en.planet.wikimedia

English

What happens when a WikiWoman meets a WikiLibrarian? An editathon on women’s biographies, of course! Or at least this is what happened on May 4th at Biblioteca Salaborsa, one of the most well-known libraries in Bologna, Italy.

Wikimedia Italia organized its first event at Biblioteca Salaborsa on April 20th, an introductory workshop led by wikipedian Piero Grandesso. Thanks to the work of the librarian and wikimedian Virginia Gentilini, it was possible to renew the collaboration and organize a second event.

We had thirteen participants, some of whom came after attending the first workshop. We created five new articles and improved two existing pages, paying homage in this way to seven amazing Italian women (and also a French one!) who didn’t have the space they deserved on Wikipedia.

It is always a little shocking to discover how many relevant women are missing from Wikipedia. Amongst the pages we created was one about Hortensia, a late Roman Republic orator and one of the very few women who at that time challenged men’s authority by giving a speech in the Forum. She lived during the civil war that took place after Julius Caesar’s assasination, a period when the Roman Republic was struggling with many war expenses. Hortensia debated in the Roman Forum against a tax imposed on wealthy Roman women, arguing that it was not legitimate to demand that women’s properties finance a war in which they had no active role. Eventually the number of women affected by the tax was reduced.

As one can imagine, we study a lot of Ancient Roman history in Italy. Latin literature and language are also compulsory teachings in some secondary schools. But Hortensia’s page, already in other language versions, was not yet on Italian Wikipedia.

Beside the creation of content on Wikipedia, the editathon was also an occasion to put together and share the different skills and competencies of the organizers. The team was composed of Virginia Gentilini, Wikimedia Italia member Ginevra Sanvitale and Commons and Italian Wikipedia sysop Elitre, who worked together, each one according to her area of expertise. We also had a chance to learn and confront a number of related Wikimedia topics.

Finally, the role played by Salaborsa as a center of cultural creation and knowledge circulation was very important.

In 2012, Wikimedia Italia reached out to Italian librarians and libraries for the first time, discovering many possible ways of collaboration. Wikipedia workshops for patrons of libraries are one of these, and they are particularly interesting because of their cultural and social implications. Working on Wikipedia in libraries can bridge the gap between print, traditional resources of information and the lively and active community of Wikipedians. But it can contribute to bridge the Wikipedia Gender Gap too: public libraries in Italy are traditionally used by women more than men, and they can therefore be a perfect place to find women interested in connecting their love of reading to a more participative and empowering way to enrich their cultural life. More women attended the editathon indeed, showing enthusiam and asking for further opportunities to work in this direction.

Librarians in Italy are traditionally mostly women too. It will be interesting to see how many successful ways of collaboration we’ll manage to find, both working directly with patrons inside the libraries, and at a more general level of interaction between bibliographic data held by National Libraries and Wiki Projects. There is such a large amount of useful work to do!

Ginevra Sanvitale, Wikimedia Italia. With the collaboration of Virginia Gentilini

Italian

Cosa succede quando una Wikipediana incontra una WikiBibliotecaria? Un editathon su biografie femminili, ovviamente! O per lo meno questo è quello che è successo il 4 maggio in Biblioteca Salaborsa, una delle biblioteche più famose di Bologna.

Wikimedia Italia ha organizzato il suo primo evento in Salaborsa il 20 aprile, un workshop introduttivo tenuto dal wikipediano Piero Grandesso. Grazie al lavoro della bibliotecaria e wikimediana Virginia Gentilini è stato possibile rinnovare la collaborazione e organizzare un secondo evento.

Abbiamo avuto tredici partecipanti, alcuni dei quali arrivati direttamente dal primo workshop. Abbiamo creato cinque nuovi articoli e migliorato due pagine esistenti, omaggiando in questo modo sette fantastiche donne italiane (e anche una francese!) che non avevano ancora lo spazio che meritavano su Wikipedia.

È sempre un po’ scioccante scoprire quante donne rilevanti mancano su Wikipedia. Tra le pagine che abbiamo creato ce n’è una su Ortensia, un’oratrice della tarda Repubblica romana e una delle pochissime donne che a quei tempi sfidarono l’autorità maschile tenendo un discorso nel Foro. Ortensia visse durante la guerra civile iniziata dopo l’assassinio di Giulio Cesare, un periodo di grandi spese militari per Roma. Ortensia discusse nel Foro contro una tassa imposta sulle romani benestanti, sostenendo che non fosse legittimo chiedere alle donne romane di impegnare i loro patrimoni per una guerra in cui non avevano avuto un ruolo attivo. Alla fine, il numero di donne colpite dalla tassa fu diminuito.

In Italia studiamo tanta storia romana. Basti pensare che la lingua e la letteratura latina sono ancora materie obbligatorie in diverse scuole superiori. Eppure la pagina di Ortensia, già esistente in altre versioni linguistiche, non era ancora presente su Wikipedia in italiano.

Oltre alla creazione di contenuti su Wikipedia, l’editathon è stato anche un’occasione di mettere insieme e condividere le diverse abilità e competenze delle organizzatrici. Il team era composto da Virginia, Ginevra Sanvitale di Wikimedia Italia e l’amministratrice di Commons e Wikipedia in italiano Elitre, che hanno lavorato insieme ognuna in accordo al proprio campo di esperienza. Abbiamo anche avuto la chance di approfondire le nostre conoscenze e scambiarci opinioni su diversi argomenti collegati al mondo Wikimedia.

Infine, il ruolo giocato da Salaborsa in quanto centro di creazione culturale e di circolazione della conoscenza è stato molto importante.

Nel 2012 Wikimedia Italia ha per la prima volta iniziato a dialogare con le biblioteche e i bibliotecari italiani, scoprendo molti modi possibili per collaborare. Uno di questi sono i workshop su Wikipedia fatti per gli utenti delle biblioteche, particolarmente interessanti per le impicazioni culturali e sociali che comportano. Lavorare con Wikipedia nelle biblioteche può ridurre il divario tra la carta stampata, le risorse d’informazione tradizionali e la vivace e attiva comunità di Wikipediani. E inoltre può anche contribuire a ridurre il divario di genere: le biblioteche pubbliche italiane sono tradizionalmente utilizzate dalle donne più che dagli uomini e possono dunque essere il luogo perfetto per trovare donne interessate a collegare il loro amore per la lettura a una modalità maggiormente partecipativa e responsabilizzante di arricchimento della loro vita culturale. Molte donne, infatti, hanno partecipato all’editathon, mostrando entusiasmo e chiedendo altre occasioni di lavoro in questa direzione.

Gli stessi bibliotecari in Italia sono, tradizionalmente, per la maggior parte donne. Sarà interessante vedere quanti altri modi riusciremo a trovare per collaborare, sia lavorando direttamente con gli utenti all’interno delle biblioteche, sia a un livello di interazione più generale tra i dati bibliografici custoditi dalle biblioteche nazionali e i progetti Wiki. C’è così tanto lavoro utile da fare!

Ginevra Sanvitale, Wikimedia Italia. Con la collaborazione di Virginia Gentilini

Spanish

¿Qué sucede cuando WikiWomen se junta con una Wikibiblitecaria? Un editatón de biografías de mujeres, por supuesto! O al menos esto es lo que sucedió el 4 de mayo en la Biblioteca Salaborsa, una de las bibliotecas más conocidas en Bolonia, Italia.

Wikimedia Italia organizó su primer evento en la Biblioteca Salaborsa el 20 de abril, un taller de introducción realizado por el wikipedista Piero Grandesso. Gracias a la labor de la bibliotecaria y wikimedista Virginia Gentilini, se logró renovar la colaboración y organizar un segundo evento.

Teníamos trece participantes, algunos de los cuales vinieron después de asistir al primer taller. Hemos creado cinco nuevos artículos y mejoramos dos páginas existentes, rindiendo homenaje de esta manera a siete mujeres italianas increíbles (y también una francesa!) Que no tenían el espacio que merecen en Wikipedia.

Siempre es algo impactante descubrir cuántas mujeres relevantes no están en Wikipedia. Entre las páginas que hemos creado había un sobre Hortensia, una oradora de la república romana tardía y una de las pocas mujeres que en ese momento desafiaron la autoridad de los hombres, dando un discurso en el Foro. Ella vivió durante la guerra civil que tuvo lugar después del asesinato de Julio César, un período en que la República Romana estaba luchando contra las consecuencias económicas de la guerra. Hortensia debatió en el Foro Romano en contra de un impuesto aplicado a las mujeres romanas adineradas, con el argumento de que no era legítimo exigir que las mujeres financiaran con su propiedad una guerra en la que no tenían ningún papel activo. Eventualmente se redujo el número de mujeres afectadas por el impuesto.

Como se puede imaginar, estudiamos mucho de la historia antigua de Roma en Italia. La literatura y la lengua latina también son materias obligatorias en algunas escuelas secundarias. Pero la página de Hortensia, que ya existía en otros idiomas, todavía faltaba en la Wikipedia en italiano.

Además de la creación de contenidos en Wikipedia, el editatón fue también una ocasión para reunir y compartir las diferentes experiencias y habilidades de los organizadores. El equipo estaba compuesto por Virginia, la integrante de Wikimedia Italia Ginevra Sanvitale y el administrador de Commons y Wikipedia en italiano Elitre, quienes trabajaron juntos, cada uno de acuerdo a su área de especialización. También tuvimos la oportunidad de aprender y hacer frente a una serie de temas relacionados con Wikimedia.

Por último, el papel desempeñado por Salaborsa como centro de creación cultural y difusión del conocimiento fue muy importante.

En 2012 Wikimedia Italia se dirigió a los bibliotecarios y las bibliotecas italianas por primera vez, descubriendo muchas formas posibles de colaboración. Talleres de Wikipedia para usuarios de las bibliotecas son una de ellas, particularmente interesantes debido a sus implicaciones culturales y sociales. Trabajar con Wikipedia en las bibliotecas puede cerrar la brecha entre los recursos tradicionales de información impresos y la comunidad viva y activa de wikipedistas. Pero también puede contribuir a reducir la brecha de género en Wikipedia: las bibliotecas públicas en Italia se utilizan tradicionalmente más por mujeres que por hombres, y por lo tanto pueden ser el lugar perfecto para encontrar mujeres interesadas en conectar su amor por la lectura con una manera más participativa y de empoderamiento para enriquecer su vida cultural. La mayoría de las mujeres que asistieron a la editatón de hecho, mostraron su entusiasmo y preguntaron acerca de las oportunidades de continuar trabajando en esta dirección.

La mayoría de bibliotecarios en Italia también son tradicionalmente mujeres. Será interesante ver cuántas formas exitosas de colaboración podemos encontrar, tanto trabajando de manera directa con los usuarios dentro de las bibliotecas, y en un nivel más general a través de la interacción entre los datos bibliográficos contenidos en las bibliotecas nacionales y en los proyectos wiki. Hay tanto trabajo útil que hacer!

Ginevra Sanvitale, Wikimedia Italia. Con la colaboración de Virginia Gentilini

Wikimedia UK’s Education Organiser, Dr Toni Sant, has received professional recognition as Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. The HEA is the national professional organisation for lecturers in UK universities, and Senior Fellowships are awarded only to experienced staff able to demonstrate outstanding impact and influence in teaching and supporting the student experience, both within their departments and across their university.

This professional recognition relates mainly to work he has done in recent years at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough, which includes his efforts to introduce Wikipedia as an appropriate learning and teaching resource within higher education.

He presented this aspect of his work at the EduWiki conference, which took place at the University of Leicester in September 2012 – you can watch a video of his presentation here – but he has gone on to assign the creation and editing of Wikipedia articles with students across arts and new media courses in Scarborough. Aside from this, he has also imparted the practice to other lecturers within the same institution who now use it with their own students.

Commenting on this prestigious professional recognition award from the HEA, Toni said: “As Wikimedia UK’s new Education Organiser I plan to share the experience I’ve developed at the University of Hull’s Scarborough Campus with others in the education sector. While I’m keen to see Wikimedia projects used appropriately across higher education, I’d also like to ensure that we provide appropriate support for the broader education sector, including school-age children, as well as those in lifelong learning environments and participants in the University of the Third Age.”

If you would like to discuss education-related matters with Wikimedia UK, please contact Toni Sant via the Wikimedia UK wiki.

So, what has the Swedish education programme been up to since its founding in October last year? What’s been going on past these around 180 days? Well, let us look at some of the things that has been going on!

But hey, perhaps we should initially look at the overarching aim of an education programme in Sweden. The overall goal is to have Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) accepted as learning tools among teachers at various educational levels in Sweden.

Employment

On 1 October, Sophie Österberg was employed as Education manager as to initiate and lead the education programme in Sweden. Then, the world’s first Wikipedian in Academy was employed the spring of 2013 by a Swedish University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. We’ve recently spoken to another university here in Sweden who is quite interested in the idea of employing a Wikipedian. So we might see another Wikipedian in Academy this autumn.

