war stories as the one you describe can be either
interesting or boring, it does not provide sufficient evidence to act. On
the other hand, there is a growing body of research work that is trying to
understand the topic of diversity and POV in Wikipedia. Telling me that I
am refusing to see that "elephant in the room" is kind of amusing,
considering that I have co-written the proposal for and have been working
on the EU-funded research project "Render - Reflecting Knowledge Diversity"
[1], where Wikimedia is a project partner. And there are many, many others
doing research on the topic as well. All of the things you describe --
analysis of revert-patterns, approaches towards measuring POV, etc. are
being done. Maybe you want to read the papers about this and look through
the findings.

Also, diversity is a major topic at the work at the German Wikimedia
chapter, where I am employed, and it has been a major driver in the
creation of the data model underlying Wikidata, where we are working hard
on creating a truly diversity-enabling knowledge base -- something, that is
rather unique in its scope and ambition.

So, yes, I am shooting down your message. I find it as useful as telling a
smoker to quit smoking because fire is bad, as evidenced in London 1666.
There is no need to be sensationalist and counter-factual in order to get
your point across. So, why not restart the whole thread with an Email where
you make suggestions on how to improve the situation, or provide new
evidence and data that can inform the conversation further, or where you
ask for existing research on the topic to inform yourself, or ask for
initiatives where you can help in order to increase Wikipedia's diversity,
and join us in doing something constructive?

Regards,
Denny


[1] http://www.render-project.eu





2013/8/1 Rui Correia 

> Denny
>
> If you going to shoot me down as a troll, then I can say only that you are
> one of those that refuse to see the elephant in the room. I am a journalist
> (and a journalism trainer), I know that if I want others to read what I
> have to say I need to come up a headline that will attract attention, while
> at the same time abiding by age-old ethic standards - and I have done so.
>
> Who controls what is said has become a big problem on the English and to a
> degree the Portuguese WPs. Be fair to yourself, step back and just look at
> some articles to see how many times a day they get reverted. The rot has
> become endemic - there are so many people who do nothing but revert the
> whole day without EVER contributing anything. Yes, I know that a lot of the
> reverting is to undo the work of vandals with nothing better to do, but
> most of it is done to preserve the view thae a specific article has
> 'acquired' through time.
>
> Can you honesty tell me that you have not come across articles that are
> 'untouchable'? That you know they convey a view that is not entirely right,
> but YOU and I cannot change it? Can you tell me that you have not come
> across editors who are hell-bent on preserving this or that article just as
> it is?
>
> Rui
>
> On 1 August 2013 22:40, Denny Vrandečić  >wrote:
>
> > Rui,
> >
> > if your basic assumption is that Wikipedia will never be a real
> > encyclopedia because of the lack of diversity among its contributors, I
> > would like to know of any other encyclopedia that is anywhere close to
> the
> > diversity among its contributors that Wikipedia has (just a side-note,
> the
> > original Encyclopédie had an even worse bias towards aristocratic, male
> > French than Wikipedias does, as surprising as it sounds). So, which
> > Encyclopedia do you consider a real encyclopedia at all?
> >
> > Also, never mind the fact that we already sport such a diversity -- we
> are
> > actively aiming and striving for even more diversity, and we are not
> > comparing us to the usually abysmal record of other encyclopedias, but
> > merely to our own high, maybe even unreachable ideals.
> >
> > So, whereas I fully agree that there is a lot about Wikipedia that can be
> > improved, I am not sure that a mail that starts with the statement "Why
> the
> > Wikipedia will never be a real encyclopedia" deserves even the
> > consideration that I offered you here, and is to be considered anything
> > beyond trolling.
> >
> > All the best,
> > Denny
> >
> >
> >
> > 2013/8/1 Rui Correia 
> >
> > > Dear Colleagues at

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Why the WP will never be a real encyclopaedia

[Denny Vrandečić]

Rui,

if your basic assumption is that Wikipedia will never be a real
encyclopedia because of the lack of diversity among its contributors, I
would like to know of any other encyclopedia that is anywhere close to the
diversity among its contributors that Wikipedia has (just a side-note, the
original Encyclopédie had an even worse bias towards aristocratic, male
French than Wikipedias does, as surprising as it sounds). So, which
Encyclopedia do you consider a real encyclopedia at all?

Also, never mind the fact that we already sport such a diversity -- we are
actively aiming and striving for even more diversity, and we are not
comparing us to the usually abysmal record of other encyclopedias, but
merely to our own high, maybe even unreachable ideals.

So, whereas I fully agree that there is a lot about Wikipedia that can be
improved, I am not sure that a mail that starts with the statement "Why the
Wikipedia will never be a real encyclopedia" deserves even the
consideration that I offered you here, and is to be considered anything
beyond trolling.

All the best,
Denny



2013/8/1 Rui Correia 

> Dear Colleagues at the Foundation
>
> I just came across an artecle called "White Africans of European ancestry".
> What is that even supposed to mean?  Who would be any other "white people"
> if not of Europen ancestry? What other white people (yes, WP has a
> definition of "white people" could these be? Especially as it already says
> on the talk page that Arabs don't count.
>
>
> When we have 'white people' creating every conceivable article about 'white
> people', but we have no 'Khoi' people writing about 'Khoi people, then we
> can't call the WP an encyclopaedia. But them the rules do say - somewhere -
> that "just because ...". And those "just because" rules are all over the
> place - you can't use what was done in one case to justify another similar
> case because someone is bound to throw a "just because" rule at you. But
> the "just because ..." rule applies only when it is convenient - the
> corollary of the "just because .." is "I know more rules and tricks than
> you and I will win this/ I will not allow you to have your way even if I
> have to break all the rules and make new ones as I go along".
>
> So, "just because" there isn't an artice about "Khoi people living in
> Denmark" is no reason to not have an article about "White Europens of
> Europen descent livng in Patagonia" or "White Europens of Europen descent
> livng in Timbaktu". We have allowed ourselves to fall victim of the digital
> divide - the Khoi don't have computers and internet, white Europeans do.
> That is not an encyclopaedia.
>
> Why don't we have a page on "Black Americans of African ancestry"?
> Or "Black Europeans of African ancestry"? Strangely enough, type "Black
> African" and you get redirected to Black people, BUT the redirect actually
> takes you all the way down to Africa - yes, the article on Black people
> does not start with Africa, but with the United States, then Brazil 
>
> Like I said, When we have 'white people' creating every conceivable article
> about 'white people', but we have no 'Khoi' people writing about 'Khoi
> people, ...
>
> The same goes for the so-called "Biographies of Living People". I had my
> first clash on WP on the issue of the "dual nationality" of Nelly Furtado.
> Two hundred million people see her as Portuguese, three - yes, 3 - editors
> disagree and BRAG they will NEVER ALLOW it. The rationale changes, as can
> be seen from the talk pages and archives. They go as far as 'challenging'
> editors that NF sees herself as Portuguese, to then dismiss all the
> evidence as not good enough - even Nelly HERSELF saying she is PORTUGESE
> was thrown out! Why? Obvious! She doesn't count, she is not a NEUTRAL
> source!!! We have become a joke!
>
> How about being constructive?
>
> If we can come up with every conceivable script in the world, why has
> nobody come up with a script for controversial articles that would appear
> on the the edit page - like the script that says the article is protected -
> ALERTING unsuspecting editors to the fact that said article is cotroversial
> for xand y reason, and that if the edit the editor is about to do falls
> under that theme, to please first read the talk page, with a direct link
> ALSO to an explanation on BLP and the issue of ethnic background/ present
> nationality. It would save lots of wasted time and effort and the three
> editors who spend sleepless nights reverting the artcile might actually do
> something constructive for a change.
>
> In closing, of the nine people featured in photos on that page, I know
> (have met 5) and correspond with 2 - I can guarantee that all five of them
> (and most likley all 9 [or the descendents of those no longer with us])
> would object to being featured in such a racist article.
>
> I will write to them about this. I know that each one is not a valid source
> about him/ herself and therefore them objecting w

Re: [Wikimedia-l] article bytes more meaningful than users or revisions (was Re: Updates on VE data analysis)

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thank you for the observation.

