Wikimedia-l May 2016

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164 participants
79 discussions

[Foundation-l] Improving search in Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery
by Brian J Mingus 10 Sep '22

10 Sep '22

This paper (first reference) is the result of a class project I was part of almost two years ago for CSCI 5417 Information Retrieval Systems. It builds on a class project I did in CSCI 5832 Natural Language Processing and which I presented at Wikimania '07. The project was very late as we didn't send the final paper in until the day before new years. This technical report was never really announced that I recall so I thought it would be interesting to look briefly at the results. The goal of this paper was to break articles down into surface features and latent features and then use those to study the rating system being used, predict article quality and rank results in a search engine. We used the [[random forests]] classifier which allowed us to analyze the contribution of each feature to performance by looking directly at the weights that were assigned. While the surface analysis was performed on the whole english wikipedia, the latent analysis was performed on the simple english wikipedia (it is more expensive to compute). = Surface features = * Readability measures are the single best predictor of quality that I have found, as defined by the Wikipedia Editorial Team (WET). The [[Automated Readability Index]], [[Gunning Fog Index]] and [[Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level]] were the strongest predictors, followed by length of article html, number of paragraphs, [[Flesh Reading Ease]], [[Smog Grading]], number of internal links, [[Laesbarhedsindex Readability Formula]], number of words and number of references. Weakly predictive were number of to be's, number of sentences, [[Coleman-Liau Index]], number of templates, PageRank, number of external links, number of relative links. Not predictive (overall - see the end of section 2 for the per-rating score breakdown): Number of h2 or h3's, number of conjunctions, number of images*, average word length, number of h4's, number of prepositions, number of pronouns, number of interlanguage links, average syllables per word, number of nominalizations, article age (based on page id), proportion of questions, average sentence length. :* Number of images was actually by far the single strongest predictor of any class, but only for Featured articles. Because it was so good at picking out featured articles and somewhat good at picking out A and G articles the classifier was confused in so many cases that the overall contribution of this feature to classification performance is zero. :* Number of external links is strongly predictive of Featured articles. :* The B class is highly distinctive. It has a strong "signature," with high predictive value assigned to many features. The Featured class is also very distinctive. F, B and S (Stop/Stub) contain the most information. :* A is the least distinct class, not being very different from F or G. = Latent features = The algorithm used for latent analysis, which is an analysis of the occurence of words in every document with respect to the link structure of the encyclopedia ("concepts"), is [[Latent Dirichlet Allocation]]. This part of the analysis was done by CS PhD student Praful Mangalath. An example of what can be done with the result of this analysis is that you provide a word (a search query) such as "hippie". You can then look at the weight of every article for the word hippie. You can pick the article with the largest weight, and then look at its link network. You can pick out the articles that this article links to and/or which link to this article that are also weighted strongly for the word hippie, while also contributing maximally to this articles "hippieness". We tried this query in our system (LDA), Google (site:en.wikipedia.org hippie), and the Simple English Wikipedia's Lucene search engine. The breakdown of articles occuring in the top ten search results for this word for those engines is: * LDA only: [[Acid rock]], [[Aldeburgh Festival]], [[Anne Murray]], [[Carl Radle]], [[Harry Nilsson]], [[Jack Kerouac]], [[Phil Spector]], [[Plastic Ono Band]], [[Rock and Roll]], [[Salvador Allende]], [[Smothers brothers]], [[Stanley Kubrick]]. * Google only: [[Glam Rock]], [[South Park]]. * Simple only: [[African Americans]], [[Charles Manson]], [[Counterculture]], [[Drug use]], [[Flower Power]], [[Nuclear weapons]], [[Phish]], [[Sexual liberation]], [[Summer of Love]] * LDA & Google & Simple: [[Hippie]], [[Human Be-in]], [[Students for a democratic society]], [[Woodstock festival]] * LDA & Google: [[Psychedelic Pop]] * Google & Simple: [[Lysergic acid diethylamide]], [[Summer of Love]] ( See the paper for the articles produced for the keywords philosophy and economics ) = Discussion / Conclusion = * The results of the latent analysis are totally up to your perception. But what is interesting is that the LDA features predict the WET ratings of quality just as well as the surface level features. Both feature sets (surface and latent) both pull out all almost of the information that the rating system bears. * The rating system devised by the WET is not distinctive. You can best tell the difference between, grouped together, Featured, A and Good articles vs B articles. Featured, A and Good articles are also quite distinctive (Figure 1). Note that in this study we didn't look at Start's and Stubs, but in earlier paper we did. :* This is interesting when compared to this recent entry on the YouTube blog. "Five Stars Dominate Ratings" http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html… I think a sane, well researched (with actual subjects) rating system is well within the purview of the Usability Initiative. Helping people find and create good content is what Wikipedia is all about. Having a solid rating system allows you to reorganized the user interface, the Wikipedia namespace, and the main namespace around good content and bad content as needed. If you don't have a solid, information bearing rating system you don't know what good content really is (really bad content is easy to spot). :* My Wikimania talk was all about gathering data from people about articles and using that to train machines to automatically pick out good content. You ask people questions along dimensions that make sense to people, and give the machine access to other surface features (such as a statistical measure of readability, or length) and latent features (such as can be derived from document word occurence and encyclopedia link structure). I referenced page 262 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to give an example of the kind of qualitative features I would ask people. It really depends on what features end up bearing information, to be tested in "the lab". Each word is an example dimension of quality: We have "*unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on.*" You then use surface and latent features to predict these values for all articles. You can also say, when a person rates this article as high on the x scale, they also mean that it has has this much of these surface and these latent features. = References = - DeHoust, C., Mangalath, P., Mingus., B. (2008). *Improving search in Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery*. Technical Report. PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/6/68/DeHoustMangalat…> - Rassbach, L., Mingus., B, Blackford, T. (2007). *Exploring the feasibility of automatically rating online article quality*. Technical Report. PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/d/d3/RassbachPincock…>