Funding

The education programme managed to get funding for a quarter of the manager’s salary from an internet fund for a specific educational project. The project is a collaboration with an educational institution where we offer Wikipedia training to teachers of immigrants who are learning Swedish. When they’re on a more advanced level, a possibility is to translate a Swedish Wikipedia article about something typically Swedish and hence learn about a historical person or phenomenon, and writing this article in their native language on their Wikipedia language version. So far we’ve found, and had to meet-ups with the interested teachers who will engage their students in this the coming fall. Look at the list of examples of what to write about which is arguably typically Swedish. (What might a list look like on your language version? What are typical German, British, Spanish, Arabic articles?)

Invitations (at least a few of them)

The education programme has kindly and generously been invited to various events around in Sweden, mostly in Stockholm and Gothenburg, our two largest cities. We’ve been talking at large conferences, exhibiting the education programme at various events, held seminars and co-hosted teachers evenings and various workshops. At the Internet days here in Sweden we participated in a panel discussion regarding digital resources in education. At SETT (yes, it’s like BETT and is the Swedish version of it) we held lectures on both the days of the huge exhibition. We were also invited to have a seat at the jury for a well-established school competition in April. These are a few of the events we’ve been invited to, and the invitations keep on coming! (It must be due to the amazingly gorgeous t-shirts!)

Collaborations

The education programme is supporting a network of teachers in Sweden who are using the flipped-classroom idea. There has been a lack of a good place to store these movies so Commons seemed as a rather splendid alternative. The dialogue was initiated between the education manager and one of the most engaged flipped-classroom teachers in Sweden, Karin Brånebäck, in the end of March, and the first movie is now up after a page has been created for this purpose on Commons.

Moreover, the Swedish Educational broadcasting radio (which also does TV) has had its largest ever TV production aiming at immigrants learning Swedish and the teachers engaged in their education. Through the Wikipedia education programme, a part of the production is to have teachers share their experiences, knowledge and ways to teach Swedish via Wikiversity which is promoted by the Swedish Educational broadcasting radio. They will also create a short movie about Wikiversity and how one may contribute to the project.

Ambassador programme

On 24t March, all was created that was needed for an ambassador programme, and the very first Swedish Ambassador was done with his online training on 4 May. He has now been given a lovely t-shirt and other goodies and has already scheduled a meeting with the principal of the school to discuss how the best may utilise Wikipedia at their school.

Online-education

An online-training for teachers, which looks at the pedagogical aspects of Wikipedia, the current legislation in Sweden in regards to what should happen in school and how Wikipedia fits into that context, is now on Wikiversity. The course was finalised on 22 February, and 17 people have take the online course. The first teacher succeeded with all the three tasks the other day and has now been sent a …. well I guess you know by now what we’ve sent him! ;) He will run a programme this fall with his pupils to develop a specific article about an area that is close to their school. They will collect information and take photos, all in order to make Wikipedia better!

Travels

As a great part of the education programme here in Sweden is to inform about the possibility to use Wikipedia in the classroom through practical workshops and/or lectures, the education programme has been to 13 cities so far in Sweden. It’s actually 1,379 km (857 miles) between the cities Skellefteå in the north and Simrishamn in the south, so we’ve covered quite a bit of this long country, which is in total 1,574 km from north to south.

Programmes

• This past fall students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology had the option of writing their assignment as an article on Wikipedia.
• 13-year olds have started writing articles together with their very dedicated librarian.
• A high-school class has written articles relating to their journeys to Uganda and South Africa.
• The Royal College of Music has had a small tryout with Wikipedia writing about music production, which they wish to scale with much more students this coming fall.
• Students at Linneaus University are writing about different bacteria on Wikipedia as a part of their course.
• High-school students are currently writing about their home town and are finding historical fact by engaging the local museum to help them.

A tool

The programme has so gratefully had the chance to be helped by a dedicated Wikipedian in Sweden who has developed a tool for counting a group’s contributions to Wikipedia. This is currently used by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Museums have also expressed interest in using this as it makes possible to quantitatively see what they’ve actually contributed to this wonderful encyclopedia.

And what about the fall …. ?

Some of the things that are planned are:

• A day for teachers in museums about digital resources. This will be in collaboration with two other organisations.
• Half a day for primarily principals about Wikipedia. As teachers are very interested in Wikipedia but would need more support by their principals, we are arranging a half-day seminar about Wikipedia and its importance in education
• Education for librarians. A joint program with an organisation for school librarians about how Wikipedia works and how they can use it in their role as librarians.
• Initiating WikiMini in Sweden. The interest for WikiMini has been quite big in Sweden from teachers at younger levels, and we are aiming to have WikiMini up and running this fall. This will be in collaboration with an educational institution in Gothenburg.
• Two seminars during a course this fall for principals. In collaboration with an organisation supporting principals in Sweden, we have been offered to host two seminars during their semester-long evening course for principals where we will talk Wikipedia.
• Among various of other interesting & exciting stuff of course! :)

Sophie Österberg, Wikimedia Sverige

(Lee la versión en español aquí)

When Melisa Parisi began contributing to Wikimedia in 2007, she was only 15. Parisi, a native Argentinean, started by translating articles about the long-running cartoon The Simpsons from English Wikipedia to Spanish Wikipedia.

Her first article was deleted because it didn’t have the correct formatting. That setback didn’t deter Parisi, however, and with the assistance of an even younger Wikipedia editor, she learned the the ins and outs of editing guidelines. “He helped me a lot, I was ready to quit when a sysop deleted my first article, I wanted to quit because it was so frustrating,” said Parisi. “Thanks to his help, I kept going.”

Once she got her footing, she began writing articles about American TV shows. With The Simpsons, she translated roughly 300 articles from English to Spanish, covering the many characters and episodes. “I was interested [in writing about The Simpsons] because we didn’t have a lot of articles about this program,” she said. “There were in the English Wikipedia but not in the Spanish, so I decided to bring them all, and I did — I brought absolutely everything to Spanish Wikipedia.”

As of 2012, she’s written more than 800 articles — including 40 Featured articles — and has made more than 27,000 edits. All that experience has helped her improve her writing and language skills. “Wikipedia helped me a lot because I learned how to write better,” she said. “It helps me in my professional career.”

Being a Wikipedia contributor even helped Parisi get a job. Since she didn’t have any professional experience at the time, she added that she edits Wikipedia to her resume and said that got her the gig. She’s now a professional text editor and translator, and is also pursuing a career as a flight attendant.

After years of contributing her own time and skills, Parisi hopes more young people will also contribute to Wikipedia. To encourage others in her community, she has taught classrooms full of students how to get started editing Wikipedia. With any luck, she’ll create a new generation of editors and contributors for Spanish Wikipedia and beyond.

Parisi is the first to tell anyone that all that’s required to contribute to Wikipedia is the desire to do so. You don’t need to be a genius or an expert on a topic, she said, you just need to have the drive to make a contribution. It helps if you love what you write about, but even the smallest changes in an existing article can make a difference.

“I realized that many people do not participate in Wikipedia because they don’t know they are able to do useful contributions,” she said. “By correcting a comma, an accent or a misspelled word you are improving an article and helping the reader who will consult it.”

Sarah Mitroff, Communications Volunteer, Wikimedia Foundation

This month’s featured text is the first issue of Amazing Stories (April 1926), a pulp magazine created and initially edited by Hugo Gernsback.

Amazing Stories was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction, or “scientifiction” as Gernsback called the genre. It helped define the field, launched an entirely new brand of pulp fiction, and led to the formation of science fiction fandom as a semi-formal association of people.  The magazine began as a bed-sheet format publication, rather than the pulp it would become, and it would go through many incarnations and publishers over the years.  In time it would be one of the most famous of the pulp magazines of the early twentieth-century.

The first issue of the magazine collected reprints of fiction Gernsback deemed fit into his new category of fiction. This includes three reprints of nineteenth century scientific romances: Jules Verne’s “Off on a Comet” (the first part of a serialisation), H. G. Wells’ “The New Accelerator” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (both complete). Newer material was reprinted from other magazines. Austin Hall’s “The Man Who Saved the Earth” had been published in All-Story Weekly, while G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Man from the Atom” and George Allan England’s “The Thing from—’Outside’” had both previously appeared in Science and Invention, one of Gernsback’s existing magazines.

This month’s featured text was timed to coincide with the Nebula Awards.  The awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to recognise the best works of science fiction or fantasy published in the United States in the last year. This year’s awards will be presented on 18 May in San Jose, California.

Another fiction magazine!

At first thought it does seem impossible that there could be room for another fiction magazine in this country. The reader may well wonder, “Aren’t there enough already, with the several hundreds now being published?” True. But this is not “another fiction magazine,” Amazing Stories is a new kind of fiction magazine! It is entirely new—entirely different—something that has never been done before in this country. Therefore, Amazing Stories deserves your attention and interest.

There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on, but a magazine of “Scientifiction” is a pioneer in its field in America.

By “scientifiction” I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. For many years stories of this nature were published in the sister magazines of Amazing Stories—”Science & Invention” and “Radio News.”

But with the ever increasing demands on us for this sort of story, and more of it, there was only one thing to do—publish a magazine in which the scientific fiction type of story will hold forth exclusively. Toward that end we have laid elaborate plans, sparing neither time nor money.

Three tips to help new Google Summer of Code applicants and interns, some of which all remote workers could stand to remember:

1. Never let yourself get stuck on a technical question or problem for more than half an hour. Take a break, ask questions in IRC or a mailing list, find a technical book to read like The Architecture of Open Source Applications, look at some other codebase to see how they do it, eat a meal, or do something else, then come back to the problem.
2. Never let yourself get stuck waiting for someone's reply for more than 2 business days (Monday through Friday). Escalate -- ask your mentor. If your mentor isn't helping, ask your org admin. If the org admin isn't helping, ask on the GSoC discussion forum, or email Carol Smith.
3. Ask yourself at the start of every day: what did I accomplish yesterday? What will I try to do today? What are the obstacles I think I will run into? If you ask yourself those three questions and answer honestly -- especially if you let your mentor and team know the answers -- then you will prevent long delays and help keep your morale up.

We’ve changed some things for simpler, more beautiful discovery of the world’s largest photo contest. It’s still a work in progress and we welcome your suggestions in the comments section below. From cleaner typography to a responsive design that adapts to your device, Wiki Loves Monuments is happy to introduce this new look.

(This is a guest post by Carol Ann O’Hare of the French Wikimedia chapter.)

Wikimedia France is pleased to announce the first winner of the Wikimedia France Research Award:

If you read my blog, you are probably a Wikimedian or someone close to the Wikimedia movement. So I suppose you probably know that I have become a candidate for the WMF Board. Within this one and my future blog posts I will introduce myself and my program in more detail.

My first post will be a personal story, a story about a great place and community which I have been devoted to for about more than a year. The place I am talking about is Hacklab Belgrade (hklbgd).

Even though its official date of creation is March 2012, the story of hklbgd starts in 2005. The Wikimedian community, which created Wikimedia of Serbia and Montenegro (today Wikimedia Serbia) at the end of the same year, at the time already had its regular meetings at Belgrade’s Youth Cultural Center. As we were the only free content group with a place for meetings, naturally we were willing to share it with other similar organizations.

It wasn’t long before the Linux User Group Belgrade appeared (it evolved into the group Skill Share — Razmena vestina). And so, on a number of occasions the Wikimedian community and LUG shared a large room for their meetings.

I met Marko Djordjevic, LUG’s leader, and we soon became friends. Whether it was localizing Creative Commons licenses, organizing local and regional events or participating in a feminist organization, during the past years we cooperated closely on a number of occasions.

But there was one thing missing: a hackerspace. I knew that Wikimedia Serbia would get an office eventually, but time was passing and it wasn’t happening.

That’s when we benefited from our extensive networking. During the summer of 2011 Désirée Miloshevic, former (and future?) Internet Society Board member, approached our friend Aleksandar Blagojevic, the leader of the Serbian Pirate movement, with the idea to create a hackerspace and donate her flat for it.

Aleksandar and Marko got in touch and then Desiree and Marko spent the fall and winter adapting the interior and exterior of Desiree’s apartment for the future hacklab. (Note that Hacklab opened more than half a year before Wikimedia Serbia got their offices. During that time the Wikinews editors and the WMRS Board had regular meetings in hklbgd.)

And this is where the main part of the story begins…

Marko and I spent a lot of time discussing how we wanted to build our hackerspace and how we did not.

We knew what some hackerspaces were like. And we concluded a couple of things:

• We didn’t want to have a space reserved exclusively for geeks. We didn’t want to create a self-sufficient space, where the most interesting talks would be about arcade games, D&D characters, and programming in bf. We wanted a lively place, where people from other fields, interested technically and/or ideologically in free content movements, would be willing to come and participate.
• Marko and I are feminists and we know how empty spaces can be without women. An important goal for us was to create a place where women would feel safe, a place where they would be able to participate equally.
• A community filled with people of a similar age is a dead community. It is important to make it open and attractive to newer generations.

