Hoi,
What I absolutely hate in this piece is something that has been obvious for
so long: "... , or to groups devoted to non-English languages?". It is the
lack of attention and funding that has discriminated against other
languages. The attitude of "when it works for the big Wikipedias, it will
work for the small Wikipedias" is manifestly wrong and there are plenty
examples to prove the point.
In the app where information is to be had from Wikidata they use for
instance descriptions. There are several problems with them.
- They do not translate
- They do not get updated
- They distract people from adding statements that would improve
automated descriptions.
There is no single argument why we should not use automated descriptions
and there are plenty why we should. To start we support over 280 languages
and most of them are best served with automated descriptions.
This is only one example where positive discrimination for English is
actually holding us back.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 21 June 2015 at 20:47, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> This op-ed by Andrew Lih appeared in today's New York Times. I'm sending
> it here in case anyone is interested in reading or discussing it. I
> enjoyed the piece; congrats to Mr. Lih on getting this published!
>
> MZMcBride
>
> ----
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html
>
> Can Wikipedia Survive?
> By Andrew Lih
> June 20, 2015
>
> WASHINGTON — WIKIPEDIA has come a long way since it started in 2001. With
> around 70,000 volunteers editing in over 100 languages, it is by far the
> world’s most popular reference site. Its future is also uncertain.
>
> One of the biggest threats it faces is the rise of smartphones as the
> dominant personal computing device. A recent Pew Research Center report
> found that 39 of the top 50 news sites received more traffic from mobile
> devices than from desktop and laptop computers, sales of which have
> declined for years.
>
> This is a challenge for Wikipedia, which has always depended on
> contributors hunched over keyboards searching references, discussing
> changes and writing articles using a special markup code. Even before
> smartphones were widespread, studies consistently showed that these are
> daunting tasks for newcomers. “Not even our youngest and most
> computer-savvy participants accomplished these tasks with ease,” a 2009
> user test concluded. The difficulty of bringing on new volunteers has
> resulted in seven straight years of declining editor participation.
>
> In 2005, during Wikipedia’s peak years, there were months when more than
> 60 editors were made administrator — a position with special privileges in
> editing the English-language edition. For the past year, it has sometimes
> struggled to promote even one per month.
>
> The pool of potential Wikipedia editors could dry up as the number of
> mobile users keeps growing; it’s simply too hard to manipulate complex
> code on a tiny screen.
>
> The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia’s operations
> but is not directly involved in content, is investigating solutions. Some
> ideas include touch-screen tools that would let Wikipedia editors sift
> through information and share content from their phones.
>
> What has not suffered is fund-raising. The foundation, based in San
> Francisco, has a budget of roughly $60 million. How to fairly distribute
> resources has long been a topic of debate. How much should go to regional
> chapters and affiliates, or to groups devoted to non-English languages?
> How much should stay in the foundation to develop software, create mobile
> apps and maintain infrastructure?
>
> These tensions run through the community. Last year the foundation took
> the unprecedented step of forcing the installation of new software on the
> German-language Wikipedia. The German editors had shown their independent
> streak by resisting an earlier update to the site’s user interface.
> Against the wishes of veteran editors, the foundation installed a new way
> to view multimedia content and then set up an Orwellian-sounding
> “superprotect” feature to block obstinate administrators from changing it
> back.
>
> The latest clash had repercussions in the election this year for seats to
> the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees — the most influential
> positions that volunteers can hold. The election — a record 5,000 voters
> turned out, nearly three times the number from the previous election — was
> a rebuke to the status quo; all three incumbents up for re-election were
> defeated, replaced by critics of the superprotect measures. Two other
> members will leave the 10-member board at the end of this year. Meanwhile,
> the foundation’s new executive director, Lila Tretikov, has been hiring
> developers from the world of open-source technology, and their lack of
> experience with Wikipedia content has concerned some veterans.
>
> Could the pressure from mobile, and the internal tensions, tear Wikipedia
> apart? A world without it seems unimaginable, but consider the fate of
> other online communities. Founded in 1985, at the dawn of the Internet,
> the Well, the self-proclaimed “birthplace of the online community
> movement,” hosted an influential cast of dot-com luminaries on its
> electronic bulletin board discussion forums. By 1995, it was in steep
> decline, and today it is a shell of its former self. Blogging, celebrated
> a decade ago as pioneering an exciting new form of personal writing, has
> decreased significantly in the social-media age.
>
> These are existential challenges, but they can still be addressed. There
> is no other significant alternative to Wikipedia, and good will toward the
> project — a remarkable feat of altruism — could hardly be higher. If the
> foundation needed more donations, it could surely raise them.
>
> The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes —
> the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to
> protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in — and to
> design a mobile-oriented editing environment. One board member, María
> Sefidari, warned that “some communities have become so change-resistant
> and innovation-averse” that they risk staying “stuck in 2006 while the
> rest of the Internet is thinking about 2020 and the next three billion
> users.”
>
> For the last few years, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives
> and other world-class institutions, libraries and museums have
> collaborated with Wikipedia’s volunteers to improve accuracy, quality of
> references and depth of multimedia on article pages. This movement dates
> from 2010, when the British Museum saw that Wikipedia’s visitor traffic to
> articles about its artifacts was five times greater than that of the
> museum’s own website. Grasping the power of Wikipedia to amplify its
> reach, the museum invited a Wikipedia editor to work with its curatorial
> staff. Since then, similar parternships have been set up with groups like
> the Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit organization that focuses on
> evidence-based health care, and the Centers for Disease Control and
> Prevention.
>
> These are vital opportunities for Wikipedia to tap external expertise and
> enlarge its base of editors. It is also the most promising way to solve
> the considerable and often-noted gender gap among Wikipedia editors; in
> 2011, less than 15 percent were women.
>
> The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a
> whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness
> that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making
> meaningful reforms.
>
> No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into
> the hands of so many — a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence
> of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of
> websites is worth saving.
>
> ---
>
> Andrew Lih is an associate professor of journalism at American University
> and the author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies
> Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.”
>
>
>
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