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
by GerardM 09 Aug '22

09 Aug '22

Hoi, I have asked and received permission to forward to you all this most excellent bit of news. The linguist list, is a most excellent resource for people interested in the field of linguistics. As I mentioned some time ago they have had a funding drive and in that funding drive they asked for a certain amount of money in a given amount of days and they would then have a project on Wikipedia to learn what needs doing to get better coverage for the field of linguistics. What you will read in this mail that the total community of linguists are asked to cooperate. I am really thrilled as it will also get us more linguists interested in what we do. My hope is that a fraction will be interested in the languages that they care for and help it become more relevant. As a member of the "language prevention committee", I love to get more knowledgeable people involved in our smaller projects. If it means that we get more requests for more projects we will really feel embarrassed with all the new projects we will have to approve because of the quality of the Incubator content and the quality of the linguistic arguments why we should approve yet another language :) NB Is this not a really clever way of raising money; give us this much in this time frame and we will then do this as a bonus... Thanks, GerardM ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: LINGUIST Network <linguist(a)linguistlist.org> Date: Jun 18, 2007 6:53 PM Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers To: LINGUIST(a)listserv.linguistlist.org LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831. Mon Jun 18 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875. Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar(a)linguistlist.org> Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry(a)linguistlist.org> Reviews: Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project <reviews(a)linguistlist.org> Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/ The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, and donations from subscribers and publishers. Editor for this issue: Ann Sawyer <sawyer(a)linguistlist.org> ================================================================ To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html ===========================Directory============================== 1) Date: 18-Jun-2007 From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org > Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers -------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:49:35 From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org > Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers Dear subscribers, As you may recall, one of our Fund Drive 2007 campaigns was called the "Wikipedia Update Vote." We asked our viewers to consider earmarking their donations to organize an update project on linguistics entries in the English-language Wikipedia. You can find more background information on this at: http://linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2007/wikipedia/index.cfm. The speed with which we met our goal, thanks to the interest and generosity of our readers, was a sure sign that the linguistics community was enthusiastic about the idea. Now that summer is upon us, and some of you may have a bit more leisure time, we are hoping that you will be able to help us get started on the Wikipedia project. The LINGUIST List's role in this project is a purely organizational one. We will: *Help, with your input, to identify major gaps in the Wikipedia materials or pages that need improvement; *Compile a list of linguistics pages that Wikipedia editors have identified as "in need of attention from an expert on the subject" or " does not cite any references or sources," etc; *Send out periodical calls for volunteer contributors on specific topics or articles; *Provide simple instructions on how to upload your entries into Wikipedia; *Keep track of our project Wikipedians; *Keep track of revisions and new entries; *Work with Wikimedia Foundation to publicize the linguistics community's efforts. We hope you are as enthusiastic about this effort as we are. Just to help us all get started looking at Wikipedia more critically, and to easily identify an area needing improvement, we suggest that you take a look at the List of Linguists page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguists. M Many people are not listed there; others need to have more facts and information added. If you would like to participate in this exciting update effort, please respond by sending an email to LINGUIST Editor Hannah Morales at hannah(a)linguistlist.org, suggesting what your role might be or which linguistics entries you feel should be updated or added. Some linguists who saw our campaign on the Internet have already written us with specific suggestions, which we will share with you soon. This update project will take major time and effort on all our parts. The end result will be a much richer internet resource of information on the breadth and depth of the field of linguistics. Our efforts should also stimulate prospective students to consider studying linguistics and to educate a wider public on what we do. Please consider participating. Sincerely, Hannah Morales Editor, Wikipedia Update Project Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable ----------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831