I owe you a detailed story about the goings-on during the past year: which stories turned out to be successful, which ones did not; which things fall within general truths and which ones come as a result of the social circumstances in Belgrade. (In the meantime, you can read Maximillian’s report from his visit to hklbgd.) But now I would like to return to the present.

Hacklab Belgrade is a non-formal and a non-hierarchical community. There isn’t a formal membership and active people can have more influence than the inactive ones, a rule which doesn’t exclude even the people who founded it. The membership fee is not mandatory, but those of us with good salaries usually participate with 10-20 euros per month.

Our program varies. Some ideas last, some of them reduce, some expand. Presently, this is what our week looks like:

• Monday evening: Pirate movement meetings.
• Tuesday afternoon to evening: PHP workshop consisting of a self-organized group, an initiative made by women.
• Wednesday evening: Python.
• Thursday: Drupal (has’t been too active for the last few months, but was once the most regular workshop)
• Friday early afternoon: GNU/Linux administration workshop, lead by me.
• Friday evening: Web frameworks in Python.
• Sarturday afternoon: Electronics.
• Saturday evening: Movie night.
• Sunday afternoon: Computer science workshop.

A year after it was founded, after a lot of involvement from dozens of people, Hacklab Belgrade has become an extraordinary place. We have people from hacker spaces from neighbouring countries asking us: What’s the catch? How have you managed to make such a good hackerspace?

The answers are simple and written above: welcoming people who are just willing to be introduced to internet technologies and free content ideologies; women in the hackerspace; and a wide range of generations.

During the last year, the members of our community have become close friends. We support each other, teach and learn, go to parks and enjoy night life together. And we adopt every new member as a close friend, too.

I have a very particular benefit, as well. Some of you may have noticed how my English got better. Thanks to Milijana

Pete Forsyth, an early designer of the Wikipedia Education Program, is now teaching a free online course on Wikipedia and Open Educational Resources, along with Wikipedian and education researcher Sara Frank Bristow. The six-week course, “Writing Wikipedia Articles,” recently concluded its first run, and will be offered again starting 14 May (Americas)/15 May (Asia/Australia). You can enroll here.

The course was born of Communicate OER, a project that seeks to activate the Open Educational Resources community to improve and update Wikipedia articles relevant to its field. Accordingly, as students learn about the technical and social aspects of Wikipiedia, they are encouraged to improve such articles as open educational resources, open content, MOOC, and free license. Students successfully completing the course earn the WikiSOO Burba Badge, which is based on English Wikipedia’s “service awards” and Peer to Peer University’s badges. The course is offered through the Peer to Peer University’s recently launched School of Open.

“This course has allowed us to bring together several communities that are passionate about the same things, but not always closely connected,” Forsyth said. “The OER community brings the values and practices that brought Wikipedia into existence to formal and informal learning around the world. The School of Open provides the perfect environment for a course like ours, allowing us to work alongside colleagues from free culture organizations like Creative Commons and Mozilla.”

Students are welcome to enroll regardless of their background; while some familiarity with wikis or OER can be helpful, it is not required.

“The WikiSOO course is exactly the kind of work serious Wikipedians need to be doing not only to make their encyclopedia better, but to make their community a more sane place to collaborate,” said Christine, a student who earned the WikiSOO Burba Badge in the course’s first run. “This course provides a solid primer of the skills needed to navigate the syntax, discourse, and guidelines you will encounter if you want to make substantive contributions to Wikipedia’s audacious mission.”

Enrollment in the course’s second run is open through next week. (The first class will be held Tuesday/Wednesday.) See the course’s page on the School of Open for more information, or to join the 60 students who have already enrolled!

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

There’s a current proposal to close the Xhosa Wikipedia for lack of activity, so I thought it’d be a good time to see the progress of the African and South African language Wikipedias.

Heading the list of African-language Wikipedias by article count, Malagasy is still racing ahead in creating new articles, mainly thanks to articles automatically created by bots. These articles aren’t always ones that you’d imagine would be high priority. There are currently over 200 galaxies with their own article, some with broken templates, for example the one on the NGC 953 elliptical galaxy in the constellation Triangulum. But no article on Nelson Mandela, or Omer Beriziky, the prime minister of Madagascar.

So it’s a somewhat artificial indicator, but there is still a reasonable level of activity, and it would be interesting to measure whether bot-activity helps encourage human activity.

Second is Yoruba, where the huge burst has slowed (again, many are bot-related, and the first random article I clicked on was minor space body 3011 Chongqing), but there’s still steady progress. Afrikaans in third continues well, and is probably in the best shape of any African-language Wikipedia. After being overtaken by Swahili, it has seen consistent activity, has a healthy community, and is growing far faster than Swahili.

Swahili and Amharic are still growing steadily, while Egyptian Arabic is growing quickly, and is on track to pass Amharic. Of the others with more than 1000 articles, only Kinyarwandahas has stalled, while Kabyle and Shona have seen good growth.

Language	1/1/2007	11/2/2011	13/4/2012	16/11/2012	9/5/2013
Malagasy		3806	36767	38753	45361
Yoruba	517	12174	29894	30158	30585
Afrikaans	6149	17002	22115	24821	26752
Swahili	2980	21244	23481	24519	25265
Amharic	742	6738	11572	11806	12360
Egyptian Arabic			8433	9341	10379
Somali		1639	2354	2525	2757
Lingala	292	1394	1816	1951	2025
Kinyarwanda			1501	1807	1817
Kabyle				1144	1503
Shona				1272	1421
Wolof		1116	1814	1129	1161

So overall, in Africa, some good progress.

Of the South African language Wikipedias, outside of Afrikaans, the state is as dismal as ever. Three have actually lost articles (usually due to removing spam), while a proposal has been made to close the Xhosa Wikipedia. Xhosa is the smallest-remaining African language Wikipedia still open. A number of smaller languages have already been closed. Growth in Zulu has slowed, Venda has shown flickers of activity, while Sotho has grown by 37 articles, although it’s still second-smallest, ahead of Xhosa.

Let’s not forget Ndebele, which as the least widely spoken official South African language, still has no representation.

South African Language Wikipedias

Language	1/10/2007	19/11/2011	13/4/2012	16/11/2012	9/5/2013
Afrikaans	8374	20042	22115	24821	26754
Northern Sotho	0	557	566	686	685
Zulu	107	256	483	568	579
Tswana	40	240	490	497	495
Swati	56	359	361	363	364
Tsonga	10	192	193	243	240
Venda	43	193	190	194	204
Sotho	43	132	145	151	188
Xhosa	66	125	136	141	148

Neville Alexander, a champion of multi-lingualism in South Africa, recently died, and there don’t seem to be prominent leaders taking up the mantle. While there are eleven official languages, English seems to be becoming ever-more dominant, there’s a dearth of local literature and language departments are shrinking in the country’s universities. A recent Wikipedia workshop at the University of Cape Town was co-ordinated by one of the Wikimedia South Africa board members, Douglas Scott, and in spite of being a standard lecture as part of the curriculum, not a single native-speaker turned up. The article-counts reflect this situation, so it seems unlikely there’ll be a change anytime soon.

Related articles

• November African language Wikipedia update: Afrikaans passes Swahili
• April 2012 African language Wikipedia update
• Northern Sotho Wikipedia now an official project, Afrikaans reaches 20 000 articles
• African language Wiktionary update
• African language Wikipedia update
• Wolof Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles
• Swahili Wikipedia now the largest African-language Wikipedia
• The state of Wikimedia projects in South African and Africa – Dec 2008
• The South African Wikimedia communities
• Venda Wikipedia Progress
• First Wikipedia Academy in Africa
• Wikipedia Week
• Afrikaans Wikipedia hits 5000 articles

Over the next couple of years, the Wikimedia Foundation will be building capacity among program leaders around evaluation and program design. A better understanding of how to increase impact through better planning, execution and evaluation of programs and activities will help us to move a step closer to achieving our mission of offering a free, high quality encyclopedia to our readers around the world.

With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the first Program Evaluation and Design Workshop, on 22-23 June 2013 in Budapest, Hungary.

We have only 20 slots available for this workshop and the application deadline ends on May 17th. This two-day event will be followed by a pre-conference workshop at Wikimania 2013. Ideally, applicants would commit to attending both events.

Our long-term goals for the workshop are:

• Participants will gain a basic shared understanding of program evaluation
• Participants will work collaboratively to map and prioritize measurable outcomes, beginning with a focus on the most common programs and activities
• Participants will gain increased fluency in common language of evaluation (i.e. goals versus objectives, inputs and outputs versus outcomes and impact)
• Participants will learn and practice how to extract and report data using the UserMetrics API
• Participants will commit to working as a community of evaluation leaders who will implement evaluation strategies in their programs and activities and report back at the pre-conference workshop at Wikimania 2013
• …and participants will have a lot of fun and enjoy networking with other program leaders!

We will publish a detailed agenda for the event in Budapest soon on Meta-Wiki.

During the workshop in Budapest, we will only have a limited amount of time. Therefore, we will be focusing on the some of the more common programs and activities:

• Wikipedia editing workshops where participants learn how to or actively edit (i.e. edit-a-thon, wikiparty, hands-on Wikipedia workshop)
• Content donations through partnerships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) and related organizations
• Wiki Takes/Expeditions where volunteers participate in day-long or weekend events to photograph site specific content
• Wiki Loves Monuments, which takes place in September
• Education program and classroom editing where volunteers support educators who have students editing Wikipedia in the classroom
• Writing competitions, which generally take place online in the form of contests, the WikiCup  and other challenges – often engaging experienced editors to improve content.

Contributors who play an active role in planning and executing programs and activities as described above in the Wikimedia community are highly encouraged to apply. Your experience and knowledge will make this workshop a success!

Hotels, flights and other transportation costs will be the responsibility of your chapter; the Wikimedia Foundation will provide the venue, handouts, breakfasts, light lunches, and a dinner for all participants on Saturday. If you’re not affiliated with a chapter and cannot afford to attend the event, please email me after you apply – we have a small amount of money set aside for those cases.

Remember, applications are open until May 17. You can apply via this Google Form.

Thanks for your interest, and I look forward to a great group of participants!

Sarah Stierch, Program Evaluation and Design Community Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

(This is a guest post by Wikisource volunteers Andrea Zanni and David Cuenca)

English

There was an Indian librarian who once wrote five laws on what libraries should be. The fifth and last law read: “A library is a growing organism.“ Wikisource is a wiki digital library that doesn’t grow by itself. Volunteers like you, like us, make it grow everyday, digitizing books from the public domain, proofreading OCR text and recently also transcribing sheet music.

Almost 10 years have passed since Wikisource started, on November 24, 2003. It began as a support project for Wikipedia. While we cannot tell you what dreams are made of, we know that the Wikipedia dream is nurtured by many of the sources, books and first-hand knowledge that populate Wikisource.

Wikisource users Andrea (Aubrey) and David (Micru) were recently named recipients of a Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engangement Grant, and we intend to periodically keep you updated about the progress of our work. We are sharing the progress we have made during the month of April and we invite you to participate defining the Wikisource vision for the future with us.

During the first month of work for the grant, we have been focusing on writing the first draft of the Wikisource values and ways of applying them. The suggestions are based on a Wikimania meeting last year, on our experience with the wiki, and on volunteer wishes. If you expect more of Wikisource, help us expand our list and comment on the suggestions.

That is not only a “wishlist,” but a list of specific proposals that can be transformed into action. As part of this commitment, we are giving support and formally endorsing the GSoC^[1] proposal: Book upload customisation (candidate 1, candidate 2). The reason for this endorsement is the high importance that such a project could have for the Wikisource community, enabling users to import external book metadata and spread it to the relevant pages to avoid redundant work.

There are three other candidates that are additionally applying for the Outreach Program for Women with proposals that, if accepted, will also be of paramount importance:

• Refactor proofread extension: to integrate the Visual Editor into Wikisource.
• Improve support for book structures: a long expected and needed feature.
• Prototype inline citations: combining the wonderful OKFN Annotator with Mediawiki.

We expect that once we have reached an agreement on what the other important tasks for Wikisource’s future are, we can keep offering more volunteer projects.

Another task we are tackling is the relationship with external organizations. It is useless to have an amazing digital library if it is not well connected with other libraries, websites, users and the world. It will take time to develop partnerships with other related organizations, like the Open Library, or free knowledge organizations, such as the Open Knowledge Foundation. We have started developing these connections and exploring possible ways of collaboration.

And finally there is Wikidata, a new member of the Wikimedia family that will also be a key for resolving one of Wikisource’s long standing issues: book metadata management. As a first stage of this ongoing work, we have started the Wikidata books task force to define the necessary properties for having reusable data about books in Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wikisource.

In May, we are looking forward to interviewing core users from the different language Wikisources. Special thanks to Haitham for his aid in visualizing the activity data in Gephi.

If you have any suggestions, requests or feedback, please reach out either via email or our talk pages. All Wikimedia users are invited to join and build a better Wikisource together. It’s your call too.