Is the graph  based on actual data? Because
it looks just tad bit too linear to me. (I do not disagree with the
finding, just wondering about the graph itself).

I still would worry, though: our content is increasing linearly, as you
say, but the number of active contributors is not. If we take for granted
that active contributors are the ones who provide quality control for the
articles, this means that since 2006 or so the ratio of content per
contributor is linearly declining, which would mean that our quality would
suffer.

I see two effects to counter that:

1) as you already mentioned, contributors are getting increasingly more
experienced and more effective in fulfilling their tasks.

2) we continue to have a strong increase in readers and even stronger in
pageviews (i.e. more and more people consult Wikipedia more and more). They
probably also provide a layer of quality assurance, even though they might
not qualify to be counted as active contributors.

I have the gut feeling that 1) cannot be sufficient, and I would be curious
in the effects of 2) - especially considering that much of the Foundation
development work can be considered in improving 2 further (visual editor,
article rating, mobile editing, etc.)





2013/7/27 James Salsman 

> MZMcBride wrote:
> >... the number of non-deleted revisions per day for the
> > English Wikipedia. The results are here:
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/565971356
>
> So, that looks terrible: http://i.imgur.com/Z9lYCWj.png
>
> It looks terrible in the same way that every other graph of active
> users and several other related measures look like.
>
> But it isn't. It doesn't account for the power law of practice which
> causes everyone who has ever edited Wikipedia to get better at it with
> time. And since so many IP editors are obviously returning, that means
> a lot more than under the false but very common assumption that every
> IP editor is new.
>
> Here's what really matters, articlespace size:
> http://i.imgur.com/TfaD99V.png
>
> The size of the article text in bytes has been marching on linearly
> since the beginning of Wikipedia, with extremely low variation, just
> like the short popular vital articles and every other measure of
> quality content.
>
> There is no legitimate basis to worry about anything until the linear
> trend of the total article bytes breaks out of its 12 year linear
> trend.
>
> (If you multiply columns 'E' and 'I' from
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm the database size
> shows a cusp at around 2006, corresponding to the growth modes, but
> two separate linear trends fit both modes far better than any growth
> model fits the entire curve.)
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What community initiatives have made an impact on editor engagement?

[Denny Vrandečić]

Wait - removing the captchas lead to a decrease of reverted edits in terms
of absolute numbers? Woot? Anyone has an explanation for that?




2013/7/5 Federico Leva (Nemo) 

> The recent community initiative with the highest impact I can think of is
> surely what Platonides and other members of the global (technical)
> community did on pt.wiki. Platonides noticed a configuration error on
> pt.wiki: CAPTCHA was required for all edits since 2008. The error was fixed
> in April. 
> 
> >
>
> Fresh stats produced by the WMF show that in May and June this produced a
> decrease of overall vandalism (or rather, of reverted edits) with a
> shocking +58 % increase of productive edits by IPs and +23 % for registered
> users. It seems pt.wiki may see the end of the decline after many years. :)
>  a):HAndrade_(WMF)/Pesquisa_**Vandalismo/Segunda_Fase&oldid=**36301585
> >
>
> Discussion is ongoing on how pt.wiki will address this growth. Part of the
> community may think that "nao estamos preparados para crescer".
>  Wikip%C3%A9dia/Reuni%C3%B5es/**Reuni%C3%A3o_IRC_21-06-2013
> >
>
> Nemo
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikivoyage logo

[Denny Vrandečić]

Peter, we stand up to big bullies. As big as they get. But in this case, I
cannot see the WTO bullying us. Their terms are very reasonable in my
opinion, and I am grateful to the legal team for handling this situation
this well.

But in this case, we are talking about either changing a non-established
logo - something that has been discussed anyway before in the community, as
SJ pointed out - or risking to spend donation money on a very expensive
legal battle that, frankly, does not look very promising. And if the court
decides against us, which simply looks probable, we would need to change it
anyway.

Or, to put it differently, Peter: what other programs paid by our budget
would you curtail in order to try defending the Wikivoyage logo? Should we
cut down on development? On supporting chapters? Look at FDC and IEG, and
simply weight the projects enabled by that money against keeping the
Wikivoyage logo? Is the logo really worth that much?

Our movement fights against big bullies. Be it in the legislative branch,
where we use protest and lobbying, be it in the judicial branch, where we
defend volunteers in court, be it in the executive branch, where our
methods are cooperation and mutual support.

But I fail to see what the benefit of this particular fight would be in
reaching our mission. The costs, on the other hand, can be drastic.





2013/6/2 Peter Southwood 

> So we stand up to small bullies, by not to big ones.
> Nice to know where the line is drawn when it comes to principles.
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> - Original Message - From: "Craig Franklin" <
> cfrank...@halonetwork.net>
> To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" 
> 
> >
> Sent: Saturday, June 01, 2013 5:00 PM
>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikivoyage logo
>
>
>  On 2 June 2013 00:22, MZMcBride  wrote:
>>
>>  Craig Franklin wrote:
>>> >I'm sure that the legal team has done their homework on this and would
>>> >not
>>> >have made this recommendation unless they felt that the WTO had a
>>> >credible
>>> >argument.  Asking the Foundation to play chicken with the lawyers of a
>>> >major international organisation over a trademark claim on a relatively
>>> >new and easily replaced logo of ours does not offer a very good
>>> >risk/reward ratio in my view.
>>>
>>> You mean "has done their homework on this this time," right? The General
>>> Counsel position is one of the oldest in the Wikimedia Foundation and the
>>> Legal and Community Advocacy team certainly existed before the previous
>>> Wikivoyage logo contest. If this were an issue, you'd think someone
>>> would've said something six months ago. And, of course, there's no
>>> shortage of trademark, patent, or copyright trolls in the world. I've
>>> seen
>>> both logos and while they're obviously similar, I'm sure there are a
>>> great
>>> number of lawyers who could make a number of arguments as to why there's
>>> no real issue here. Anyone can send a cease and desist letter, right?
>>>
>>>
>> The WMF Legal team are good, but they're not *that* good.  I'm sure if
>> Geoff and the gang were capable of foretelling the future to see if they'd
>> get issued with a cease-and-desist, they'd be spending their lottery
>> winnings in the Caribbean rather than dealing with trademark issues.
>>
>> There are also at least a few Wikivoyagers who are concerned that the
>>
>>> active participants of Wikivoyage weren't properly enfranchised during
>>> the
>>> last logo contest. That is, there's a concern that the people most
>>> involved with Wikivoyage will get drowned out by the much larger
>>> Wikimedia
>>> community in any contest of this nature.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Obviously this is a valid concern, but that's best dealt with by making
>> sure that the best process is in place for the logo competition, not by
>> complaining about something that, lets face it, is not going to change.
>> Obviously, for those that were unhappy with the last logo process, this is
>> an opportunity to have an improved contest this time around.
>>
>>
>>
>>> I would think some of these issues would be of concern to you. This isn't
>>> about asking anyone to play chicken. It's about ensuring that communities
>>> are free to choose their own identity.
>>>
>>>
>> Well, obviously I'd be happy for them to pick whatever identity, so long
>> as
>> it's not infringing on a trademark.  In other words, they can't have the
>> Golden Arches or Mickey Mouse ears! :-).
>>
>> More seriously though, while I suppose the WMF might conceivably be
>> eventually victorious in court on this sort of issue, the expense would be
>> enormous and the legal team's time is much better spent on things other
>> than fighting battles over non-core principles with international
>> organisations.  I also suspect that the WTO has a fair bit more cash to
>> splash around on fancy lawyers to fight this than we do.  It's not a nice
>> situation to be in obviously, but it's better than the Foundation having
>> to
>> waste its money fighting this in court.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Craig
>

Re: [Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Denny Vrandečić]

2013/4/25 Mathieu Stumpf 

> What would be the limits you would expect from your solution, because you
> can't expect to just "translate" everything. Form may be a part of the
> meaning. It's clear that you can't translate a poem for example. Sur
> wikipedia is not primary concerned about poetry, but it does treat the
> subject.
>
>
I don't know where the limits would be. Probably further then we think
right now, but yes, they still would be there and severe. The nice thing is
that we would be collecting data about the limits constantly, and could
thus "feed" the system to further improve and grow. Not automatically (I
guess, but bots would obviously also be allowed to work on the rules as
well), but through human intelligence, analyzing the input and trying to
refine and extend the rules.

