Re: [Wikimedia-l] The reader, who doesn't exist
On 8/25/14, 3:06 AM, MZMcBride wrote: As a metric, pageviews are probably not very meaningful. One way we can observe whether we're fulfilling our mission is to see how ubiquitous our content has become. An even better metric might be the quality of the articles we have. Anecdotal evidence suggests that higher article quality is not really tied to the readership rate, though perhaps article size is. Yes, I'd ideally like some better measure of how much people get out of articles. Some types of analytics do track page view duration, although that can be considered intrusive. I've done a little spot-checking within specific areas (e.g. archaeological sites) of our view counts, and they are largely dominated by spikes around transient news events: something is in the news and 5,000 or 50,000 people load an article that normally gets 50 or 100 hits a day. Providing that kind of quick background knowledge to people googling for an item they saw on the news is a valuable service, to be sure. But I'm not sure it's *as* big a proportion of the value Wikipedia provides as the raw pageload numbers would say. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia mobile apps
On 6/16/14, 4:27 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: As Sage notes, the functionality of the new apps is about the same on both Android and iOS, with some differences in the UI. Is there something written on the intended relationship between the apps and the mobile website? I've long been mildly confused about how the goals for each relate, and what I should use. On my Android phone right now, I've got both the old app, and a bookmark to Wikipedia that opens in Firefox, and I seem to alternate between which I prefer, because neither is strictly a superset of the other's functionality. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] The tragedy of Commons
On 6/17/14, 5:52 PM, George William Herbert wrote: On Jun 17, 2014, at 8:37 AM, Emmanuel Engelhart kel...@kiwix.org wrote: On 17.06.2014 17:26, George William Herbert wrote: We need an Uncommons, where the strict open license / PD rules are abandoned and we accept images as long as their fair use can be established. And don't delete unless that fair use is credibly questioned. Conflating and comingling our educational role with open content advocacy was always risky and is proving impossible. Without devaluing open content, we need to separately support fair use for educational purposes, and stop letting cross-project advocacy games screw with our educational mission. Third parties may or may not be able to re-redistribute, but we simply put it up with an explicit reuse at your own risk. reuse at your own risk = risky = no reuse for most actors Well done! Not my problem. Educational role. The whole mission of the movement, including its educational mission, is *produce freely reusable content*, not just to run a website. Wikipedia in particular is an open-content encyclopedia, which can be adapted to many educational and other uses, by Wikimedians and third parties. If it's not an open-content encyclopedia, for example if Wikipedia articles make use of provincial American copyright loopholes that render them illegal to redistribute here in Denmark, imo it has failed in its educational mission. In my view, the fact that I (an educator not in the United States) should be able to legally reproduce and distribute Wikipedia articles, is part of the whole point of an open-content educational project. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open letter from Wikimedia Argentina regarding URAA
On 2/28/14, 9:18 AM, David Gerard wrote: On 28 February 2014 01:23, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: On 27 February 2014 22:03, Galileo Vidoni gali...@gmail.com wrote: And we remain convinced that there is space for a way more prudent implementation of URAA that prevents deleting educational resources until there is complete copyright information and no legal alternative, which to our understanding (and to our interpretation of WMF's communications) can mean waiting for DMCA takedown notices. We could do that but it pretty much removes commons only advantage over say imgur or flickr. We want the images on commons to be free. Not simply stuff no one has got around to complaining about yet, This supports what I noted: Commons increasingly just can't be relied upon as a repository for the other Wikimedia projects. This implies no bad faith or bad actions on the part of the Commons community. (But that that's a distinct thing from the Wikimedia community is a lot of the problem.) Nor that what Commons *is* is inherently problematic; but what it is is less and less useful inside Wikimedia. But the other Wikimedia projects are *also* supposed to share that goal: of producing a Free-as-in-freedom encyclopedia whose contents can be safely reused and adapted by a wide range of other people and organizations, who should be able to assume that it is legal to do so without exhaustive case-by-case investigation. The movement's main job is not merely hosting the websites *.wikipedia.org, putting up whatever we find useful to put up, and taking down things when we get complaints or lawsuits. What level of scrutiny we want to apply is indeed a judgment call, so and I don't know if the current URAA policy falls on the right or wrong side of that (I haven't investigated it). But I don't think the fundamental goals are different. And if they are, it's the other projects that are in the wrong: *not* having a free, reusable body of content as the project goal is fundamentally incompatible with the Wikimedia Movement. We want the content on all Wikimedia wikis to be free-as-in-freedom and reusable by anyone. That's the point. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] The Wikipedia Gap