Andrea Zanni and David Cuenca, Wikisource

Note

1. ↑ Google Summer of Code 2013: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

 

Italiano

Costruiamo la vision di Wikisource

Un bibliotecario indiano una volta scrisse cinque leggi a fondamento della biblioteconomia. La quinta ed ultima recita: “La biblioteca è un organismo che cresce“.

Wikisource è una biblioteca digitale wiki, ma non cresce da sola. Volontari come voi, come noi, la coltivano e fanno crescere ogni giorno, digitalizzando libri in pubblico dominio, rileggendo i testi e, da pochissimo, anche trascrivendo spartiti musicali.

Sono passati quasi 10 anni da quando Wikisource è nata, il 24 novembre 2003, come semplice progetto a supporto di Wikipedia. Anche se non sappiamo dirvi di cosa sono fatti i sogni, possiamo dirti che il sogno di Wikipedia si nutre anche della conoscenza che alberga nelle migliaia di fonti, libri e documenti presenti in Wikisource.

Come tributo a questo decimo anniversario, Andrea (Aubrey) and David (Micru), vincitori di una borsa Individual Engangement Grant, vorrebbero condividere con voi il lavoro che hanno portato avanti durante il mese di aprile, e invitarvi a partecipare nella definizione della vision di Wikisource per i prossimi anni.

In questo primo mese di lavoro, ci siamo concentrati nello scrivere la prima versione dei valori di Wikisource, e dei modi per applicarli. I suggerimenti sono basati sul meeting di Wikimania l’anno scorso, sulla nostra esperienza, e sui desideri dei volontari. Se ti aspetti più da Wikisource, aiutaci ad espandere la nostra lista e commenta o correggi.

Questa non è una “lista dei desideri”, ma una serie di proposte specifiche da tradurre in azione. Come parte del nostro impegno, stiamo dando formale supporto e appoggio ad alcune proposte GSoC^[1]:Book upload customisation (candidato 1, candidato 2). La ragione di questo supporto è la grande importanza che questo progetto potrebbe avere per la comunità di Wikisource: abiliterebbe gli utenti nell’import automatico di metadati bibliografici esterni, eliminando azioni tediose e ripetitive di copia e incolla manuale.

Ci sono inoltre tre altri candidati che si stanno proponendo per il programma Outreach Program for Women, le cui proposte, se accettate, sarebbero di fondamentale importanza:

• Refactor proofread extension: per integrare il Visual Editor su Wikisource.
• Improve support for book structures: una feature a lungo richiesta e desiderata dalla comunità.
• Prototype inline citations: integrare il fantastico OKFN Annotator in Mediawiki.

Ci aspettiamo inoltre che, una volta raggiunto un accordo sulle priorità più importanti per Wikisource, potremo continuare ad offrire altri progetti per volontari.

Un’altro problema che stiamo affrontando sono le (possibili) relazioni con organizzazioni esterne. E’ inutile possedere una straordinaria biblioteca digitale se questa non è connessa, se non parla con altre biblioteche, siti, utenti e il resto del mondo. Ci vorrà un sacco di tempo per sviluppare relazioni durature e stabili con altre organizzazioni, come Open Library, o altre associazioni per la conoscenza libera,come la Open Knowledge Foundation. Abbiamo iniziato a svilupparle, esplorando possibili vie di collaborazione.

Infine, c’è Wikidata, il nuovo membro della famiglia Wikimedia. Wikidata sarà fondamentale per risolvere uno dei maggiori problemi di Wikisource, cioè la gestione dei metadati bibliografici. Come prima parte di un lungo lavoro, abbiamo creato una Wikidata books task force per definire le proprietà necessarie ad ottenere dati riusabili sui libri presenti nei vari progetti (Commons, Wikipedia e Wikisource).

Per il mese di maggio, vorremmo intervistare gli utenti più attivi nelle varie Wikisource. Un ringraziamento speciale va a Haitham, per il suo aiuto trovare questi utenti for his aid in visualizing the activity data in Gephi.

Se hai qualsiasi suggerimento, richiesta o feedback, per favore contattaci via email. Saremo anche presenti a Wikimania, ad agosto 2013 (puoi votare la nostra presentazione, se vuoi darci una mano).

Tutti gli utenti di Wikimedia sono invitati a farsi avanti e costruire insieme una Wikisource migliore. C’entri anche tu.

Andrea Zanni, David Cuenca, Wikisource

Nota

1.  Google Summer of Code 2013: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

 

Català

Definint la visió de Viquitexts

Hi hagué un bibliotecari indi qui una vegada escrigué cinc lleis sobre què haurien de ser les biblioteques. La cinquena i darrera era la següent: “una biblioteca és un organisme que creix”. Viquitexts és una biblioteca digital wiki que no creix ella mateixa. Els voluntaris com tu, com nosaltres, la fan créixer cada dia, digitalitzant llibres que es troben al domini públic, transcrivint text OCR i, recentment, transcrivint partitures.

Han passat quasi 10 anys des que Viquitexts (Wikisource, en anglès) començà a caminar el 24 de novembre de 2003. Començà com un projecte de suport a la Viquipèdia. Encara que no et poden dir de què estan fets els somnis, sabem que el somni de la Viquipèdia es nodreix d’algunes de les incomptables fonts, llibres i coneixement de primera mà que existeix a Viquitexts.

Els usuaris de Viquitexts Andrea (Aubrey) i David (Micru) resultaren recentment receptors d’una subvenció Individual Engangement grant de la Fundació Wikimedia, i volem mantenir-vos actualitzats periòdicament sobre el que fem. Estem compartint el progrés que hem fet durant el mes d’abril i et convidem a participar en la definició de la visió de Viquitexts (en anglès) pel futur del projecte.

El primer mes de treball ens hem centrat en la redacció del primer esborrany dels valors de Viquitexts i les maneres d’aplicar-los. Les suggerències s’han basat en la trobada de Wikimania de l’any passat, en la nostra experiència a la Viquipèdia i en els desitjos dels voluntaris. Si esperes més de Viquitexts, ajuda’ns a expandir la llista i comenta els suggeriments.

Això no és tan sols una “llista de desitjos” sinó una llista de propostes específiques que es poden transformar en acció. Com a part d’aquest compromís, donem suport i recolzem formalment la proposta del GSoC[1] següent: customització de la càrrega de llibres (candidat 1, candidat 2). La raó d’aquest recolzament és l’alta importància que aquest projecte podria tenir per la comunitat de Viquitexts, ja que permetria als usuaris importar metadades de llibre externes i aplicar-les a les pàgines rellevants, de tal manera que s’estalviaria molt treball redundant.

Hi ha tres altres candidats que es presenten addicionalment per l’Outreach Program for Women amb propostes que, si s’accepten, seran també d’una importància a tenir en compte:

• Extensió de revisió: per integrar l’Editor visual a Viquitexts.
• Millora del suport per estructures de llibres: una característica llargament demanada i necessària.
• Citacions en línia: combinació del magnífic OKFN Annotator amb Mediawiki.

Esperem que quan haguem arribat a un acord sobre quines són les altres tasques importants pel futur de Viquitexts podrem seguir oferint més projectes voluntaris.

Una altra tasca a la qual ens enfrontem és la relació amb organitzacions externes. És inútil tenir una biblioteca digital fantàstica si no està ben connectada amb altres biblioteques, llocs web, usuaris i el món. Prendrà temps desenvolupar una relació de col·laboració amb altres organitzacions relacionades tals com l’Open Library, o organitzacions de coneixement lliure tals com l’Open Knowledge Foundation. Hem començat a desenvolupar aquestes relacions i a explorar possibles vies de col·laboració.

Finalment, hi ha Wikidata, un nou membre de la família Wikimedia que també serà clau per resoldre un dels problemes eterns de Viquitexts: la gestió de les metadades dels llibres. Com a primera etapa d’aquest treball, hem començat la Wikidata books task force per a definir les propietats necessàries per tenir dades reutilitzables a Wikimedia Commons, Viquipèdia i Viquitexts.

El maig tenim previst entrevistar usuaris clau de les diferents versions idiomàtiques de Viquitexts. Volem donar les gràcies especialment aHaitham per la seva ajuda en la visualització de les dades d’activitat a Gephi. També hem presentat una presentació per Wikimania, si us plau, doneu-li suport.

Si teniu qualsevol suggeriment, sol·licitud o comentari, si us plau contacteu-nos per correu electrònic o mitjançant les pàgines de discussió. Tots els usuaris de Wikimedia estan convidats a afegir-s’hi i construir un millor Viquitexts tots junts. A tu també t’hi esperem.

Andrea Zanni, David Cuenca, Wikisource

Nota

1.  Google Summer of Code 2013 http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

• From the team: Some personal thoughts on GLAM
• Australia and New Zealand report: Wikipedia in academia and libraries in Australia
• Denmark report: Upcoming Edit-a-thon 1864
• Finland report: WLPA; GLAM Sessions; Funding
• France report: Brest
• Germany report: Hamburg Museum; Museum August Kestner
• Hungary report: Article writing contest about statistics and related sciences
• Italy report: Wikipedia workshop; Editathon on women’s biographies
• Mexico report: Fotofestín activities; DIY scanner project progress and Winners of the Holy Week in Mexico photo contest at ITESM Campus Ciudad de Mexico
• Netherlands report: GLAM WIKI UK; Wiki loves Sound; Wikipedian in Residence; Wiki loves Libraries; Wikipedia Training National Museum of Ethnology
• Spain report: Longest edit-a-thon ever at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona
• Sweden report: GLAM handbook version 3; conferences; hackathons and Wiki Loves Public Art
• Switzerland report: Swiss Federal Archives looking for a Wikipedian in Residence
• Taiwan report: Taiwan Government Data Portal Launched
• UK report: GLAM-Wiki; new and departing Wikipedians in Residence
• USA report: First GLAM Boot Camp; Consortium meeting; GLAMout; plus workshops and editathon
• Special story: Intersections between GLAM and Wikinews
• Open Access report: Featured content; Wikimania sessions
• Calendar: May’s GLAM events

 

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Single page view
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/April_2013/Single

Twitter
http://twitter.com/ThisMonthinGLAM

Work on the next edition
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/Newsroom

This post was written by Daria Cybulska

The dust has settled on the GLAM-Wiki 2013 Conference that Wikimedia UK organised and ran jointly with the British Library, Europeana, Wikimedia Sweden and THATCamp, and we can now look back and reflect on the event.

GLAM-Wiki 2013 took place on 12-14 April 2013 at the Conference Centre of the British Library. From the start of the planning phase its aim was to bring Wikimedians and GLAMs together to share their experiences, and to inspire any representatives of cultural institutions interested in a partnership with Wikimedia UK. With this in mind, the workgroup (consisting of many volunteers and supported by staff) created three strands to the event:

On the Friday, we looked at the work Wikimedia and other organisations have done in partnership with cultural institutions, presenting case studies and discussing the benefits to both parties. The day included two highly evaluated keynote speeches, which you can watch here: one by Michael Edson and one by Lizzy Jongma.

On the Saturday, we focused on the more practical and technical side, looking at ways to work together and running workshops to share best practice. Valuable ideas were generated throughout the day.

Sunday was organised by THATCamp as a free unconference and hackathon, exploring the humanities and technology. We have seen some exciting creations and thoughts around free-licensing, open access and the interface between humanities and technology.

Wikipedians and GLAMs are both looking for ways of spreading their information in the widest possible way. It sounds like a perfect match, and indeed over the three days of the conference, with over 150 people attending, Wikimedia UK has facilitated an impressive ideas exchange. It was clear from the start that the conference centre at the British Library was buzzing with possible projects, case studies shared, new approaches. Such a creative atmosphere would not be possible without bringing so many dedicated people together in a physical space.

The feedback from the conference was generally positive, with attendees saying they were happy with the overall quality of GLAM-Wiki and the range of topics covered. There were many highlights, and people were especially impressed by Michael Edson’s talk on “Scope, Scale and Speed”. A recurring theme was that people felt GLAM-Wiki was a great opportunity to network and learn about what was going on in other institutions. Detailed feedback can be found here, and if you’re interested in the presentations but weren’t able to attend WMUK has uploaded videos of some of the talks to YouTube.

We will be following up on many of the ideas generated, picking up new cultural projects. I am very proud of being able to contribute to such a successful event, and looking forward to organising many more in the future.

In English:

Professor Rafael Pezzi, a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, read about a new program to support university faculty members in Brazil who were interested in incorporating Wikipedia editing into students’ assignments. Rafael was intrigued by the idea, and thought it might be a good idea for his physics course for engineering students.

“Wikipedia makes it explicit how knowledge is built: a never-ending dynamic process with conflicting opinions in a lively discussion,” he says. “Although this process is fundamental, it is ignored in the standard textbook-based class where knowledge is just given, considered as an absolute truth.”

Rafael was impressed with the level of support he received in the program, both from colleagues and from the Wikipedia community. Fabio Azevedo and Israel Rocha served as Wikipedia Ambassadors for his class. They introduced Wikipedia and motivated the students to participate in the assignment. They were also very supportive on-line, clarifying technicalities of the Wikipedia interface and introducing the participants to the Wikipedia community.