But, considering the already existing bot created articles, which number in
the hundred thousands in languages like Swedish, Dutch, or Polish, there
seems to be some consensus that this can be considered as a useful starting
block. It's just that with the current system, even with Wikidata, we
cannot really grow into this direction further.

Cheers,
Denny

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Denny Vrandečić]

2013/4/25 Brion Vibber 

> You are blowing my mind, dude. :)
>

Glad to do hear :)


I suspect this approach won't serve for everything, but it sounds
> *awesome*. If we can tie natural-language statements directly to data nodes
> (rather than merely annotating vague references like we do today), then
> we'd be much better able to keep language versions in sync. How to make
> them sane to edit... sounds harder. :)
>

Absolutely correct, it would not serve for everything. And it doesn't have
to. For an encyclopedia we should be able to get a useful amount of
"frames" in a decent timeframe. For song lyrics, it might take a bit longer.

It would and should start with a restricted set of possible frames, but the
trick would be to make the user extensible. Because that is where we are
good at -- users who fill and extend the frameworks we provide. I don't
know of much work where the frames and rules themselves are user editable
and extensible, but heck, they people said we are crazy when we made the
properties user editable and extensible in Semantic MediaWiki and later
Wikidata, and it seems to be working out.

A sane editing interface - both for the rules and the content, and their
interaction - would be something that would need to be explored first, just
to check whether this is indeed possible or just wishful thinking. Starting
without this kind of exploration beforehand would be a bit adventurous, or
optimistic.

Cheers,
Denny


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Denny Vrandečić]

Erik,

2013/4/25 Erik Moeller 

> > The system I am really aiming at is a different one, and there has
> > been plenty of related work in this direction: imagine a wiki where you
> > enter or edit content, sentence by sentence, but the natural language
> > representation is just a surface syntax for an internal structure. Your
> > editing interface is a constrained, but natural language. Now, in order
> to
> > really make this fly, both the rules for the parsers (interpreting the
> > input) and the serializer (creating the output) would need to be editable
> > by the community - in addition to the content itself. There are a number
> of
> > major challenges involved, but I have by now a fair idea of how to tackle
> > most of them (and I don't have the time to detail them right now).
>
> So what would you want to enable with this? Faster bootstrapping of
> content? How would it work, and how would this be superior to an
> approach like the one taken in the Translate extension (basically,
> providing good interfaces for 1:1 translation, tracking differences
> between documents, and offering MT and translation memory based
> suggestions)? Are there examples of this approach being taken
> somewhere else?



Not just bootstrapping the content. By having the primary content be saved
in a language independent form, and always translating it on the fly, it
would not merely bootstrap content in different languages, but it would
mean that editors from different languages would be working on the same
content. The texts in the different language is not a translation of each
other, but they are all created from the same source. There would be no
primacy of, say, English.

It would be foolish to create any such plan without reusing tools and
concepts from the Translate extension, translation memories, etc. There is
a lot of UI and conceptual goodness in these tools. The idea would be to
make them user extensible with rules.

If you want, examples of that are the bots working on some Wikipedias
currently, creating text from structured input. They are partially reusing
the same structured input, and need "merely" a translation in the way the
bots create the text to save in the given Wikipedia. I have seen some
research in the area, but they all have one or the other drawbacks, but can
and should be used as an inspiration and to inform the project (like
Allegro Controlled English, or a Chat program developed at the Open
University in Milton Keynes to allow conducting business in different
languages, etc.)

I hope this helps a bit.

Cheers,
Denny

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[Wikimedia-l] Branding and visibility of sister projects Re: The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Denny Vrandečić]

Aubrey,

2013/4/24 Andrea Zanni 

> I feel that we could boost a lot the idea of a "family of projects", of an
>  integrated, global, comprehensive approach to knowledge.
> Right now, the fact is that Wikipedia both attracts and cannibalizes users
> to/from sister projects, which are kinda invisible if you don't know they
> exist.
>
> Could we promote better our sister projects, making them more visible?
> For this purpose, user Micru and me just created a RfC for interproject
> links
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Interproject_links_interface
> (I
> invite you all to propose other solutions), but
> the underlying question is if we, as the Wikimedia community, are aware of
> the "theoretical" shift this means.
>


The strongest promotion -- and actually your proposal goes into this
direction -- would be to rebrand the sister projects, and then integrate
them tighter. A first step, and a necessity before any further integration
could happen, would be to give up the many different brands the Wikimedia
movement has, and huddle together under one flag.

As said, your proposal suggests that - it doesn't say "Wikiquote", it just
says "Quotes", etc. This basically means that it is not Wikiquote anymore,
but Wikipedia Quotes.

Without that, I am afraid, such a strong integration between the projects
always remains fragile and touchy, because the projects - if they are not
mere supporting projects like Commons or Wikidata anyway - might feel
offended and debranded every time they are integrated in such a way.

Having said that, this thread is half hijacked by "what are projects, how
important are they, what kind of support do they need" instead of
discussint the original topic.

Cheers,
Denny


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Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Denny Vrandečić]

Erik, all,

sorry for the long mail.

Incidentally, I have been thinking in this direction myself for a while,
and I have come to a number of conclusions:
1) the Wikimedia movement can not, in its current state, tackle the problem
of machine translation of arbitrary text from and to all of our supported
languages
2) the Wikimedia movement is probably the single most important source of
training data already. Research that I have done with colleagues based on
Wikimedia corpora as training data easily beat other corpora, and others
are using Wikimedia corpora routinely already. There is not much we can
improve here, actually
3) Wiktionary could be an even more amazing resource if we would finally
tackle the issue of structuring its content more appropriately. I think
Wikidata opened a few venues to structure planning in this direction and
provide some software, but this would have the potential to provide more
support for any external project than many other things we could tackle

Looking at the first statement, there are two ways we could constrain it to
make it possibly feasible:
a) constrain the number of supported languages. Whereas this would be
technically the simpler solution, I think there is agreement that this is
not in our interest at all
b) constrain the kind of input text we want to support

If we constrain b) a lot, we could just go and develop "pages to display
for pages that do not exist yet based on Wikidata" in the smaller
languages. That's a far cry from machine translating the articles, but it
would be a low hanging fruit. And it might help with a desire which is
evidently strongly expressed by the mass creation of articles through bots
in a growing number of languages. Even more constraints would still allow
us to use Wikidata items for tagging and structuring Commons in a
language-independent way (this was suggested by Erik earlier).

Current machine translation research aims at using massive machine learning
supported systems. They usually require big parallel corpora. We do not
have big parallel corpora (Wikipedia articles are not translations of each
other, in general), especially not for many languages, and there is no
reason to believe this is going to change. I would question if we want to
build an infrastructure for gathering those corpora from the Web
continuously. I do not think we can compete in this arena, or that is the
best use of our resources to support projects in this area. We should use
our unique features to our advantage.

How can we use the unique features of the Wikimedia movement to our
advantage? What are our unique features? Well, obviously, the awesome
community we are. Our technology, as amazing as it is, running our Websites
on the given budget, is nevertheless not what makes us what we are. Most
processes on the Wikimedia projects are developed in the community space,
and not implemented in bits. To summon Lessing, if code is law, Wikimedia
projects are really good in creating a space that allows for a community to
live in this space and have the freedom to create their own ecosystem.

One idea I have been mulling over for years is basically how can we use
this advantage for the task of creating content available in many
languages. Wikidata is an obvious attempt at that, but it really goes only
so far. The system I am really aiming at is a different one, and there has
been plenty of related work in this direction: imagine a wiki where you
enter or edit content, sentence by sentence, but the natural language
representation is just a surface syntax for an internal structure. Your
editing interface is a constrained, but natural language. Now, in order to
really make this fly, both the rules for the parsers (interpreting the
input) and the serializer (creating the output) would need to be editable
by the community - in addition to the content itself. There are a number of
major challenges involved, but I have by now a fair idea of how to tackle
most of them (and I don't have the time to detail them right now). Wikidata
had some design decision inside it that are already geared towards enabling
the solution for some of the problems for this kind of wiki. Whatever a
structured Wiktionary would look like, it should also be aligned with the
requirements of the project outlined here. Basically, we take constrain b,
but make it possible to push the constraint further and further through the
community - that's how we could scale on this task.