In terms of specific articles to create, there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles That project collects articles that exist in wide range of other encyclopedias, but don't yet exist on Wikipedia. However that's not covering quite the same concerns as the systemic-bias discussion, since many of those encyclopedias themselves have similar biases. Nonetheless this kind of comparison can be useful to find specific gaps in coverage that, equally importantly, are actionable in the sense that at least one source to base an article on exists. -Mark On 12/9/13, 9:07 PM, Peter Coombe wrote: The English Wikipedia has attempted a (non-exhaustive) list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias Peter On 9 December 2013 07:35, Romaine Wiki romaine_w...@yahoo.com wrote: In various research and media articles is written that in several subject groups Wikipedia is missing a lot of articles and those groups are relatively unrepresented. How can we as Wikipedia get clear which subject groups are missing? How can we get lists of less represented subject groups and the articles in those groups? Let us get practical, ow can we fill the gap? Greetings, Romaine ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list 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 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 Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Which Wikipedias have had large scale bot creation of articles this year?
On 11/27/13 2:01 PM, Fæ wrote: As well as finding out where this has happened, it would be good to have some cases of where bots went bad explained. My main concern would be leaving a bot to create thousands of articles but in the process creating a headache for limited numbers of maintainers, such as article copy-editors, categorizers, illustrators, inter-linkers or gnomic contributors. One example I recently ran across, while using the georeference data from Wikipedia World, is that bot-imports of villages on the Hindi Wikipedia appear to be creating *thousands* of articles with identical coordinates. There are about 1300 articles georeferenced to the coordinates (25.611, 85.144), for example. I'm not sure if this is an error (default value left in a template?), or has some other explanation. I could imagine it also being a deliberate imprecision, for example using the coordinate for the center of a district for villages where the precise coordinate of the village itself isn't known. In any case, it produces a bit of a mess; these could all be fixed up pretty easily by volunteers checking on OpenStreetMap and the like, but nobody has done so, because there are so many of these stubs. This particular example: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:hi.wikipedia.org+25.611,+85.144 -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] letter from the FDC to the WMF
On 10/23/13 2:08 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: Theo10011, 23/10/2013 00:21: I'm quite surprised to constantly read FDC is somehow representative of the larger community and accountable to them. Almost all the current members were part of chapter leadership and have been quite active within that circle. I suppose this is the same fiction as chapters inherently being representatives of the larger community. The FDC is sort of a UN-like gathering that yet somehow overlooks the largest and most active community of all. Perhaps you might want to take a look at the dismal rate of actual community participation in FDC discussions. An year or so in to its formation, there isn't exactly a stellar record and high-opinions to go around. I hope I don't need to point to the recent news articles and comments about the FDC and possible issues of corruption, which might have even played a part in...whatever this is. I'm not sure how this matters for this proposal/request by the FDC: do such defects exist or apply only to evaluating the WMF budget? If not, how do they bring water to the idea of letting WMF be special compared to the other entities' funding? From my perspective as someone not really involved in either the WMF or chapters (or other committees), but just an editor and a community member, I tend to see the WMF as special in this sense because it already has a Board of Trustees that in a fairly reasonable way represent the community/movement, who I trust to make decisions on funding priorities. Therefore it's not clear to me why *another* advisory board should be a second layer of bureaucracy evaluating its budget proposals. They are already evaluated by the Trustees primarily, and by the community as a whole secondarily, which seems like enough oversight. If the community disagrees with the WMF's direction or priorities, they can vote for different trustees in the next election, or otherwise suggest changes in its structure or membership. But in general I trust their judgment on how to allocate the Foundation's money in accordance with the mission. Best, Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [WikiEN-l] access to journals