For Fabio, an editor since 2007, becoming a Wikipedia Ambassador and supporting Rafael’s class was a natural choice.

“I was motivated by using a modern teaching technique at my university, improving free content in my language, and helping Wikipedia to grow,” Fabio says. “I gave a talk on Wikipedia editing for his students in the first or second week of class. After, I replied to some emails, helping students with editing question and uploading images.”

“I must say that the help of the Ambassadors was key to making it happen,” Rafael says. “Without them it would not have happened, as I am not an experienced editor and created my Wikipedia account for this project.”

Rafael’s students really took to editing, creating or significantly expanding several important articles about physics related topics on the Portuguese Wikipedia, including articles such as Thermometer, Supercritical fluid and Interference of waves. In fact, five of Rafael’s students enjoyed the assignment so much that they volunteered to be Ambassadors for the current term.

“Basically traditional writing assignments are read once or twice and then sits in a drawer or folder archive in the professor computer,” Rafael says. “It is of limited value and does not really motivate the student apart from getting a good grade. With Wikipedia, the students have the real publishing experience and the feeling that what they write can help others understand what they are studying. Some get really motivated by this challenge.”

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Em Português:

Professor de física encoraja estudantes a editar a Wikipédia em português

Professor Rafael Pezzi, um professor da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, leu sobre um novo programa que apoia professores universitários no Brasil que demonstrem interesse em incorporar a edição de verbetes da Wikipédia, no currículo estudantil. Rafael ficou intrigado pela ideia, e achou que poderia ser uma boa opção para a sua disciplina de física para estudantes de engenharia.

“A Wikipédia torna explicito como o conhecimento é construído: um processo infinito e dinâmico, com opiniões confrontantes, em uma discussão vívida,” ele diz. “Mesmo este processo sendo fundamental, ele é ignorado nas aulas comumente baseadas em leituras, onde o conhecimento é apenas entregue e é considerado como verdade absoluta.”

Rafael ficou impressionado com a boa qualidade do suporte que ele recebeu no programa, tanto de colegas como da comunidade Wikipédia. Fabio Azevedo e Israel Rocha atuaram como Embaixadores da Wikipédia na sua classe. Eles introduziram a Wikipédia aos estudantes e os motivaram a participar do projeto. Eles também ofereceram grande apoio on-line, esclarecendo especificações técnicas da interface da Wikipédia e introduzindo os participantes à comunidade Wikipédia.

Para Fabio, editor desde 2007, se tornar um Embaixador Wikipédia e apoiar a classe de Rafael foi uma escolha natural.

“Eu fiquei motivado em utilizar uma técnica de ensino moderna na minha universidade, melhorando o conteúdo livre disponível em meu idioma, e ajudando a Wikipédia a crescer “, diz Fabio. “Eu dei uma palestra sobre edição de Wikipédia para seus alunos na primeira ou segunda semana de aula. Depois, respondi a alguns e-mails, ajudando os alunos sobre como eram feitas as edições e o upload de imagens.”

“Devo dizer que a ajuda dos Embaixadores foi essencial para fazer tudo acontecer” diz Rafael. “Sem eles não teria acontecido, já que eu não sou um editor experiente e criei minha conta na Wikipédia para este projeto.”

Os alunos de Rafael realmente levaram a cabo a edição, criação e uma significativa expansão de importantes artigos sobre tópicos relacionados a física na Wikipédia em português, incluindo verbetes sobre Termômetro, Fluido supercrítico e Interferência de ondas. Na verdade, cinco dos alunos de Rafael gostaram tanto do projeto que se voluntariaram como Embaixadores para o atual período.

“Basicamente os trabalhos de escrita tradicionais são lidos uma ou duas vezes e depois postos em uma gaveta ou em uma pasta de arquivo no computador do professor” diz Rafael. “(Trabalhos tradicionais) São de valor limitado e não motivam verdadeiramente o estudante a nada além de receber uma boa nota. Com a Wikipédia, os estudantes têm uma experiência real de publicação e o sentimento de o que eles escrevem podem realmente ajudar outros a entender o que eles estão estudando. Alguns ficam realmente motivados por este desafio.”

LiAnna Davis
Gerente de comunicação do Programa Wikipédia no Ensino

In the recently concluded development sprint, the Wikimedia Language Engineering team made a new release of the Mediawiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB), fixed bugs related to the Page Translation feature in Translate UX (TUX) and began work on design changes for the Universal Language Selector (ULS). The team also hosted a bug triage session that was well attended.

Universal Language Selector Design Changes

Development and design changes have been initiated for the Universal Language Selector. The option to position the extension’s main panel in the sidebar was added and this feature is now being polished. Changes to the layout of the Language Settings dialog have been initiated, and usability tests for the proposed design changes were also done.

Using Wikimedia’s default GeoIP locator, ULS can now infer the user’s location and suggest language preferences.

MLEB Release

The April release for the Mediawiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) was announced by Amir Aharoni. Starting with this release, MLEB is no longer compatible with MediaWiki 1.19. MLEB 2013.04 and its later versions can only be used with MediaWiki version 1.20.4 or above.

The notable changes include update to CLDR v.23, bug fixes to further stabilize TUX and design changes for the Universal Language Selector. An experimental feature to present a restricted translation environment for new translators was developed for TUX. This is not enabled by default. Basic support for the XLIFF file format has also been added to Translate.

Up Next

During the next development cycle, the team will complete the changes to the Universal Language Selector design and test the features. The team is also participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Outreach Program for Women (OPW), and will be working on completing the tasks in the next stages of the programs. More information about the other open projects for internationalization can be found in the master list.

The next Language Engineering office hour will be held on 8 May 2013 at 17:00 UTC (10:00 PDT) in #wikimedia-office on Freenode IRC.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

At Rice University, students pursuing a minor in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities (PJHC) must complete two core courses addressing poverty, justice, and human development. Since Spring 2010, Professor Diana Strassmann has given students in her courses the same final assignment: to create or expand Wikipedia articles about poverty and about the links between gender equality and economic development in various regions of the world. She has also trained the other professors who teach the minor’s core courses so that they can include the Wikipedia assignment.

Nadhika Ramachandran, a rising senior studying political science and international relations in addition to the PJHC minor, signed on for the first of the two core courses in Spring 2012 and learned that she would be editing Wikipedia. Nadhika was both excited and nervous.

“So many people turn to Wikipedia for information that you know your contribution can have a real impact in terms of how people view a certain subject,” she says. “Of course, that also made me a bit nervous because if I did not include certain information or an important viewpoint I would misinform people.”

For that term’s class, she significantly expanded the peacebuilding article, which introduced her to Wikipedia editing. Since Professor Strassmann has set this assignment up for both of the two core courses in the minor, Nadhika enrolled in the second class a year later. In that class, Nadhika created the Women in the Arab Spring article because she “felt it was an important issue that had no coverage” on English Wikipedia. The article explores women’s involvement in the political protests and demonstrations, including their role online.

“I love knowing that my work will educate people all over the world about an important but often-ignored topic,” Nadhika says. “The Arab world has a reputation of treating women as second-class citizens in areas like political participation, economic independence, personal freedoms, and general social status. When the Arab Spring first began, it seemed like a unique opportunity to boost the status of women in the Arab world. The protesters were pushing for democracy, increased political participation, respect for human rights, and better economic opportunities, all of which would improve the status of women. Additionally, women actually participated in the revolution as street protestors and in some countries, as leaders. However, as the new governments formed and Islamist parties won elections in most places people began to fear that they would actually curtail women’s rights. The impact of the Arab Spring remains to be seen.”

Nadhika’s class was supported by Wikipedia Ambassadors, who helped her and her classmates learn how to edit Wikipedia. The students received in-person support from university staff member Christine Cox as well as Virginia White and Joyce Chou, students who had taken the class in previous semesters. They could also seek assistance from long-time Wikipedia editors Mike Christie, Justin Knapp, and Pat Earley.

“The dedication of the other editors in the community reinforced the impact of our work and their support made me feel more comfortable when editing,” Nadhika said. After spending a few days responding to those editors’ constructive feedback, she submitted the new article to appear on the main page of Wikipedia as a Did You Know, and it appeared on March 25, with more than 1,500 views. Soon after creating the article, she was already able to achieve her goal of sharing the fruits of her academic studies with more people.

Thanks to Professor Strassmann’s advocacy for Wikipedia assignments, many students at Rice are editing Wikipedia during multiple terms. The students don’t necessarily edit in between assignments, but they’re returning to Wikipedia with a stronger editing background and familiarity with norms, so they have more time and energy to create even better content. Even though Nadhika has completed her class assignment, she plans to expand the section about the aftermath of the Arab Spring protests once her schedule clears at the end of the term.

Jami Mathewson
Wikipedia Education Program United States and Canada Associate

Denny said some magical words to me;

• you can convert a list of Wikipedia wiki links to links to Wikidata using Lua. 
• you can check if there is an article on THIS Wikipedia
• you will show the Wikidata data when there is no article

We spent the rest of the afternoon editing articles that people were interested in, before summarising the next steps. Feedback was excellent for the most part, with a number asking for more sessions. The crack team has since returned to their day jobs, their alter egos set aside for the time being. One thing I’m sure of though, we’ll be back.

May’s Proofread of the Month is Natural History, Birds (1849) by Philip Henry Gosse.  This is the second in a series of volumes on natural history; the fifth volume, Mollusca (1845), is already held by Wikisource.  As well as a naturalist, Gosse attempted to popularise science in the Victorian Age.

The theme for the month was Natural History.  The Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America (1905) by Frank Chapman was considered but deemed too complicated for a PotM candidate.

Last month, my colleague Sara Frank Bristow and I finished our first run of the free online course, Writing Wikipedia Articles: The basics and beyond. This course is part part Communicate OER, a project to improve the coverage of open educational resources on Wikipedia. We introduced it as part of the launch of Peer to Peer University’s School of Open in March.

The course was designed to help those new to Wikipedia learn to write, edit, and improve articles, in the context of the site’s history and philosophical underpinnings. Of the 100 students who signed up initially, 25 went on to add themselves to the course roster on Wikipedia. During class sessions and optional lab sessions, we guided them through both technical and cultural challenges, and emphasized that the best way to learn about Wikipedia is to “be bold” and start trying things out.

Our students took on a variety of tasks, including:

• Expanding the lead section of the main article on Open Educational Resources, as well as covering the term’s definition more thoroughly
• Adding links to books and documents that are open access (available online)
• Substantially expanding a biography originally started by the subject’s relative, including several new high quality references
• Adding public domain images to unillustrated articles
• Starting a new article on government OER policies
• Adding an “info box” to an article
• Reviewing an article on its “talk page”

They learned valuable techniques, such as:

• Entering a useful edit summary with every edit
• Using the talk page to disclose a possible conflict of interest
• Referring to Wikipedia policy pages, the Manual of Style, etc. in order to resolve disagreements
• Identifying which Wikipedia articles have undergone various peer review processes

As a pleasant surprise, we had students working on several language editions of Wikipedia, including Greek, German, and Catalan. At the course’s conclusion, we are pleased to begin awarding the WikiSOO Burba Badge – an award recognizing a student’s successful completion of the course and final project.

We were fortunate to have help from many quarters in the Wikipedia and OER communities. Special thanks go out to our panelists from Week 4 and Week 5: Sage Ross, Lane Rasberry, Catherine Casserly, David Wiley, David Kernohan, and Nick Shockey.

The lessons, of course, were not confined to the students. As instructors, we learned a great deal about how people want to learn about Wikipedia, and how to teach accordingly in an online environment. We found that the course is more ambitious than we had imagined, and that we need to provide structure in areas we hadn’t anticipated. We got helpful feedback, including a request that students be put in pairs or small teams from the beginning, in order to get them into a collaborative context from the outset.

With these lessons under our belt, we are excited to run the course a second time! We will launch next week, on Tuesday for those in the Americas, Wednesday for those in Asia/Australia. We hope you will join us!

Every day, students come to Chanitra Bishop for advice about information — everything from how to find certain articles, to what books will help their research projects. Ms. Bishop certainly has the right pedigree. At Indiana University Bloomington, she’s the Digital Scholarship and Emerging Technologies Librarian at the Herman B Wells Library, which contains more than 4.6 million volumes, including special collections in African Studies, Russian and East European Studies, Uralic and Altaic Studies, East Asian Studies, and West European Studies.

“I wanted to work in the library,” says Ms. Bishop, “because I enjoy working with people, doing research, and helping people find information.”

Ms. Bishop has found that same connection with Wikipedia. In the fall of 2010, she began helping IU Bloomington students who were writing articles for the Wikimedia Foundation’s Public Policy Initiative. That initiative, which evolved into the Wikipedia Education Program, had students write public-policy-oriented articles as a formal classroom assignment. As a Wikipedia Ambassador, Ms. Bishop works not just with students but with professors in the program. One of Ms. Bishop’s first realizations: While every student already read Wikipedia, few students realized they could actually edit and contribute to Wikipedia’s articles. Students also assumed that each Wikipedia article was written in full by just one person.