This would be far away from solving the problem of automatic translation of
text, and even further away from understanding text. But given where we are
and the resources we have available, I think it would be a more feasible
path towards achieving the mission of the Wikimedia movement than tackling
the problem of general machine learning.

In summary, I see four calls for action right now (and for all of them this
means to first actually think more and write down a project plan and gather
input on that), that could and should be

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero wins!

[Denny Vrandečić]

Orkus was never "took over" by Google - it was created by Google in the
first place and always operated by them.




2013/3/17 Rand McRanderson 

> Orkut used to dominate outside US and Europe. Then Google took over,
> neglected it and Facebook moved in. Classic big company takes small company
> and forgets about it
> On Mar 17, 2013 11:39 AM, "Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton" <
> rodrigo.argen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Facebook here is more used than Google and Orkut, but they are well used
> > to, so... we really don't know why :)
> >
> >
> > On 17 March 2013 05:29, James Alexander  wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:53 AM, Balázs Viczián <
> > > balazs.vicz...@wikimedia.hu> wrote:
> > >
> > > > the favorit social media site in Brazil is Orkut. Far far more
> popular
> > > than
> > > > facebook. If you wish to have a strong social media presence there,
> > > you'll
> > > > have to be present on that.
> > > >
> > > > cheers, Balázs
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >  Tom or someone else from Brazi would know better then me I'm sure but
> > that
> > > doesn't seem to have been true since 2011 (
> > >
> > >
> >
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ricardogeromel/2011/09/14/facebook-surpasses-orkut-owned-by-google-in-numbers-of-users-in-brazil/
> > > )
> > > . Looking at the numbers now (
> > > http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/BR) looks like FB is the #1
> site
> > > now (of course, it IS Alexa ;) ).
> > >
> > > James
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton
> > rodrigo.argen...@gmail.com
> > +55 11 979 718 884
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list
> > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> >
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>



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Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Are there plans for interactions between wikidata and wiktionaries ?

[Denny Vrandečić]

Thank you for the clarification, Gerard. I was indeed misunderstanding the
proposal.

We need to find a central place to discuss a proposal.



2013/3/11 Gerard Meijssen 

> Hoi,
> There is no point at all in maintaining the software currently used by
> OmegaWiki. That would be foolish. Nobody who knows OmegaWiki will ask for
> that.
>
> What we are asking for is that we ensure that the structures that exist in
> OmegaWiki are replicated in Wikidata for reasons that are clear and
> obvious. Technically there are a few things that make sense to have..
>
> For instance.. In the Dutch language we have a noun, a verb an adjective
>  we do not have a country in this class. A noun can be male, female or
> neutral  we do not have a stupid.  We have singular and plural and we
> do not have dual like in Arabic.
>
> When there is a concept, we have synonyms and translations that are used as
> such but do not cover the original concept well. We want to be able to
> indicate this.
>
> Really Denny, all we need is to keep the structure, the data. We do not
> even want to be dogmatic about this (too much). What we want are things
> that fulfil a need, that have a purpose.
> Thanks,
>  GerardM
>
>
> On 11 March 2013 15:51, Denny Vrandečić  >wrote:
>
> > Sorry about the wrong link, I meant this IEG proposal:
> >
> > <
> >
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Wiktionary_-_the_way_it_should_be
> > >
> >
> > but as far as I can tell, this one didn't make it into round 1 (pity,
> > something like that would have made sense, but I understand that the
> > proposal was obviously not detailed enough. Whatever.)
> >
> > I fully agree with Andrea and Nemo that some use cases would be very easy
> > to implement, especially linking between the projects. Commons and
> > Wiktionary though are very different and require more thought:
> >
> > Commons:
> > * easy goals: link to appropriate items for some of the pages in Commons,
> > use data from Wikidata in the creator namespace and similar
> > * more engaging: add metadata to the media files in Commons itself and
> link
> > them to each other and to Wikidata
> >
> > Wiktionary:
> > * easy goals: none. The conceptualization of Wiktionary simply is not a
> > direct fit to the conceptualization in Wikipedia and Wikidata.
> > We need to figure out how they work together. Maybe this page is a good
> > start, and maybe we should collect the ideas there.
> >
> > <https://www.wikidata.org/**wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary<
> > https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary>
> > >
> >
> > I mean, OmegaWiki has been around for a while, and they learned many,
> > extremely valuable lessons. A lot of work has went into it, and it would
> be
> > a shame not to build on its experiences and lessons. But I would like to
> > ask the question whether it is the right software or not, even though it
> is
> > a painful question. But please be reminded that I have spent many years
> in
> > the development of Semantic MediaWiki, with the one goal to have it
> > switched on the Wikipedias -- and then to come to the conclusion to *not*
> > use the software as is, and start from scratch.
> >
> > We need a discussion on Wiktionary, and how it can evolve, and if it even
> > should. And I do not think that a cross-mailing list discussion like the
> > current one is the right place, and I do not even know where the right
> > place is.
> >
> > So, first question: where should this discussion take place?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Denny
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > 2013/3/11 Federico Leva (Nemo) 
> >
> > > Denny Vrandečić, 11/03/2013 14:52:
> > >
> > >  There is currently a number of things going on re the future of
> > >> Wiktionary.
> > >>
> > >> There is, for example, the suggestion to adopt OmegaWiki, which could
> > >> potentially complicate a Wikibase-Solution in the future (but then
> > again,
> > >> structured data is often rather easy to transform):
> > >> <
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Requests_for_comment/**Adopt_OmegaWiki<
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Adopt_OmegaWiki>
> > >> >
> > >>
> > >> There is this grant proposal for elaborating the future of Wiktionary,
> > >> which I consider a potentially smarter first step:
> > >>
> > >> <
> > >> http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Grants:IEG/Elaborate_**
> > &

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Are there plans for interactions between wikidata and wiktionaries ?

[Denny Vrandečić]

Sorry about the wrong link, I meant this IEG proposal:

<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Wiktionary_-_the_way_it_should_be
>

but as far as I can tell, this one didn't make it into round 1 (pity,
something like that would have made sense, but I understand that the
proposal was obviously not detailed enough. Whatever.)

I fully agree with Andrea and Nemo that some use cases would be very easy
to implement, especially linking between the projects. Commons and
Wiktionary though are very different and require more thought:

Commons:
* easy goals: link to appropriate items for some of the pages in Commons,
use data from Wikidata in the creator namespace and similar
* more engaging: add metadata to the media files in Commons itself and link
them to each other and to Wikidata

Wiktionary:
* easy goals: none. The conceptualization of Wiktionary simply is not a
direct fit to the conceptualization in Wikipedia and Wikidata.
We need to figure out how they work together. Maybe this page is a good
start, and maybe we should collect the ideas there.

<https://www.wikidata.org/**wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary>
>

I mean, OmegaWiki has been around for a while, and they learned many,
extremely valuable lessons. A lot of work has went into it, and it would be
a shame not to build on its experiences and lessons. But I would like to
ask the question whether it is the right software or not, even though it is
a painful question. But please be reminded that I have spent many years in
the development of Semantic MediaWiki, with the one goal to have it
switched on the Wikipedias -- and then to come to the conclusion to *not*
use the software as is, and start from scratch.

We need a discussion on Wiktionary, and how it can evolve, and if it even
should. And I do not think that a cross-mailing list discussion like the
current one is the right place, and I do not even know where the right
place is.

So, first question: where should this discussion take place?