On 9/24/13 10:13 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote: On 24 September 2013 14:06, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: I'm now working for the National Library of Australia and we offer free, at home, access to JSTOR and MANY other restricted access databases to any Australian, if they get a free library card. Is this unique to Australia? My free library subscription in Birmingham, England, gets me access - from home or indeed anywhere else - to a number of otherwise-paywalled online databases and services http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/libsubs. In Denmark, and I believe most of the USA, the norm is only on-site access to subscriptions, for the general public. University-affiliated researchers do have the option to login remotely, or VPN in to get an institutional IP address offsite. But the general public has to use library computers to access the subscriptions, or (in some cases) their own computers on the library WiFi. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia and the politics of encryption
On 9/3/13 4:28 PM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote: On 09/03/2013 09:45 AM, Fred Bauder wrote: Abusive nonsense does not make that fact go away. Someone, actually, many someones, need to be trusted. Доверяй, но проверяй. I agree with your assessment of the risks of working with the PRC, I simply think that if you think that those risks do not exist in our Western countries, you are ignoring history. I certainly agree with learning from history, but when it comes to censoring encyclopedias or similar reference works, are there good examples that might more concretely narrow down the specific type of thing we ought to be learning from history? The best example of which I'm aware is the 1979 attempt by the U.S. Department of Energy to stop the publication of a reconstruction of the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design. But that attempt ended up being unsuccessful, and encyclopedias (including Wikipedia) include that information. Are there more successful attempts? -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikidata Stubs: Threat or Menace?
This is a very interesting proposal. I think how well it will work may vary considerably based on the language. The strongest case in favor of machine-generating stubs, imo, is in languages where there are many monolingual speakers and the Wikipedia is already quite large and active. In that case, machine-generated stubs can help promote expansion into not-yet-covered areas, plus provide monolingual speakers with information they would otherwise either not get, or have to get in worse form via a machine-translated article. At the other end of the spectrum you have quite small Wikipedias, and Wikipedias which are both small and read/written mostly/entirely by bilingual readers. In these Wikipedias, article-writing tends to focus on things more specifically relevant to a certain culture and history. Suddenly creating tens or hundreds of thousands of stubs in such languages might serve to dilute a small Wikipedia more than strengthen it: if you take a Wikipedia with 10,000 articles, and it gains 500,000 machine-generated stubs, *almost every* article that comes up in search engines will be machine-generated, making it much less obvious what parts of the encyclopedia are actually active and human-written amidst the sea of auto-generated content. Plus, from a reader's perspective, it may not even improve the availability of information. For example, I doubt there are many speakers of Bavarian who would prefer to read a machine-generated bar.wiki article, over a human-written de.wiki article. That may even be true for some less-related languages: most Danes I know would prefer a human-written English article over a machine-generated Danish one. -Mark On 4/25/13 8:16 PM, Erik Moeller wrote: Millions of Wikidata stubs invade small Wikipedias .. Volapük Wikipedia now best curated source on asteroids .. new editors flood small wikis .. Google spokesperson: This is out of control. We will shut it down. Denny suggested: II ) develop a feature that blends into Wikipedia's search if an article about a topic does not exist yet, but we have data on Wikidata about that topic Andrew Gray responded: I think this would be amazing. A software hook that says we know X article does not exist yet, but it is