“When we explain Wikipedia,” says Ms. Bishop about the volunteer instructors, “we usually go in and do an initial talk, and a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I never knew all of that.’ I like to show one of the videos that is about the ‘Edit’ button and how people often just ignore it. Even though it’s there, it’s like it’s not there. I tell them, ‘If you see something that’s inaccurate on Wikipedia, you don’t have to wait for someone else to fix it. You can fix it yourself. You don’t even need an account; all you have to do is click ‘edit.’”

Ms. Bishop also shows students a Wikipedia article’s “History” function, “so they can also see that even though an article today might have several different sections and be may be many pages long, when it first started out, it may have been six sentences. Often it may just start off as a sentence, or a paragraph, and then the community kind of helps build that article. So it doesn’t always just start off with someone just writing all of the information. Just one person kind of gradually can build up to its current state. So a lot of students also are surprised to see the initial, first view of the article.”

From her initial volunteering in 2010, Ms. Bishop is now Wikipedia Regional Ambassador for Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, meaning she works with Wikipedia Education Program classes throughout those three states. Ms. Bishop, who has a Bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, was raised in Chicago, which is just 120 miles from Bloomington. Being Wikipedia Regional Ambassador means she often connects with students online — while never having to leave Bloomington. Ms. Bishop feels like she’s part of the bigger Wikimedia community of readers, contributors and volunteers.

“The community is what really drives Wikipedia,” says Ms. Bishop, whose Wikipedia user name is “Etlib” — a derivation of “Emerging Technologies Librarian.” “There’s not one person that’s in charge and makes all the decisions about how Wikipedia works. It’s very much community driven and it’s something that anyone can be involved in. Even though anyone can be involved in it, it’s like any other community, so the more you contribute to that community, the more people will believe what you put on there, the more respect you’ll have in that community.”

Jonathan Curiel, Development Communications Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

(Die deutsche Version dieses Artikels ist hier.)

The following is a guest post by Magnus Manske, active tool developer around Wikidata and author of the software that later evolved into MediaWiki.

Wikidata is the youngest child of the Wikimedia family. Its main purpose is to serve as a “Commons for factoids”, a central repository for key data about the topics on, and links between, the hundreds of language editions of Wikipedia. At time of writing, Wikidata already contains about 10 million items, more than any edition of Wikipedia (English Wikipedia currently has 4.2 million entries). But while, as with Commons, its central purpose is to serve Wikipedia and its sister projects, Wikidata has significant value beyond that; namely, it offers machine-readable, interlinked data about millions of topics in many languages via a standardized interface (API).

Such a structured data repository has long been a “holy grail” in computer science, since the humble beginnings of research into artificial intelligence, to current applications like Google’s Knowledge Graph and Wolfram Alpha, and towards future systems like “intelligent” user agents or (who knows?) the Singularity.

The scale of any such data collection is a daunting one, and while some companies can afford to pour money into it, other groups, such as DBpedia, have tried to harvest the free-form data stored in Wikipedia. However, Wikidata’s mixture of human and bot editing, the knowledge of Wikipedia as a resource, and evolving features such as multiple property types, source annotation, and qualifiers add a new quality to the web of knowledge, and several tools have already sprung up to take advantage of these, and to demonstrate its potential. A fairly complete list is available.

Views on Wikidata

For a straight-forward example of such a tool, have a look at Mozart. This tool does not merely pull and display data about an item; it “understands” that this item is a person, and queries additional, person-specific items, such as relatives. It also shows person-specific information that does not refer to other items, such as Authority Control data. Mozart’s compositions are listed, and can be played right on the page, if a file exists on Commons. To a degree, it can also use the language information in Wikidata, so you can request the same page in German (mostly).

Instead of looking only for direct relatives, a tool can also follow a “chain” of certain properties between items, and retrieve an “item cluster”, such as a genealogical tree (pretty and heavy-duty tree for Mozart). The Wikidata family tree around John F. Kennedy contains over 10.000 people at time of writing. In similar fashion, a tool can follow taxonomic connections between species up to their taxonomic roots, and generate an entire tree of life (warning: huge page!).

These tools demonstrate that even in its early stages, Wikidata allows to generate complex results with a fairly moderate amount of programming involved. For a more futuristic demo, talk to Wiri (Google Chrome recommended).

Edit this item

Unsurprisingly to anyone who has volunteered on Wikimedia projects before, tools to help with editing are also emerging. Some have the dual function of interrogating Wikidata and displaying results, while at the same time informing about “things to do”. If you look at the genre of television series on Wikidata, you will notice that over half of them have no genre assigned. (Hint: Click on the “piece of pie” in the pie chart to see the items. Can you assign a genre to Lost?).

When editing Wikidata, one usually links to an item by looking for its name. Bad luck if you look for “John Taylor”, for there are currently 52 items with that name but no discerning description. If you want to find all items that use the same term, try the Terminator; it also has (daily updated) lists with items that have the same title but no description.

Similarly, you can look for items by Wikipedia category. If you want some more complex filter, or want to write your own tool and look for something to ease your workload, there is a tool that can find, say, Operas without a librettist (you will need to edit the URL to change the query, though).

There are also many JavaScript-based tools that work directly on Wikidata. A single click to import all language links or species taxonomy from Wikipedia, find authority control data, declare the current item to be a female football player from Bosnia, or apply the properties of the current item to all items in the same Wikipedia category — tools for all of these exist.

This is only the beginning

While most of these tools are little more than demos, or primarily serve Wikidata and its editors, they nicely showcase the potential of the project. There might not be much you can learn about Archduke Ernest of Austria from Wikidata, but it is more than you would get on English Wikipedia (no article). It might be enough information to write a stub article. And with more statements being added, more property types (dates, locations) emerging, and more powerful ways to query Wikidata, I am certain we will see many, and even more amazing tools being written in the near future. Unless the Singularity writes them for us.

Symbols serve as some of the best tools to overcome language and cultural communication barriers. The aim of the first Wikipedia Iconathon was to create a set of graphic symbols that convey vital concepts to editors and readers of the world’s largest free, collaborative encyclopedia. The Wikimedia Foundation design team organized the event with The Noun Project, with support from Muji in the form of sketch materials. This is a brief update from the design team, as we work on digitalizing the first iteration of icons from the event.

On a rainy Saturday morning, 6 April 2013, the mood among visitors at the Wikimedia Foundation office was upbeat and determined. Educators, volunteers, civic leaders, typographers, designers and Wikipedia editors joined us and Noun Project staff, coming together to collaborate on a set of 20 icons that represent key Wikipedia terms and concepts.

We began by discussing the core challenges of creating this visual language. First, it needed to work across 330 languages. Second, we had to avoid local concepts or metaphors — such as hand gestures, animals, and local humor — that people from other regions may not be familiar with. If icons conveyed directionality, they would have to be adapted for different writing directions, such as right-to-left languages like Hebrew or Arabic. To preserve cross-cultural understanding, it was critical that we come up with a universal representation, regardless of whether the reader is from Germany, India, or Botswana.

After the general discussion of our objectives, we formed groups and looked closely at our assignment. The concepts we needed to visualize ranged from being self contained, such as “rapidly changing article,” to systems like “anonymous” and “registered” users, “administrator,” and “bots.” Participants unanimously considered abstract concepts like “encyclopedia-worthy” and “no original research” to be the most challenging icons.

As the groups discussed each icon and got to sketching, Wikipedians provided context for the symbols as, answering questions like the following (among many others). :

• Is there more than one context of use for the icon?

• Does it convey status or trigger action?

• Should it invite inquiry or is it an entry point when a user scans a list?

We were committed to getting it right, even if it meant pulling out laptops to look at all the sample interface elements. We didn’t expect to get into the thick of interaction and behavior, but it helped align the team on tone, detail and playfulness

After a few hours, we collected the sketches and pinned them to whiteboards around the room. Edward Boatman (co-founder of The Noun Project) moderated an intense group discussion.  Experienced editors helped evaluate concepts in the unique Wikipedia way of community-driven decision-making. We identified patterns across sketches and focused on connotations. For example, anonymous users don’t occupy a persistent identity, but they are an important part of the community, so a negative undertone was inappropriate.

We hope to expand the audience of participants to work with the remaining concepts and enable more people  to submit their ideas for Wikipedia icons. Given that The Noun Project receives more than 300 icon submissions a day from graphic designers, we’re confident we can leverage their network and their experience to develop engaging icons that are useful for Wikimedia projects.

Currently, we are digitizing the first set of icons that participants in the Iconathon collaboratively selected from our sketch stack. The next step, which we are really excited about, is socializing the icons with the Wikimedia community and getting them to respond and iterate on the concepts that we put forth.

Feel free to join the conversation on-wiki or in the comments, and stay tuned here for future updates. You can view more photos of the event on Commons here and on Flickr here.

Vibha Bamba, Interaction Designer. Wikimedia Foundation

Sentiment monitoring; Wikipedians and academics favor the same papers; UNESCO and systemic bias; How ideas flow on Wikiversity

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Oren Bochman, Taha Yasseri, Jonathan T. Morgan and Tilman Bayer

Contents 1 Too good to be true? Detecting COI, Attacks and Neutrality using Sentiment Analysis 2 “A Comparative Study of Academic impact and Wikipedia Ranking” 3 1970s UNESCO debate applied to Wikipedia’s systemic bias in the case of Cambodia 4 Reasons why wikilinks are added and removed 5 Generation Z judges [[Generation Z]], questioning role of amphetamines 6 Visualizing the “flow of ideas” on Wikiversity 7 In brief 7.1 Wikipedia Vs. Encyclopedia Britannica: A Longitudinal Analysis” 7.2 “Wikipedia uses in learning design: A literature review” 7.3 Wikipedia assignment has positive impact on students’ “research persistence” 7.4 Co-authorship patterns around Pope Francis, and Boston bombing views 7.5 Mining content removed from articles on breaking news events. 7.6 Spam on the rise as reason for user blocks 7.7 10k birth places and 40k almae matres from Wikipedia biographies, human-vetted 7.8 How Wikipedia’s Google matrix differs for politicians and artists 7.9 A Wikipedia search algorithm that emphasizes serendipity 7.10 Usability study recommends 18-point font for Wikipedia 7.11 OpenSym, Wikisym, ClosedSym? 7.12 Wikimedia France research award winner announced 7.13 Provenance graphs 8 References

Too good to be true? Detecting COI, Attacks and Neutrality using Sentiment Analysis

Finn Årup Nielsen, Michael Etter and Lars Kai Hansen presented a technical report^[1] on an online service which they created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies. It performs sentiment analysis of edits, filtered by companies and editors. Sentiment analysis is a new applied linguistics technology which is being used in a number of tasks ranging from author profiling to detecting fake reviews on online retailers. The form of visualization provided by this tool can easily detect deviation from linguistic neutrality. However, as the authors point out, this analysis only gives a robust picture when used statistically and is more prone to mistakes when operating within a limited scope.

The service monitors recent changes using an IRC stream and detects company-related articles from a small hand-built list. It then retrieves the current version using the MediaWiki API and performs sentiment analysis using the AFINN sentiment-annotated word list. The project was developed by integrating a number of open source components such as NLTK and CouchDB. Unfortunately, the source code has not been made available and the service can only run queries on the shortlisted companies which will limit the impact of this report on future Wikipedia research. However, it seems to have potential as a tool for detecting COI edits that tend to tip neutrality by adding excess praise or attacks which tip the content in the other direction. We hope the researchers will open-source this tool like their prior work on the AFINN data-set, or at least provide some UI to query articles not included in the original research.

“A Comparative Study of Academic impact and Wikipedia Ranking”

A paper^[2] with this title investigates the relation between the scientific reputation of scientific items (authors, papers, and keywords) and the impact of the same items on Wikipedia articles. The sample of scientific items is made of the entries in the ACM digital library including more than 100 k papers, 150 k authors and 35 k keywords. However, only a tiny subset of these could be found in English Wikipedia pages (the authors considered all Wikipedia pages in the English edition which contain at least two mentions of any of the scientific items in the sample). The academic reputation is calculated based on three criteria: frequency of appearance, number of citations each item receives from the others, and PageRank calculated on the citation network. The Wikipedia ranking is based on three popularity measures of all the pages that have mentioned the item: number of mentions, sum over PageRank of all the mentioning pages, and sum over in-degrees of all the mentioning pages in Wikipedia’s hyperlink network.

These 3 times 3 choices give 9 combinations of academic ranking and Wikipedia ranking for 3 types of scientific entities (authors, papers, keywords). All these 27 pairs are shown to be correlated according to Spearman’s Rank Correlation, indicating that in general Wikipedia mentions are non-randomly driven by scientific reputation. However, most of the combinations are less significant. Surprisingly, the most relevant Wikipedia ranking criterion turns out to be the pure total number of mentions, compared to the more sophisticated ones, i.e., PageRank and in-degree measures.