Cheers,
Denny





2013/3/11 Federico Leva (Nemo) 

> Denny Vrandečić, 11/03/2013 14:52:
>
>  There is currently a number of things going on re the future of
>> Wiktionary.
>>
>> There is, for example, the suggestion to adopt OmegaWiki, which could
>> potentially complicate a Wikibase-Solution in the future (but then again,
>> structured data is often rather easy to transform):
>> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Requests_for_comment/**Adopt_OmegaWiki<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Adopt_OmegaWiki>
>> >
>>
>> There is this grant proposal for elaborating the future of Wiktionary,
>> which I consider a potentially smarter first step:
>>
>> <
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Grants:IEG/Elaborate_**
>> Wikisource_strategic_vision<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Elaborate_Wikisource_strategic_vision>
>>
>>>
>>>
> That's Wikisource. :)
>
>
>
>> There's this discussion on Wikdiata itself:
>>
>> <https://www.wikidata.org/**wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary>
>> >
>>
>> And I know that Daniel K. is very interested in working into this
>> direction.
>>
>> Personally, I regard Wiktionary as the third priority, following Wikipedia
>> and Commons. A lot of the other projects -- like Wikivoyage or Wikisource
>> -- can be served with only small changes to Wikidata as it is, but both
>> Commons and Wiktionary would require a bit of thought (and here again,
>> Commons much less than Wiktionary).
>>
>
> Actually Wikiquote and Wikivoyage use interwikis exactly like Wikipedia;
> Commons in the same way except it's interproject; Wiktionary in the same
> way except it's case-sensitive and not about concepts (opr about a stricter
> definition of concept); Wikisource in a completely different way;
> Wikibooks, Wikinews and Wikiversity I'm not sure.
> As for phase II, it's another story. Wikisource and Commons would benefit
> a lot from it; for Wiktionary it could be a revolution; for Wikispecies
> idem but with less effort (?); Wikiquote would become
>
>
>  I would appreciate a discussion with
>> the Wiktionary-Communities, and also to make them more aware of the
>> OmegaWiki proposal, the potential of Wikidata for Wiktionary, etc. Just to
>> give a comparison: it took a few months to write the original Wikidata
>> proposal, and it was up for discussion for several months before it was
>> decided and acted upon. I would strongly advise to again choose slow and
>> careful planning over hastened decisions.
>>
>
> It's impossible to plan or discuss anything without knowing what matters.
>
&

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Are there plans for interactions between wikidata and wiktionaries ?

[Denny Vrandečić]

There is currently a number of things going on re the future of Wiktionary.

There is, for example, the suggestion to adopt OmegaWiki, which could
potentially complicate a Wikibase-Solution in the future (but then again,
structured data is often rather easy to transform):


There is this grant proposal for elaborating the future of Wiktionary,
which I consider a potentially smarter first step:

<
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Elaborate_Wikisource_strategic_vision
>

There's this discussion on Wikdiata itself:



And I know that Daniel K. is very interested in working into this direction.

Personally, I regard Wiktionary as the third priority, following Wikipedia
and Commons. A lot of the other projects -- like Wikivoyage or Wikisource
-- can be served with only small changes to Wikidata as it is, but both
Commons and Wiktionary would require a bit of thought (and here again,
Commons much less than Wiktionary). I would appreciate a discussion with
the Wiktionary-Communities, and also to make them more aware of the
OmegaWiki proposal, the potential of Wikidata for Wiktionary, etc. Just to
give a comparison: it took a few months to write the original Wikidata
proposal, and it was up for discussion for several months before it was
decided and acted upon. I would strongly advise to again choose slow and
careful planning over hastened decisions.

Cheers,
Denny






2013/3/9 Mathieu Stumpf 

> Hello,
>
> First, congratulation for all the already achieved great work on the
> wikidata project.
>
> Now I would be interested to know more about future development,
> especially on interactions with wiktionaries.
>
> I think wikidata could help to improve wiktionaries drastically, by
> unifying not only interlangs links, but also definitions and
> translations.
>
> More accurately what I mean is that currently you often have, attached
> to one wiki article you have usually several definitions for each
> language where the word is used. But often when I seek a non-french word
> in the french wiktionary, looking at the native wiktionary will bring
> more definition than what you can find on the french article.
>
> I saw that on the english wiktionary, the interface added a "quick add"
> feature, which ask user to fill translation for each meaning. That's
> great and I wish it would be added in all chapters. And I think that we
> could add even more "hey, what about translating just this little thing"
> feature across all dictionary by centralizing entries, so that each
> "word" is associated with one or several meaning by language. Then all
> meanings could be redistributed to all wiktionnaries, even when no
> translation is available for a given meaning in the local chapter. In
> this cas we could have an information box that would say "this word have
> an other meaning which wasn't yet translated in ${local_language}, if
> you one of the language in which a translation is available, please help
> us to improve the wiktionary".
>
> What do think about such a project, could it work with wikidata?
>
> kind regards,
> mathieu
>
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Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF narrowing focus (was Re: Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 105, Issue 1)

[Denny Vrandečić]

As far as I understood the rationale for the narrowing, the idea is not to
safe money but to safe people. By focusing on what the Foundation's tasks
should be and by letting go of the others, you reduce stress on people as
you allow them to concentrate on a smaller set of tasks. Focus brings flow
brings happiness.

Another point that was explicitly mentioned was that the Fellowship program
can be performed by other movement bodies, as the WMF is explicitly
stepping away from it, freeing it up for others. There are some things that
only the WMF can do, and these are the things the WMF should focus on. This
is how I understood the proposal.



2012/12/3 ENWP Pine 

>
> Thanks Sue.
>
> I am cautious when there are specific cuts such as Fellowships in exchange
> for indeterminate benefits. That makes a cost-benefit analysis difficult to
> do. Maybe this is a good tradeoff, but from the information that's publicly
> available, I'm still particularly concerned about the loss of the
> Fellowships. Could those be funded by increasing the amount of the
> fundraising goal?
>
> Some of the other possible tradeoffs and outsourcing do make sense to me.
> The loss of the fellowships is my main concern.
>
> Looking at the bright side, I would be very glad if one of the benefits
> from narrowing focus is that the progress of the Visual Editor is hastened.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Pine
>
>
> >
> > From: Sue Gardner 
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 105, Issue 1
> > Message-ID:
> >mmd...@mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> >
> > Hi Pine,
> >
> > We haven't articulated specific and measurable benefits: that's why you
> > haven't gotten an answer to your question. That's because the Narrowing
> > Focus exercise is not a one-off immediate-term event: it's a longer-term
> > decision which will have multiple implications in this year and in future
> > years.
> >
> > The Board approved the general principle: that narrowing focus would
> > benefit the organization, which had been spread too thinly. But, the
> > precise implications won't be known until the process begins to play out.
> > For example, we've made a decision to outsource some of the WMF work
> > associated with Wikimania, but until we define the terms of the
> > outsourcing, we can't know what the exact implications will be. (Because
> we
> > don't know what it will cost, or what work the contractor/consultant will
> > be able to do. We *will* know those things in future, and I could make
> > educated guesses about them now, but we can't know with certainty until
> we
> > run an RFP process or similar.)
> >
> > Upshot: this is a long-term-focused decision, and it'll take a while for
> > the implications to begin to play out. I've told the Board we shouldn't
> > expect to see too much in the way of benefits in 2012-13 (the current
> > fiscal year) because there will be work required to execute the various
> > components of it, which will offset whatever gain we might otherwise have
> > seen this year. We may see a little pay-off  this year, but mostly it
> will
> > start to happen in 2023-14.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Sue
> > On Dec 2, 2012 3:56 PM, "ENWP Pine"  wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Tilman,
> > >
> > > Thanks, I always like reading these reports.
> > >
> > > Again, I'd like to ask what specific and measurable benefits the
> "changing
> > > focus" changes will accomplish. I've been asking this for awhile.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > Pine
> > >
> > > > Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:55:37 -0800
> > > > From: Tilman Bayer 
> > > > To: wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation
> > > >   Report, October 2012
> > > > Message-ID:
> > > >> > vpoeztxxbgfz5kwncphee7m...@mail.gmail.com>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
> > > >
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > please find below the WMF report for October 2012, in plain text.
> > > >
> > > > As always, the editable and formatted version has been published on
> Meta:
> > > >
> > >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_October_2012
> > > >
> > > > and the reports are being posted on the Wikimedia blog, too:
> > > > https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/corporate/wmf-monthly-reports/
> > > >
> > > > As usual, we are also publishing a separate "Highlights" summary.
> > > > Please consider helping non-English-language communities to stay
> > > > updated, by providing a translation:
> > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_October_2012
> > > > Many thanks those who have translated the September "Highlights" into
> > > > Arabic, Breton, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Piedmontese, Russian,
> > > > Ukrainian, Chinese and Telugu!
> > > >
> > > > While still focussing on WMF activities, the "Highlights" include a
> > > > small selection of the most noteworthy events from the whole
> movement.
> > > > Suggestions for t

Re: [Wikimedia-l] The new narrowed focus by WMF (cleaner version), apology

[Denny Vrandečić]

Just a comment on the discussion:

I would find it refreshing if people were not defending funds that
apply mostly to themselves. I saw, in discussions of the essay,
arguments by researchers saying that more money should go to
researchers, by fellows and want-to-be fellows that the fellowship
program should not be cut, by chapter associated that funding for
supporting the chapters should not be cut, and by people who have been
to Wikimania that the money for supporting Wikimania should not be
cut.