matched to Y topic on Wikidata and pulls out core information, along with a set of localised descriptions... we gain all the benefit of having stub articles (scope, coverage) without the problems of a small community having to curate a million pages. It's not the same as hand-written content, but it's immeasurably better than no content, or even an attempt at machine-translating free text. XXX is [a species of: fish] [in the: Y family]. It [is found in: Laos, Vietnam]. It [grows to: 20 cm]. (pictures) This seems very doable. Is it desirable? For many languages, it would allow hundreds of thousands of pseudo-stubs (not real articles stored in the DB, but generated from Wikidata) to be served to readers and crawlers that would otherwise not exist in that language. Looking back 10 years, User:Ram-Man was one of the first to generate thousands of en.wp articles from, in this case, US census data. It was controversial at the time and it stuck. Other Wikipedias have since then either allowed or prohibited bot-creation of articles on a project-by-project basis. It tends to lead to frustration when folks compare article counts and see artificial inflation by bot-created content. Does anyone know if the impact of bot-creation on (new) editor behavior has been studied? I do know that many of the Rambot articles were expanded over time, and I suspect many wouldn't have been if they hadn't turned up in search engines in the first place. On the flip side, a large surface area of content being indexed by search engines will likely also attract a fair bit of drive-by vandalism that may not be detected because those pages aren't watched. A model like the proposed one might offer a solution to a lot of these challenges. How I imagine it could work: * Templates could be defined for different Wikidata entities. We could make it possible to let users add links from items in Wikidata to Wikipedia articles that don't exist yet. (Currently this is prohibited.) If such a link is added, _and_ a relevant template is defined for the Wikidata entity type (perhaps through an entity type-template mapping), WP will render an article using that template, pulling structured info from Wikidata. * A lot of the grammatical rules would be defined in the template using checks against the Wikidata result. Depending on the complexity of grammatical variations beyond basics such as singular/plural this might require Lua scripting. * The article is served as a normal HTTP 200 result, cached, and indexed by search engines. In WP itself, links to the article might have some special affordance that suggests that they're neither ordinary red links nor existing articles. * When a user tries to edit the article, wikitext (or
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Transparency about Wikimania costs
On 10/12/12 12:40 AM, Itzik Edri wrote: Just want to inform that WMIL published Wikimania 2011 budget breakdown: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2011/Budget Thanks for the information; it's quite useful to see these kinds of things. Two minor questions about the numbers. I don't see an item for conference venue rental/fees, which is often a major cost. Was Wikimania given free use of the venue? Or is that part of another category, such as Logistics? And, I see support by chapters listed as 0, but http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/ lists 5 chapters as sponsors. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia redefined -- typography and UX and such
On 8/17/12 12:02 PM, Magnus Manske wrote: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/redefined/?page=Pyramid This is quite nice, especially on a larger screen! Our current layout, which uses the full browser width for text, makes articles hard to read and cluttered-looking on larger screens. The text column with images and ToC in the sidebar is a nice change. Though on the other hand, I do like flowing text around images below some with threshold. When reading on a smaller screen, with this layout you can end up with a very narrow text column down the middle. But overall I like it. The only thing I'd really want is some way to get to more of the functionality. For example, I can't find how to view edit history. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] This afternoon's system outage
On 8/6/12 4:52 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote: Hi, after crashing an hour or so ago EN Wikipedia has started to come back but with a really strange appearance - less usable than Vector. It's back to normal for me now. Afaict, the servers hosting the static CSS/JS came back up later than the servers hosting the wiki content, so for a period you would be seeing the raw HTML without any CSS styling. Vaguely impressed that it was readable at all, actually. Good HTML/CSS practice is supposed to result in the HTML being readable even without CSS applied, but it's common at major sites for that to not really be the case. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is there an agreement between GoldenMap and the Wikipedia for the use of Wikipedia content?