In a separate part, authors define two sets of scientific items, those which are mentioned in Wikipedia, and those which are not mentioned at all (the latter is larger in size by a factor of 2 for keywords, 100 for authors, and 300 for papers). They show that for all 3 types, the set of items which are mentioned in Wikipedia have a better academic rank on average.

1970s UNESCO debate applied to Wikipedia’s systemic bias in the case of Cambodia

An article^[3] in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology rated the quality of Wikipedia articles on the history of Cambodia (defined as those linked in the corresponding navbox, using four measures: 1) the article’s ratio of the number of citations per the number of words, 2) the number of editors who have commented on its talk page, 3) the quality of the cited sources, rated in five categories (“traditional reference” like print encyclopedias, “news reports” including both newspapers and news websites such as CNN, “academic periodicals”, “books”, and “miscellany” like reports by governments or NGOs, or personal websites) and 4) “the number of unique authors cited”, assuming that articles which are based on a larger variety of perspectives are of higher quality. The findings are summarized as follows:

The early history of Cambodia is represented by an extremely weak article, but there is an improvement in the articles dealing with the early kingdoms of Cambodia. The improvement ends abruptly with articles on the ‘dark age’ of Cambodia, the French Protectorate, the Japanese occupation, and early postindependence periods being of a much lower quality. Afterward, the quality picks up again with especially good articles on the American intervention in Cambodia, the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, and the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. However, the quality does not last; as we near contemporary times, the articles take another turn for the worse.

From this, the author concludes that “the Wikipedia community is unconsciously mimicking the general historiography of the country”, in particular a glorification of Angkor and other early kingdoms at the cost of later periods, and observes a “continuing dominance of the traditional historiographical narrative of Cambodian history in Wikipedia.” The subsequent section of the paper tries to put these results into the context of the historical debates in the late 1970s and early 1980s about the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), a suggested remedy for problems with the under-representation of the developing world in the media, put forth by a UNESCO commission in the MacBride report (1980):

Wikipedia provides access—it is free to use by anyone with an Internet connection, and print versions can also be distributed. But the whole thrust of the NWICO argument is that content matters and those who create content matter perhaps even more, with the commission stressing that countries needed to ‘achieve self-reliance in communication capacities and policies’ … Contrary to popular belief, in the new ‘information age’ content is, once again, the preserve of the few, not the many, and a geographically concentrated few at that.

The author’s argument is somewhat weakened by asserting erroneously that “there exists no Cambodian-language Wikipedia”, but generally aligns with other quantitative research that has found a geographic unevenness of coverage in Wikipedia. The author is an information studies professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and previously published a related paper in the same journal examining the Wikipedia article History of the Philippines, reviewed in the August issue: “The limits of amateur NPOV history“.

Reasons why wikilinks are added and removed

Julia Preusse, Jerome Kunegis, Matthias Thimm, Thomas Gottron and Steffen Staab investigate^[4] mechanisms of changes in a wiki that are of structural nature, i.e., which are a direct result of the wiki’s linking structure. They consider if the addition and removal of internal links between pages can be predicted using just information about the network connecting these articles. The study’s innovation lies in considering the removal of links, which account for a high proportion of removals and reverts. The authors performed an empirical study on Wikipedia, stating that traditional indicators of structural change used in the link analysis literature can be classified into four classes, which indicate growth, decay, stability and instability of links. These methods were then employed to identify the underlying reasons for individual additions and removals of knowledge links.

The network created by links between articles in Wikipedia is characterized by preferential attachment. Prior work on social networks has identified a phenomenon called “liability of newness”, in which new connections are more likely to be broken than older ones. To provide a better predictive model of link evolution the team considered five hypotheses:

1. Preferential attachment: The number of adjacent nodes is a good indicator for link addition.
2. Embedding : The embeddedness of a link is suitable to predict the appearance of links and the non-disappearance of existing links.
3. Reciprocity: The presence of a link makes the addition of a link in the opposite direction more likely and the removal of a reciprocal link less likely.
4. Liability of Newness: Old age of an edge or a node is a good indicator for link persistence.
5. Instability The less stable two nodes are, the less stable the link connecting them is, or would be if it does not exist.

To test these hypotheses, they created networks based on the history of the mainspace articles till 2011 of the top five Wikipedias after the English one. For example, in the French Wikipedia, 41.7 million links were added and 17.3 million removed during that time. The data was used to create a link creation predictor and a link removal predictor. These were then evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.

The results were that Preferential attachment and Embedding are good indicators of growth. Liability of Newness did not turn out to be a good indicator of link removal, but more of article instability. Reciprocity is also an indicator of growth, but is not as significant since most links in a wiki are not reciprocated.

Generation Z judges [[Generation Z]], questioning role of amphetamines

An article^[5] in the Journal of Information Science, titled “Understanding trust formation in digital information sources: The case of Wikipedia”, explores the criteria used by students to evaluate the credibility of Wikipedia articles. It contains an overview of various earlier studies about credibility judgments of Wikipedia articles (some of them reviewed previously in this space, example: “Quality of featured articles doesn’t always impress readers“).

The authors asked “20 second-year undergraduate students and 30 Master’s students” in information studies to first spend 20 minutes reading “a copy of a two-page Wikipedia article on Generation Z, a topic with which students were expected to have some familiarity”, and answer an open-ended question explaining how they would judge its trustworthiness. In a subsequent part, the respondents were asked to rank a list of factors for trustworthiness in case of “either (a) the topic of an assignment, or (b) a minor medical condition from which they were suffering”. One of the first findings was a “low pre-disposition to use [Wikipedia], possibly suggesting a propensity to distrust, grounded on debates and comments on the trustworthiness of Wikipedia” – possibly to the fact that the example article contained an example of vandalism, a fact highlighted by several respondents (e.g. “started off as a valid entry … due to citations strengthening this … however came to the last paragraph and the whole document was marred by the insert of ‘writing articles on Wikipedia while on amphetamines’ [as purported hobby of Generation Z members]… just feels that you can’t trust anything now”).

Among the given trustworthiness factors, the following were ranked most highly:

authorship, currency, references, expert recommendation and triangulation/verification, with usefulness just below this threshold. In other words, participants valued having articles that were written by experts on the subject, that were up to date, and that they perceived to be useful (content factors). … Interestingly these factors all seemed more or less equally important for both contexts, with the exception of references, which for predictable reasons were seen as having greater importance in the context of assignments.

Visualizing the “flow of ideas” on Wikiversity

In a conference paper titled “Analyzing the flow of ideas and profiles of contributors in an open learning community”^[6] (see also audience notes from the presentation), the authors construct a graph from the set of revisions of a set of Wikiversity pages, with two kind of edges: 1) “Update edges”, linking a page’s revision to the directly subsequent revision. These are understood as representing “knowledge flow over the course of the collaborative process on a single wiki page”. 2) “Hyperlink edges” between two revisions of different pages with a wikilink between them – but pointing in the opposite direction, because the idea is that they indicate knowledge flowing from the linked page to the linking page. By requiring the source node of a hyperlink edge “as the latest revision of the hyperlinked page at the moment of creation of the target revision”, both kinds of links point forward in time, resulting in a two-relational directed acyclic graph (DAG), which is “depicting the knowledge flow over time.” After filtering out “redundant” hyperlink edges and attaching authorship information to each node (page revision).

The authors apply this procedure to a set of Wikiversity articles in the area of medicine, starting with v:Gynecological History Taking. The results are interpreted as follows:

the beginning, short after the category medicine was founded, the authors in this category built up the basic structure of the knowledge domain. The main relations and idea flows between the learning materials were established early in the development of the domain. After that the authors have been focusing on elaborating the articles without introducing new important hyperlinks. The overall picture of the learning process in this domain suggests a divergent evolution of ideas after an initial period of mutual fertilization between different topics. This conforms to the idea of groups of learners that followed different interests in the medicine domain with little inter-group collaboration on the creation of new shared learning resource.

The method is subsequently applied to profile the activities of various users.

The authors have integrated these algorithms, including visualization tools, into a “network analytics workbench … used in the ongoing EU project SISOB which aims to measure the influence of science on society based on the analysis of (social) networks of researchers and created artifacts.”

In brief

“Wikipedia Vs. Encyclopedia Britannica: A Longitudinal Analysis”

The authors review^[7] how Wikipedia and Britannica coverage of topics related to several major corporations has changed in the past 6 years. They find unsurprisingly that Wikipedia coverage is usually much more detailed than that of Britannica; more interestingly, they note that one of the key differences is that Wikipedia focuses more on issues such as corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues, whereas Britannica will focus more on traditional aspects such as financial results. They note that both encyclopedias, while striving towards some form of neutrality, contain non-neutral (“positively and negatively framed”) content, although it is more common to find it in Wikipedia. They also note that this content seemed to peak around 2008–2010, and attribute it to the negative views of major corporations common among the general public around that time, whose view was more likely to be represented on Wikipedia than on Britannica, also correlating this with the economic recession. The authors note that increasingly, knowledge available to the general public comes from social media collaboration projects such as Wikipedia, and are doubtful whether more traditional models like that of Britannica have a future. See also earlier coverage of a related paper by the same authors: “Are articles about companies too negative?” and of another where one of them (controversially) argued against the “bright line” rule on conflict of interest editing: “Wikipedia in the eyes of PR professionals“.

“Wikipedia uses in learning design: A literature review”

An article with this title^[8] presents a relatively useful literature review of publications about the “teaching with Wikipedia” approach. The authors analyzed several scholarly databases (not explaining, however, why the selected ones were chosen and others were not), finding 30 works on related themes, and selecting 24 of those. They provide a number of useful breakdowns (2/3 of the works deal with higher education, 1/3 with secondary, none with primary) and analyze expected learning outcomes (the most popular being learning research methodology), knowledge fields that the papers represented (mostly fields of social science), and an overview of student tasks. While containing few revelations, the paper is a solid example of a literature review of an emerging field, and contains a valuable observation that more research is needed on how Wikipedia is used by elementary school students.

Wikipedia assignment has positive impact on students’ “research persistence”

A paper by two Californian librarians, titled “From Audience to Authorship to Authority: Using Wikipedia to Strengthen Research and Critical Thinking Skills”^[9] and presented at the recent conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), describes the results of two case studies “in which Wikipedia was used as the platform for assignments” for students, one of which “had, overall, a positive impact on research persistence” of the students.

Co-authorship patterns around Pope Francis, and Boston bombing views

In his blog,^[10] Brian Keegan (known to readers of this research report for his previous research of Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news events) provides a refreshing preview of his upcoming research with visualization of Co-authorship patterns around the Pope Francis article. The Social network analysis produced by factoring edits from 607 editors who worked on the new pope’s article and then adds all other articles they collaborated on since. The results which look like an abstract art masterpiece show a number of complex pattern in the data. However we will have to wait until the publication of the paper for these to be explained. Keegan does provide a number of teasers but you will have to visit his blog to read these. In another blog post,^[11] Keegan examines pageviews of various articles related to the Boston marathon bombings.

Mining content removed from articles on breaking news events.

A short paper^[12] accepted to the 2013 WWW conference describes a new tool designed for mining the information removed from Wikipedia articles during breaking news events. The Wikipedia Event Reporter identifies “bursts” of editing activity in an article, then uses machine learning techniques to identify sentences from the revision history of the article that were added during these bursts but which are not contained within the current version, and finally displays this information to the user—all in real time! The designers of the tool state that the Event Reporter will be useful for “a journalist or a student studying about history [who wants] a comprehensive view of an event, and not only the socially accepted final interpretation”. While Event Reporter looks to be both useful and intriguing, this reviewer challenges the assumptions behind the authors’ intended scenario of use. On Wikipedia, information about breaking news events is often removed because it is factually incorrect, not for the “sake of brevity”, out of considerations of political correctness, or other (possibly nefarious) social motives. The authors do not address the issue of determining factual accuracy in their paper—hopefully their intended audience (journalists!) will keep that issue in mind if they decide to re-publish the mined information. The reviewer would also like to have seen a performance evaluation of their Vector Machine Classifier, which relies on hand-labelled training data, included in the paper. Nonetheless, this seems to be a fascinating and very powerful piece of software. One cool future direction for the Event Reporter team might be to mine the content of the article talk page during and directly after these bursts as well, and employ the same classification technique to provide the end user with a better sense of why certain content was revised or removed.

Spam on the rise as reason for user blocks

User:Ironholds examined^[13] the English Wikipedia’s block log from 2006 to 2012 for the stated blocking reasons, and found “spam” being used more and more frequently.

10k birth places and 40k almae matres from Wikipedia biographies, human-vetted

Google has published^[14] “a human-judged dataset of two relations about public figures on Wikipedia: nearly 10,000 examples of “place of birth”, and over 40,000 examples of “attended or graduated from an institution”. Each of these was judged by at least 5 raters, and can be used to train or evaluate relation extraction systems.”

How Wikipedia’s Google matrix differs for politicians and artists

Continuing the authors’ research on the Google matrix of Wikipedia articles and links between them (earlier coverage: ‘Wikipedia communities’ as eigenvectors of its Google matrix“), an ArXiv preprint studies the “Time evolution of Wikipedia network ranking”^[15], finding among other things that “PageRank selection is dominated by politicians while 2DRank, which combines PageRank and CheiRank, gives more accent on personalities of arts”.