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Arbital, another Wikipedia competitor/complement
by David Gerard 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Being put together by Eliezer Yudkowsky of LessWrong. Content is cc-by-sa 3.0, don't know about the software. https://arbital.com/p/arbital_ambitions/ Rather than the "encyclopedia" approach, it tries to be more pedagogical, teaching the reader at their level. Analysis from a sometime Yudkowsky critic on Tumblr: http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/140995096534/a-year-ago-i-remember-be… (there's a pile more comments linked from the notes on that post, mostly from quasi-fans; I have an acerbic comment in there, but you should look at the site yourself first.) No idea if this will go anywhere, but might be of interest; new approaches generally are. They started in December, first publicised it a week ago and have been scaling up. First day it collapsed due to load from a Facebook post announcement ... so maybe hold off before announcing it everywhere :-) - d.

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New tools: pronuncify and pronuncify.net
by Asaf Bartov 28 Jan '17

28 Jan '17

Hello, everyone. (this is an announcement in my capacity as a volunteer.) Inspired by a lightning talk at the recent CEE Meeting[1] by our colleague Lars Aronsson, I made a little command-line tool to automate batch recording of pronunciations of words by native speakers, for uploading to Commons and integration into Wiktionary etc. It is called *pronuncify*, is written in Ruby and uses the sox(1) tool, and should work on any modern Linux (and possibly OS X) machine. It is available here[2], with instructions. I was then asked about a Windows version, and agreed to attempt one. This version is called *pronuncify.net <http://pronuncify.net>*, and is a .NET gooey GUI version of the same tool, with slightly different functions. It is available here[3], with instructions. Both tools require word-list files in plaintext, with one word (or phrase) per line. Both tools name the files according to the standard established in [[commons:Category:Pronunciation]], and convert them to Ogg Vorbis for you, so they are ready to upload. In the future, I may add OAuth-based direct uploading to Commons. If you run into difficulties, please file issues on GitHub, for the appropriate tool. Feedback is welcome. A. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2015/Programme/Lightn… [2] https://github.com/abartov/pronuncify [3] https://github.com/abartov/Pronuncify.net -- Asaf Bartov

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation Form 990 for FY 2014-2015 now on-wiki
by Jake Orlowitz 29 Jun '16

29 Jun '16

Seconding Lodewijk here. I can already count at least 5 phrases or statements that David Emrany has said which made me cringe and wonder why hasn't this been blocked/moderated already? Hostile, accusatory, and vulgar behavior degrades this entire forum (beyond its already damaged capacity for inclusion of multiple voices). Please do something. Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi)

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Community Wishlist Survey: Status report #2
by Johan Jönsson 02 Jun '16

02 Jun '16

Hi everyone, The important part of this email is this link: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Status_repor… This is the second Community Wishlist Survey status report. In November and December, active contributors to Wikimedia projects proposed, discussed and voted on the features and fixes that they most want to see. The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team has been tasked with working on these. Additionally, Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes team has been working on wishes from the German-speaking community. There's overlap between the two wishlists, and the teams are collaborating on various wishes, so this report includes progress made by both teams as well as great work being done by volunteer developers and other WMF staff. So far, we (in the broad sense) have added support for: *) Migrating dead external links to archives (but there's more work to be done!) *) Pageview stats *) Global notifications *) A category watchlist We're currently working on: *) Improving the plagiarism detection bot *) Improving the diff compare screen *) Numerical sorting in categories *) The possibility to add an expiry date to watchlist items *) A revision slider to help editors navigate through diff pages For more information on these projects as well as upcoming tasks, see the full status report on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Status_repor… We're looking forward to talking and working with you as we go along. Thanks, //Johan Jönsson User:Johan (WMF) --

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Campaigns extension / ServerSideAccountCreation log - does anyone still use it?
by Brad Jorsch (Anomie) 01 Jun '16

01 Jun '16

Question 1: Would anyone care if we kill the "loginCTA" campaign, which tracks when people use the link at the bottom of Special:UserLogin to get to the account creation page? Question 2: Would anyone care if we remove the extension entirely from Wikimedia wikis? Wikiapiary seems to show only one user outside of Wikimedia. Background: The extension needs a rewrite for AuthManager, and in particular the "loginCTA" campaign will be a bit of a pain to keep working. If someone is making use of the extension that's fine, but if not we may as well not continue to spend development resources on it. -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Senior Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation

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Participate in the Inspire Campaign on Addressing Harassment
by Chris "Jethro" Schilling 01 Jun '16

01 Jun '16

I am pleased to announce the launch of the third Inspire Campaign for IdeaLab, focused on addressing harassment of Wikimedia project contributors: <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire> Harassment diminishes the experience of contributing and participation for a substantial number of individuals, even those who simply witness it. Current methods of dealing with harassment are considered unacceptable as they often do not lead to productive outcomes.[1] During the month-long campaign, you are invited to submit & review ideas on how to better address harassment. Consider joining a team to help make an idea happen. Ideas can be submitted in any language, and focus on research, building tools or software, outreach efforts, or something completely new. Grants are available from the Wikimedia Foundation to fund projects that are eligible for financial support.[2] Ideas focused on changes to community policies and guidelines are also welcome. Google Hangout sessions are also scheduled in June if you’d like to discuss your idea or have questions about WMF grants.[3] Questions about the campaign can be directed at the Inspire talk page.[4] An FAQ page about the campaign is also available.[5] If you want to help make your projects safer for everyone to participate in, I encourage you to participate in this Inspire Campaign. I believe we can work together to address this difficult and important issue. With thanks, Chris "Jethro" Schilling I JethroBT (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:I_JethroBT_(WMF)> Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home> [1] < https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harassment_Survey_2015_-_Results_Re… > [2] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start> [3] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Events> [4] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/Inspire> [5] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire/FAQ>

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Letters of Intent for 2016-2017 Round 1 of the FDC process are due 1 July
by Winifred Olliff 31 May '16

31 May '16

Dear Wikimedia colleagues, The deadline for submitting a Letter of Intent for 2016-2017 Round 1 of the FDC process is 1 July. *Who should submit a letter of intent?* Organizations that plan to apply for funding in Round 1 of the FDC process should submit their Letters of Intent by 1 July. Proposal forms for Round 1 will be due by 1 October 2016 and most Round 1 grants will begin 1 January 2017. If you think you will apply for funding in this round, it's a good idea to submit a letter of intent. *How to submit a letter of intent.* Organizations may submit their Letters of Intent by creating a proposal hub page here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG. Please complete this step of creating a proposal hub page, from which you can access a button to create your letter of intent, rather than copy-pasting a letter of intent template from previous years. *Why submit a letter of intent for the FDC process?* You must complete this step to submit a proposal in the next round, for funding during the 2017 calendar year, so that your organization will be evaluated for eligibility to submit a proposal. If you're not sure whether or not you want to apply, it's a good idea to contact FDC staff at < fdcsupport(a)wikimedia.org> right away, so you can be sure and understand your status before the Letter of Intent deadline. In the letter of intent, you will write the amount of funding you expect to apply for, but you can change this at any time before your proposal form is submitted on 1 October. Learn more at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Information: *Letters of Intent due: 1 July 2016 *Eligibility confirmed: 15 September 2016 *Proposal forms due: 1 October 2016 *Community review: 1 October - 30 October 2016 *FDC recommendation: by 30 November 2016 *Board decision: by 1 January 2017 *Grants begin: 1 January 2017 - 1 February 2017 Best regards from FDC staff! -- Winifred Olliff Senior Program Officer Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation Form 990 for FY 2014-2015 now on-wiki
by Gerard Meijssen 31 May '16

31 May '16

Hoi, For a bit of background form 990 is probably something everybody knows about as it is financial and important and that is why we mention this.. For all of you who do not know, we have a FAQ where you may find what is relevant about all this. Thanks, GerardM PS sorry Greg for pulling your leg. :) On 18 May 2016 at 20:55, Gregory Varnum <gvarnum(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Sent on behalf of Wikimedia Foundation's Finance Team: > > The Wikimedia Foundation Form 990 for FY 2014 - 2015 has been posted on the > Wikimedia Foundation Wiki's Financial Reports page: > https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports > > A list of answers to frequently asked questions about this form has also > been posted on the same page. > > Please contact Jaime Villagomez or Tony Le with any questions: > jvillagomez(a)wikimedia.org or tle(a)wikimedia.org > > Thank you, > Finance Team > Wikimedia Foundation > > _______________________________________________ > Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately > directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia > community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > _______________________________________________ > WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list > WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l > >

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Wikimedia-l May 2016