It looks like a direct scrape, even to the extent of having some internal links being broken because they didn't update them (e.g. the link to Wikimedia Commons at the end of the article). I believe it's just one of the (many) unauthorized mirrors that don't properly credit the source of their content. The English Wikipedia keeps track of such sites here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CC-BY-SA_Compliance -Mark On 8/3/12 1:44 PM, Rui Correia wrote: Dear All I came across a site called Golden Map, which has an encyclopaedic collection of articles that are the same as in the Wikipedia, but I don't see anywhere any information expalining what the association/ permission is. Is there an agreement in place for this? Look - for example - at this page on the Wildebeest http://en.goldenmap.com/Wildebeest Best regards, Rui ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] COI+ certification proposal
On 8/1/12 1:51 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: Yann Forget, 01/08/2012 13:13: I have suggested some basic rules about this on the French WP, but not only they were blankly rejected, but I was barred from mentioning the whole subject. The first step against CoI is making the editors conscious that, because of their profession, background, culture, etc., they may have a bias on a subject. We regularly discuss this in the Italian community about the so called subject matter experts, reegularly coming to the conclusion that we surely make it clear that their opinions/original research is not welcome (it regularly gets deleted), the question is whether thay can find a way to contribute or they're unrecoverable. I think it can work well, if the Wikipedia manages to develop a core of expert editors in an area who also understand Wikipedia norms, and can spread that culture. On the English Wikipedia this works reasonably well in some of the scientific and mathematical areas, where most of the involved academics understand that they need to cite third-party reliable sources for statements (increasingly true in the history editing as well, I believe). On the other hand, there is still some CoI that goes on now and then, with people writing articles to promote their own findings (or even an article on their lab, university, or themselves). -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Apparently, Wikipedia is ugly
On 7/14/12 7:05 PM, Audrey Abeyta wrote: Appearance does affect perceptions of credibility, which should be of interest to Wikipedia. Recently, I was talking to someone who doubted Wikipedia's validity. When I asked her if it was because the content can be edited by anyone, she replied, No, it's the way the site looks. I've run into this also, but I suspect part of it is self-referential: Wikipedia looks like a default install of MediaWiki, and therefore looks like many half-assed/uncustomized MediaWiki installs out there. But that's because we are (close to) a default install of MediaWiki! Or rather, the reverse: the default MediaWiki skin was borrowed from the one designed for Wikimedia sites. I wonder if we'd gain a modest boost in perceptions of our design if we just made sure the skin used on Wikimedia sites, and the default skin shipped with MediaWiki, were fairly dissimilar in style. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] crazy deletionists!
On 7/4/12 1:04 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote: What would a Wikipedia look like that did not make use of press sources? It would look a hell of a lot more like an encyclopedia. Thousands of silly arguments would never arise. Thousands of apposite criticisms of Wikipedia would never arise. These are good things. Unfortunately, such a Wikipedia would also have vastly impoverished coverage of popular culture and current affairs. The articles on Lady Gaga and Barack Obama would be years behind events; the articles on the Japan earthquakes, which I believe Wikipedia was widely praised for, would only now begin to be written, articles on many towns and villages would lack colour and detail. It's an intriguing idea, and I agree with the general principle of reducing reliance on sources with less gestation time, of which newspapers are the biggest offender. I do tend to apply it in an as-alternatives-are-available fashion, and to many kinds of sources. For example, citing a recent academic conference paper may be justified if no synthesizing source is available, but there are dangers to cobbling together a new synthesis out of a dozen conference papers that may or may not be representative of majority views in a field, that may now be obsolete in ways unbeknownst to the reader, etc. Better to cite a proper book or survey article, if one is available. A problem with avoiding newspapers entirely, added to those you mention, is that we'd even lose many things that aren't that recent. Especially in their more summary pieces such as obituaries and biopics, newspapers (and newsmagazines) fill in a lot of fairly uncontroversial information on more minor, but potentially still important, people and events. For the ancient world, that information is compiled fairly exhaustively in academic sources; you can find at least a three-sentence biography of every attested figure in some kind of specialist encyclopedia, e.g. the impressively comprehensive _Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire_. But for 20th-century figures that's often not the case. For example, I've written a number of articles on minor political figures (a mayor of Houston, say) primarily sourced from obituaries in major newspapers, e.g. the NYT's obituary section. For what they are, they are usually reliable enough: they provide some dates, a summary of offices held, and a brief mention of why the person is known. For famous figures, there are usually better sources, but for minor figures the alternatives are often more like primary sources, e.g. the state or municipal archives, or not including an article at all. -Mark ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Language links and double language links on the Wikipedias
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 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