If we remove all arguments of "I am an X, and money supporting X
should not be cut" this discussion would become rather short as of
now.

One of my favorite 20th century philosophers, a specialist on justice
and fairness, has described an interesting concept, and I would very
strongly recommend to adopt it during policy and strategic discussions
like this:



Cheers,
Denny


2012/10/26 David Goodman :
> I owe a number of good people an apology. I have worked for several
> self-protecting bureaucracies myself, and it
> is possible, though not easy, , for individuals to do good work there.
>  I never intended to imply that everyone there is incompetent, though
> it is certainly my opinion that some of the people assigned to some of
> the programs I have been involved in have been.  I admit that my anger
> is an inappropriate reflection of my frustration at my inability to
> work with those in one particular program.
>
> On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 8:54 PM, David Goodman  wrote:
>> One obvious possibility for support is the chapters and the thematic
>> organizations; even if the WMF continues these fellowships as it
>> should, the other bodies in the movement should supplement them--it is
>> good to have more than one source of funds and more than one body
>> deciding on requests.  But whether their work can be actually
>> implemented at those levels is another matter.
>>
>> The proposal at meta says "the Wikimedia Foundation was never able to
>> resource the fellowships to the point where they could achieve
>> significant impact: " I don't think the resource at issue is primarily
>> money, considering that in all recent years we have had not only
>> surpluses, but greater than expected surpluses.  The resource which is
>> lacking is sufficient qualified people at the Foundation to work with
>> the fellows and help implement their projects. Rather than get such
>> people--which admittedly would require a change in WMF culture--the
>> WMF staff finds the easiest thing is to not even attempt to make the
>> improvements; it is too troublesome to deal with the good ideas of the
>> community, so the reaction is what one expects of self-protecting
>> incompetent bureaucracies: diminish the flow of good ideas.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 7:57 PM, Steven Zhang  wrote:
>>> In my opinion, the value of fellowships in my opinion is huge, and I feel 
>>> that ceasing to support projects like the Teahouse would be a real shame. 
>>> That said, I do feel there are other ways that individual editors could get 
>>> the support they need to work on critical projects. As long as this remains 
>>> in some capacity, then I think that could work too.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Steve Zhang
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>> On 22/10/2012, at 10:25 AM, Jacob Orlowitz  wrote:
>>>
 A letter in support of the Community Fellowship program from past,
 current, and prospective Fellows,

 The WMF has expanded profoundly over the past decade, and especially
 in the last few years.  Recently initiatives to streamline and focus
 the WMF have been undertaken; while these efforts are worthy in spirit
 and necessary at some level, one useful if not vital program has been
 caught in that process:  The Community Fellowship program.  We would
 like to express our strong support of this valuable and important
 program.

 The Fellowship program is first and foremost a community-based
 program.  It selects editors to work on projects -- those which are
 novel and have yet to be tried, those that have been tried but have
 not been rigorously developed or tested, and those otherwise that need
 financial, technical and institutional backing to succeed.  It
 represents a direct line of support from the WMF to
 community-organized, community-driven, and community-maintained
 projects.

 We strongly believe that the Fellowship program is a great way to jump
 start many projects cheaply, efficiently, and with low-risk.  Most
 importantly, because Fellowship projects are community-organized,
 there is high potential for their broad community support.

 We recognize that the Wikimedia Foundation’s allocation of funding
 must reflect the priorities of the Foundation’s annual and strategic
 plans, and we understand that the future of the Fellowship program is
 at risk under the justification that it doe

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia redefined -- typography and UX and such

[Denny Vrandečić]

If WMF had a Steve Jobs on staff, everyone would hate him for making
decisions without properly consulting the community, for destroying
the community, for reinventing Wikimedia again, for making unpopular
decisions, for making decisions behind close doors, for being an
egomaniac, etc.

Heck, we cannot even get the branding right. We call our project
Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews... we have a
software called MediaWiki, and the whole movement is called the
Wikimedia Movement. No surprise people think Wikileaks is one of ours.
No surprise people cannot get these words right. There have been
several suggestions for improving the branding, but every time met
with strong resistance.

I think Athena is a much more though-out design step for Wikipedia,
and I am very much looking forward to it to happen. But as long as
there is considerable backlash for something like a move from Monobook
to Vector -- which, it seems, is not even regarded as a design update
by most critics here -- I am wary about the social costs involved in
such an update.



Yes, it would be nice if it was easier to change Wikipedia.

Cheers,
Denny


2012/8/17 Nathan :
> Never having been to design school like Amir, I can't comment on what grade
> it might get. But I do like it a lot; I think it's a serious improvement
> over what we use now, and incorporates design principles that we should
> adopt even if we don't take the design itself. The visual elements, the
> better branding and identification of sister projects, and the modern feel
> / look are all elements that can be adapted.
>
> I'd love to see more of these complete redesign proposals with a
> professional feel. The current "2012 main page redesign" proposals are
> almost uniformly amateurish, and many make only the most minimal
> adjustments. More importantly, they are aimed only at the main page - what
> needs to be updated is really the entire thing. 10 years on and the editing
> interface is still shit, and the design is still aimed at satisfying lowest
> common denominator concerns. Time for a new approach, if only Wikimedia had
> a Steve Jobs on staff.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A task list for a beginning project

[Denny Vrandečić]

2012/7/31 Denny Vrandečić :
>   Country: {{#getfromwikidata:country}}

And this is just a place holder syntax for now.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A task list for a beginning project

[Denny Vrandečić]

Wikidata will still help with the task at hand, but it should be formulated as:

- Translate certain templates, like city templates etc., to the target language
- Provide labels to relevant items on Wikidata in the target language

Simplified this means the template

  ''City''
  Country: {{#getfromwikidata:country}}

would need to be translated in the target wiki to

  "Stadt"
  Land: {{#getfromwikidata:land}}

and the actual country would need a label in the target language in
Wikidata (i.e. "Österreich" for the item on Austria, etc.) and the
city the template is used needs to be linked to the respective
Wikidata item. This will help with starting Wikipedias quite a bit,
but there is no magic involved.

Cheers,
Denny

2012/7/31 Federico Leva (Nemo) :
> Milos Rancic, 31/07/2012 12:53:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 8:35 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> * Create useful templates, like {{welcome}, {{citation needed}},
>>> {{infobox}}, {{delete}} etc.
>>
>>
>> Wikidata should fix the issue with templates. Thus, soon the manual
>> should be fixed with "translate templates <1>, <2>...  into your
>> language at Wikidata".
>
>
> Really? Where is this discussed/specified in more detail?
> Cf.
> .
>
> Nemo
>
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Language links and double language links on the Wikipedias

[Denny Vrandečić]

I got the number from Brent Hecht, a researcher at Northwestern, who
has a number of great papers published on Wikipedia-related topics.

CC-ing him, so he knows I am blam.., er, referencing him :)

Cheers,
Denny



2012/6/26 Martijn Hoekstra :
> This number, 99.2% was also mentioned on the Berlin Hackathon. It
> sounds much higher than what my (very scientifically relevant,
> obviously) gut feeling tells me. Could you indicate where this number
> is coming from?
>
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 2:45 PM, Denny Vrandečić
>  wrote:
>> Ziko,
>>
>> it does not jeopardize the Wikidata goal -- the current language link
>> system won't be switched off, but can be further used. Everything that
>> is working currently will still be possible afterwards. Wikidata can
>> still be used to represent the 99.2% of language links that are simple
>> -- this would still be a huge improvement over the current state.
>>
>> As soon as these are out of the way, we can think about if and how to
>> extend the system in order to deal with the rest.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Denny
>>
>> 2012/6/25 Ziko van Dijk :
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> So may I guess that "double links" are usually the result of a
>>> Wikipedian who was not sure which language link to set, so in doubt,
>>> he simply put in the language links for two different articles?
>>>
>>> And in general, is it imagineable that different languages divide the
>>> knowledge in different ways, which could jeopardize the whole goal of
>>> Wikidata unifiying the language links?
>>>
>>> Kind regards
>>> Ziko
>>>
>>>
>>> 2012/6/25 Delirium :
>>>> Thanks for this list. For the languages I know, I've started going through
>>>> and fixing ones that are clearly wrong. If a number of people do that, that
>>>> should improve the general quality/consistency of interwiki links. I second
>>>> the other comment that it'd be nice if the parsing could be re-run to
>>>> exclude commented-out links, but the list is still useful as is.
>>>>
>>>> There are some difficult cases, though, when languages make different
>>>> choices on how to group subjects, so the articles aren't actually in 1-to-1
>>>> correspondence. For example, the English article [[en: Móði and Magni]]
>>>> unsurprisingly has two outgoing interwiki links, when linking to languages
>>>> that split them, such as [[da:Magni]] and [[da:Modi]]. It's not clear what
>>>> to do about these cases.
>>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>> Mark
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 6/25/12 12:29 PM, Denny Vrandečić wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> I ran some analysis last week, to get some numbers out of the
>>>>> Wikipedia language links. One type of reports that were generated was
>>>>> the list of all articles in the main namespaces of the Wikipedias that
>>>>> link to more than one article in another language edition of Wikipedia
>>>>> (so called double language links). There are not that many of them
>>>>> (about 19,000 in total), split by language, all available here:
>>>>>
>>>>> <http://simia.net/languagelinks/>
>>>>>
>>>>> Double language links are not errors per se, but they contain a few
>>>>> nuisances
>>>>> * they lead to two links in the language links list that just look the
>>>>> same (you have to hover over them to see that they link to different
>>>>> languages), which is not really optimal from the user experience side
>>>>> * they are not saved in the langlinks table and thus are ignored in
>>>>> certain reports and also in the respective export
>>>>>
>>>>> I am not sure how to reach out to the respective Wikipedia
>>>>> communities, or if I should at all. Should I post to their respective
>>>>> version of the village pump? Remembering from the time I was active on
>>>>> the Croatian Wikipedia, I would have appreciated that list to check
>>>>> the entries. I reckoned the wikipedia-l list would be the right place,
>>>>> but that list looks rather dead.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>> Denny
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Language links and double language links on the Wikipedias

[Denny Vrandečić]

Amir,

thank you for the thoughtful reply!

Indeed our current plan is a kind of a staged deployment in the sense
that we will not automatically transfer the links but let the editor
community do it. On our test systems we already see bots being tried
out and rewritten, so we expect that as soon as Wikidata starts, we
will see that transition happening.

But the current language link system will continue to work, so no
article or Wikipedia is forced to switch to the Wikidata system.
Complex language links configurations can still be handled manually --
and maybe even easier so, since conflicts between bots and human
editors should be less likely to happen.

I hope that this is the right path to "profit" :)

Cheers,
Denny


2012/6/25 Amir E. Aharoni :
> Hi Denny,
>
> TL;DR: It's a very important question, but don't worry about it too
> much. Just do Wikidata well as it is currently planned.
>
> Now, the full reply.
>
> I wrote a bit of an essay about it in 2008:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tips_for_resolving_interwiki_conflicts
>
> I also started a page to coordinate the efforts to resolve such conflicts:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization
>
> It started out nicely, but didn't really scale, so I had no choice but
> to neglect it.
>
> There are two main reasons that it didn't scale:
> 1. Fixing interlanguage links conflicts is an exhausting manual
> process. The Interlanguage extension or Wikidata are supposed to make
> it centralized and easier.
>
> 2. Almost all Wikipedians are very, very reluctant about doing
> anything outside their home projects.
>
> So, Wikidata is supposed to resolve #1. Once it becomes active, #2
> will kick in again. At this stage, all I can say is our old motto: "Be
> Bold". There's a rumor about me, which says that I know a lot of
> languages. I don't; I'm just bold about trying to edit Wikipedias in
> languages that I don't know. Everybody can do it. Most of the time it
> turns out to be correct and people don't complain. Trying to talk to
> people about this on village pumps and using global message delivery
> is not very efficient. In many languages, even in some major ones, the
> village pumps are not as active as in English, and even when they are,
> people very often ignore messages in English.
>
> Anyway, my proposal is this:
> * As discussed at bug 15607 [1], the best strategy for rolling out
> centralized language links is to enable them in articles without
> conflicts and to leave articles with conflicts without any change at
> first.
> * After initial roll-out, a list of conflicts for every project should
> be created. That is, there should be one list of articles with
> conflicts in the English Wikipedia, another list for the Hebrew
> Wikipedia, another one for Croatian, etc. This will make it relatively
> more accessible for people, because it will look like a problem in
> their project. Most people like solving local problems more than
> global problems.[2]
> * Profit.
>
> I believe that this crowdsourcing model may work. It won't be
> immediately perfect or very fast. It's just a sensible start.
>
> [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15607
>
> [2] A technical implementation comment about the "list of pages with
> conflicts": it will be most efficient, if it will be implemented as a
> special page in each project. If updating it immediately is too
> burdensome in terms of performance, it can be updated in batches every
> week or so. The reason it should be a special page is that it will
> look like an integrated site feature and that it will be easy to
> localize its interface.
>
> 2012/6/25 Denny Vrandečić :
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I ran some analysis last week, to get some numbers out of the
>> Wikipedia language links. One type of reports that were generated was
>> the list of all articles in the main namespaces of the Wikipedias that
>> link to more than one article in another language edition of Wikipedia
>> (so called double language links). There are not that many of them
>> (about 19,000 in total), split by language, all available here:
>>
>> <http://simia.net/languagelinks/>
>>
>> Double language links are not errors per se, but they contain a few nuisances
>> * they lead to two links in the language links list that just look the
>> same (you have to hover over them to see that they link to different
>> languages), which is not really optimal from the user experience side
>> * they are not saved in the langlinks table and thus are ignored in
>> certain reports and also in the respective export
>>
>> I am not sure h

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Language links and double language links on the Wikipedias

[Denny Vrandečić]

Hi Bence,

yes, I am thinking about rerunning the script and removing comments
first. Didn't work out yesterday, I had a bug in my script, and
noticed that only in the morning when it was already almost finished.
Let's see when I have the time for the update. (Or if someone else
picks up the code and does it).

Thanks for the comments,
Cheers,
Denny

2012/6/25 Bence Damokos :
> Hi Denny,
>
> This is a really interesting list.
> Looking at the Hungarian list, I find that in many instances the duplicate
> interwiki link is actually commented out (in the form of " or ),
> and not real duplicate links. (In some cases there are indeed duplicate
> links, where one concept covers two concepts in other languages.)
>
> Maybe you could refine your search algorithm to exclude commented out
> links, and improve your listing page by including not only the second
> interwiki link found for a given language, but also the first one, so it is
> easier to assess without having to check the article pages or source codes?
>
> In any case, the village pumps might be a good place to post a link to the
> lists. The "Global message delivery" system might help you in that:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery
>
> Best regards,
> Bence
>
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Denny Vrandečić <
> denny.vrande...@wikimedia.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I ran some analysis last week, to get some numbers out of the
>> Wikipedia language links. One type of reports that were generated was
>> the list of all articles in the main namespaces of the Wikipedias that
>> link to more than one article in another language edition of Wikipedia
>> (so called double language links). There are not that many of them
>> (about 19,000 in total), split by language, all available here:
>>
>> <http://simia.net/languagelinks/>
>>
>> Double language links are not errors per se, but they contain a few
>> nuisances
>> * they lead to two links in the language links list that just look the
>> same (you have to hover over them to see that they link to different
>> languages), which is not really optimal from the user experience side
>> * they are not saved in the langlinks table and thus are ignored in
>> certain reports and also in the respective export
>>
>> I am not sure how to reach out to the respective Wikipedia
>> communities, or if I should at all. Should I post to their respective
>> version of the village pump? Remembering from the time I was active on
>> the Croatian Wikipedia, I would have appreciated that list to check
>> the entries. I reckoned the wikipedia-l list would be the right place,
>> but that list looks rather dead.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Denny
>>
>> --
>> Project director Wikidata
>> Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
>> Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de
>>
>> Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
>> Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
>> unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
>> Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
>>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Language links and double language links on the Wikipedias

[Denny Vrandečić]

Ziko,

it does not jeopardize the Wikidata goal -- the current language link
system won't be switched off, but can be further used. Everything that
is working currently will still be possible afterwards. Wikidata can
still be used to represent the 99.2% of language links that are simple
-- this would still be a huge improvement over the current state.

As soon as these are out of the way, we can think about if and how to
extend the system in order to deal with the rest.

Cheers,
Denny

2012/6/25 Ziko van Dijk :
> Hello,
>
> So may I guess that "double links" are usually the result of a
> Wikipedian who was not sure which language link to set, so in doubt,
> he simply put in the language links for two different articles?
>
> And in general, is it imagineable that different languages divide the
> knowledge in different ways, which could jeopardize the whole goal of
> Wikidata unifiying the language links?
>
> Kind regards
> Ziko
>
>
> 2012/6/25 Delirium :
>> Thanks for this list. For the languages I know, I've started going through
>> and fixing ones that are clearly wrong. If a number of people do that, that
>> should improve the general quality/consistency of interwiki links. I second
>> the other comment that it'd be nice if the parsing could be re-run to
>> exclude commented-out links, but the list is still useful as is.
>>
>> There are some difficult cases, though, when languages make different
>> choices on how to group subjects, so the articles aren't actually in 1-to-1
>> correspondence. For example, the English article [[en: Móði and Magni]]
>> unsurprisingly has two outgoing interwiki links, when linking to languages
>> that split them, such as [[da:Magni]] and [[da:Modi]]. It's not clear what
>> to do about these cases.
>>
>> Best,
>> Mark
>>
>>
>> On 6/25/12 12:29 PM, Denny Vrandečić wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I ran some analysis last week, to get some numbers out of the
>>> Wikipedia language links. One type of reports that were generated was
>>> the list of all articles in the main namespaces of the Wikipedias that
>>> link to more than one article in another language edition of Wikipedia
>>> (so called double language links). There are not that many of them
>>> (about 19,000 in total), split by language, all available here:
>>>
>>> <http://simia.net/languagelinks/>
>>>
>>> Double language links are not errors per se, but they contain a few
>>> nuisances
>>> * they lead to two links in the language links list that just look the
>>> same (you have to hover over them to see that they link to different
>>> languages), which is not really optimal from the user experience side
>>> * they are not saved in the langlinks table and thus are ignored in
>>> certain reports and also in the respective export
>>>
>>> I am not sure how to reach out to the respective Wikipedia
>>> communities, or if I should at all. Should I post to their respective
>>> version of the village pump? Remembering from the time I was active on
>>> the Croatian Wikipedia, I would have appreciated that list to check
>>> the entries. I reckoned the wikipedia-l list would be the right place,
>>> but that list looks rather dead.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Denny
>>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
>
> ---
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> dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter
> http://wmnederland.nl/
>
> Wikimedia Nederland
> Postbus 167
> 3500 AD Utrecht
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] IRC office hours "The future of e-mail usage in Wikimedia projects" 2012-07-18 16:30 UTC

[Denny Vrandečić]

2012/6/26 Risker :
> On 25 June 2012 13:56, Steven Walling  wrote:
>> On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Risker  wrote:
>> > Excuse me. Just about a month ago, we had a discussion about spreading
>> out
>> > the times during which office hours would be hosted. Instead of increased
>> > diversity in times, it seems ALL office hours are now being scheduled
>> > during a very narrow window of time from roughly 1530 UTC to 1800 UTC.

> Now, it's entirely possible that the WMF staff and those of other projects
> using the "usual" timeslot have decided that their target audience is the
> people who are available during that timeslot (I don't think Wikidata's
> ever had an office hours outside of the same slot, for example).  However,

Since we have been named explicitly: our three English office hours
have so far been at 16:30 UTC (twice) and 12:00 UTC (once), so one out
of three was outside that narrow band you mentioned.

I have to admit that the next one was again scheduled for 16:30 UTC,
but in order to respond to the critique we will move it to 22:00 UTC
(which is, by the way, midnight for us. I hope that someone
appreciates that effort).

We will try to keep that in mind for further scheduling and to make it
more diverse, and if we do not, anyone is free to remind us. We're not
perfect :)


Thanks for pointing it out,
Cheers,
Denny


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Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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[Wikimedia-l] Language links and double language links on the Wikipedias

[Denny Vrandečić]

Hi all,

I ran some analysis last week, to get some numbers out of the
Wikipedia language links. One type of reports that were generated was
the list of all articles in the main namespaces of the Wikipedias that
link to more than one article in another language edition of Wikipedia
(so called double language links). There are not that many of them
(about 19,000 in total), split by language, all available here:



Double language links are not errors per se, but they contain a few nuisances
* they lead to two links in the language links list that just look the
same (you have to hover over them to see that they link to different
languages), which is not really optimal from the user experience side
* they are not saved in the langlinks table and thus are ignored in
certain reports and also in the respective export

I am not sure how to reach out to the respective Wikipedia
communities, or if I should at all. Should I post to their respective
version of the village pump? Remembering from the time I was active on
the Croatian Wikipedia, I would have appreciated that list to check
the entries. I reckoned the wikipedia-l list would be the right place,
but that list looks rather dead.

Cheers,
Denny

-- 
Project director Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Write about Wikipedia Zero!

[Denny Vrandečić]

I mentioned Wikipedia Zero in the last few talks that I gave about
Wikidata, and I always got great feedback on that part. I agree with SJ
that this is an amazing initiative that should be known better!

2012/4/29 Samuel Klein 

> Wikipedia Zero is starting to get more attention recently.  We could
> use set of funny / beautiful / amazing images of it in use, and a
> compelling overview page to send people to that mentions how to can
> spread the word / get their local distributors or politicians or
> schools on board.
>
> Then we should run a little viral publicity campaign.  It's really a
> very sexy project.  We could frame it as something universal: "free
> access to Wikipedia on all mobile devices and networks."
>
> This seems to be the main project page for now, so I've been
> encouraging people to link to it in their posts.
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero
>
> SJ
>
>
> --
> Samuel Klein  identi.ca:sj   w:user:sj  +1 617
> 529 4266
>
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-- 
Project director Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 2 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikidata opinion piece in The Atlantic

[Denny Vrandečić]

I agree that Mark has written a nice article, but I disagree with some of
his conclusions, as you can find in my comment on the page (alas, not
permalinkable).

Andreas, do you think that it is easier to monopolise and manipulate
information on Wikidata, visible to potentially many editors and users
coming from different backgrounds, than it would be in a Wikipedia language
edition with a small number of active editors? I.e. do you think that
Wikidata *increases* that danger, or merely does not improve the situation,
or maybe even has the chance of leading to a less likely to be manipulated
system?

Cheers,
Denny



2012/4/11 Andreas Kolbe 

> I would like to second that recommendation. I read that article too, and
> thought it highly relevant.
>
> Information is power, and there is a real danger of both monopolisation and
> manipulation of information here.
>
> Andreas
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:46 AM, En Pine  wrote:
>
> >
> > Here's an opinion piece, "The Problem with Wikidata", by Mark Graham, who
> > "is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute," which appears on
> > The Atlantic's website. I'm not personally supporting or opposing his
> views
> > but I found this to be an interesting read.
> http://www.theatlantic.com/**
> > technology/archive/2012/04/**the-problem-with-wikidata/**255564/<
> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikidata/255564/
> >
> >
> > __**_
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> > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.**org 
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l<
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>
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-- 
Project director Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Eisenacher Straße 2 | 10777 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
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