A Wikipedia search algorithm that emphasizes serendipity

A two-page paper to be presented at the upcoming WWW 2013 [2] conference explores algorithms for “Searching for Interestingness in Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers” ^[16], or “Serendipitous search” – defined as “when a user with no a priori or totally unrelated intentions interacts with a system and acquires useful information”. The authors modify some standard information retrieval metrics by including sentiment analysis and a measure of a page’s quality – in the case of Wikipedia, “the number of dispute messages inserted by editors to require revisions”, which may be seen as questionable. The resulting two algorithms for ranking search results on both sites are tested for some popular search terms (drawn from the Google Zeitgeist lists), by asking test subjects to rank the results “for relevance, interestingness to the query, and interestingness regardless of the query”. In the end, the authors suggest that they be combined into a hybrid system.

Usability study recommends 18-point font for Wikipedia

An “experi­ment with 28 participants with dyslexia [comparing] reading speed, comprehension, and subjective readability” found “that font size has a significant effect on the readability and the understandability of the text, while line spacing does not”. On that basis, the four researchers from Barcelona “recommend using 18-point font size when designing web text for readers with dyslexia.^[17]

OpenSym, Wikisym, ClosedSym?

This year the WikiSym conference will be co-located with OpenSym. This marks a step forward from a conference focused mostly on CSCW application of wiki technology to a broader investigation of OpenCulture. This year the conferences will be collocated with Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. The WikiSym conference is funded in part by a grant by the WMF. However, as reported last month (Wikimedia funding for Wikisym ’13 despite open access concerns), there has been debate about the tension between the requirements of WMF on supporting open access research and the fact that the conference papers will be published by the ACM – a closed access provider. In two subsequent blog posts, the organizers explain why they have not been able^[18] to find an open publisher with a reputation comparable to the ACM for the 2013 proceedings, but formulate requirements for a suitable publisher for next year ^[19].

Wikimedia France research award winner announced

The French Wikimedia chapter has announced the winner of its research award: “Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”,^[20] an influential 2006 essay by the historian Roy Rosenzweig, which received the most votes among the jury-selected five finalists. The prize money of € 2,500 will go to the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, founded by the paper’s late author.

Provenance graphs

A conference paper by two computer scientists from the University of Newcastle^[21] presents code to convert metadata from Wikipedia revision history and user contribution pages (e.g. the author of a particular revision, or articles edited by an editor) into provenance data in the W3C‘s PROV-DM data model. The graph of revisions and editors is visualized. Code and examples are provided on Github.

References

This post was written by Richard Nevell. 

On Friday 3^rd May, the Wiki Loves Monuments photo exhibition was packed up, marking the end of their time in the country, and is now en route to Sweden.

Wiki Loves Monuments is the largest photography competition in the world, and in 2012 resulted in more than 300,000 images being uploaded to Commons. High quality prints were created of the 12 winning pictures and since January they have been exhibited in various countries. While in the UK they were shown to a varied audience of both Wikimedians and members of the general public.

The first stop was the media event with Jimmy Wales in March, where the photos formed an attractive backdrop to the event and prompted many discussions between Wikimedia UK volunteers, members of the press, and other interested parties who were at TechHub. Likewise when WMUK had an open day on the charity’s future later that month, which attracted members of the charity and members of the public who were interested in becoming trustees.

The main part of the exhibition was in April. On Friday 12^th to Sunday 14^th the British Library hosted GLAM-Wiki 2013, with about 200 attendees over the three days. In between talks and workshops, a mixture of GLAM professionals and Wikimedians had the opportunity to see the photographs. The final stop in the UK for the exhibition was the University of London’s Senate House Library. With more than 100,000 registered readers, the library is often busy. Installed at the entrance the library, the Wiki Loves Monuments exhibition was prominently displayed for visitors to view. During the exhibition’s time in the UK it has been viewed by a wide range of people, and helped raise awareness about Wikimedia’s activities.

Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 will be held in September, and the planning process to hold the event in the UK has begun. If you are interested in helping out, feel free to add your name to the page on Commons. And if you have a camera, keep your fingers crossed for a sunny September because we want you to go out and take as many pictures as possible! Hopefully it will be a resounding success.

We’re happy to announce this week’s release of Notifications on the English Wikipedia.

Notifications inform users about new activity that affects them on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, such as talk page messages, page reviews or edit reverts. It also lets them take quick action to respond to these events.

This new notifications system (formerly called Echo) was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation’s editor engagement team, to encourage people to participate more actively on MediaWiki sites (see earlier post). It provides a modern, unified user experience that replaces or augments existing notification systems — and gives significantly more control to users.

Here’s a quick overview of this new engagement tool.

How do notifications work?

When someone takes an action that relates to you on a Wikipedia or MediaWiki site, a red badge shows up next to your user name, with the number of unread notifications. Clicking on that badge displays a flyout listing the most recent notifications (see screenshot). You can then click on the notification of your choice to learn more and take action.

This first release features a variety of notifications:

• Talk page messages: when a message is left on your user talk page;
• Mentions: when your user name is mentioned on a talk page;
• Page reviews: when a page you created is reviewed;
• Page links: when a page you created is linked;
• Edit reverts: when your edits are undone or rolled back;
• Thanks: when someone thanks you for your edit (coming soon);
• User rights: when your user rights change;
• Welcome: when you create a new account;
• Getting started: easy ways for new users to start editing.

These notifications were created to support the needs of both new and experienced users. For example, new users who create an account receive special Welcome and Getting started notifications to guide them in their critical first steps on Wikipedia. A special Thanks notification lets experienced users give positive feedback to new users who made constructive edits, to encourage them to contribute more. And power users will benefit from the User rights notifications (which are sent when your user rights are changed) and Mentions (sent when someone mentions your name) — two features that were found useful by active editors we consulted for this project.

To learn more about notifications, visit this FAQ page. To customize your notifications, check your preferences on the English Wikipedia. Once you’ve received your first notifications, please take this quick survey and join the discussion on this talk page.

Next steps

During the next few weeks, we plan to fix bugs and tweak Notifications based on community feedback. We are working on a few more features for our next release, such as alternative displays of talk page messages, more visually appealing HTML emails and new ways to dismiss notifications you don’t want. Over time, we would also like to develop more notifications for both new and power users. If you have any suggestions for improving this tool, please let us know :).

Once Notifications have been improved and fully tested on the English Wikipedia, we plan to make this product available in more languages on other Wikipedias and sister projects. In parallel, we will start providing tools and guidelines to allow notifications to be extended by developers.

Thanks

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank some of the people who made this product possible. They include Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ, Luke Welling, Vibha Bamba, Oliver Keyes, Brandon Harris, Steven Walling, Matthew Flaschen, Dario Taraborelli, Howie Fung, Terry Chay and Erik Moeller, to name a few of our colleagues. We’d also like to thank all the community members who have guided our development and everyone else who pitched in to help us bring this tool to life!

We look forward to continuing these collaborations in coming months and to helping engage millions of Wikimedia users to share free knowledge more productively.

Fabrice Florin, Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Team

In English

With more than 280 million native speakers, Arabic is one of the world’s most spoken languages, but the Arabic Wikipedia has lagged behind other language Wikipedias in terms of the amount of articles. The Arabic Wikipedia has only 205,000 articles — a tiny fraction in comparison to the English Wikipedia, which has 4.2 million articles. But the Arabic Wikipedia has been steadily growing over the last year, thanks in part to the efforts of college students in Egypt participating in the Wikipedia Education Program.

The Wikipedia Education Program kicked off in Egypt with a Cairo pilot at two universities, Ain Shams University and Cairo University. The chart at right shows the amount of content added to the Arabic Wikipedia by students participating in the program. In the first term of the pilot, students added about 1.85 million bytes of content to the Arabic Wikipedia — an incredible achievement celebrated at a conference in Cairo in July 2012. In the second term of the pilot, which wrapped up in February 2013, students contributed even more, with over 5.97 million bytes of content added to the Arabic Wikipedia. In addition, students who we’ve introduced to editing through the Wikipedia Education Program have contributed an additional 515,000 bytes, meaning the program has brought a total of more than 8.34 million bytes to the Arabic Wikipedia.

Volunteer program leaders organized a second celebration conference at Cairo University on February 27, 2013. Dr. Abeer Abd El-Hafez, a professor of Spanish from Cairo University, opened the conference and spoke about the spirit of the program and its importance in the lives of students and teachers in terms of skills development and new experiences. Faris El-Gwely, the education program consultant who runs the program in Egypt, shared results from the second term, and the best students and Ambassadors from the program received certificates recognizing their hard work. Students and professors also shared information about their experiences in the program. See more photos from the conference.

The second celebration conference was a catalyst for the program to grow. Two more universities in northern Egypt have joined the program, Damanhour University and Kafr El-Sheikh University, as has Saint Khadija High School for Girls in Cairo. The drive from these programs comes from past students and Wikipedia Ambassadors who want to volunteer their time to further the spread of the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt:

• Walaa Abd El-Moneim, leader of the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University
• Doaa Saif El-Din, leader of the Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages), Ain Shams University
• Helana Raafat and Mina Saber, leaders of the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University
• Samir El-Sharabaty, commander of the Faculty of Education, Damanhour University

Egypt is not the only Arab World country to see growth in the Wikipedia Education Program. In the term that’s just beginning, universities in Algeria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have joined the program. All told, more than 45 classes will be editing the Arabic Wikipedia as part of their coursework this term.

In Jordan, Dr. Nidal Yousef of Isra University is one of five university professors teaching Wikipedia classes this term through the program. The Jordanian Teachers Association is also leading a program where high school students in every governorate in Jordan will be editing Wikipedia as part of their schoolwork, assisted by volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors. Dr. Abd El-Haq Fareh of Algeria is also incorporating Wikipedia editing into his free software class this term. And Dr. Mohammed Alghbban and Dr. Sami Bin Slimah of King Saud University are leading a Wikipedia translation program in Saudi Arabia in their school’s languages department.

We look forward to seeing the Arabic Wikipedia continue to grow, thanks to these dedicated faculty leaders and students.

Faris El-Gwely, Education Program Consultant, Arab World
LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

This post was written by Andrew Gray at the conclusion of his residency at the British Library. It was originally posted on the British Library’s blog here.

My residency at the British Library is coming to an end today, and so it seemed a good chance to look back at what we’ve done over the past twelve months. It’s been a very productive and very interesting year.

The residency was funded by the AHRC, who aimed to help find ways for researchers and academics to engage with new communities through Wikipedia, and disseminate the material they were producing as widely as possible. To help with this, we organised a series of introductory workshops; these were mostly held at the British Library, with several more at the University of London (two at Birkbeck and three at Senate House) and others scattered from Southampton to Edinburgh. Through the year, these came to fifty sessions for over four hundred people, including almost a hundred Library staff both in London and at Boston Spa, and another fifty Library readers in London! Attendees got a basic introduction to Wikipedia – how it works, how to edit it, and how to engage with its community – as well as the opportunity to experiment with using the site.

As well as building a broad base of basic skills and awareness, we also worked with individual projects to demonstrate the potential for engagement in specific case. At the Library, the International Dunhuang Project organised a multi-day, multi-language, editing event in October; IDP staff, student groups, and Wikipedia volunteers worked on articles about central Asian archaeology, creating or improving around fifty articles.

At the Library, one of the most visible outcomes has been the “Picturing Canada” project, digitising around 4,000 photographs from the Canadian Copyright Collection, with funding from Wikimedia UK and the Eccles Centre for American Studies. We’ve released around 2,000 images so far, as JPEGs and as high-resolution TIFFs, with the full collection likely to be available by early June (we’ve just found enough left in the budget to do an extra batch of postcards). Other content releases have included digitised books, historic photographs, collection objects, and ancient manuscripts (pictured).

We also hosted the GLAM-Wiki conference in April, which was a great success, with over 150 attendees and speakers from around the world. Several of the presentations are now online.

While I’m leaving the Library, some of these projects I’ve been working on will be continuing – we still have another 2,000 of the Canadian photographs to be released, for example! We’re also hoping to host some more workshops here in the future (possibly as part of the upcoming JISC program). I’ll still be contactable, and I’m happy to help with any future projects you might have in mind; please do get in touch if there’s something I can help you with.

I have been playing with Wikidata and it is really good fun. I find many uses for it and some of them have to be tweaked a bit to be even better. Take for instance a list of popes. There is a list with articles on the English Wikipedia for each of them. There are so many popes, that it is obvious that many Wikipedias do not have the list and certainly not articles to all of these popes.


Wikidata could come to the rescue. When a list is made up of values available in Wikidata and when the links to articles fall back to Wikidata, we are able to provide relevant information and, we have the perfect opportunity to suggest to our readers to write a stub or an article.

In effect such a list allows us to provide improved information by using the strength of Wikidata in any of the languages we support. When you think about such a list, it is not much different from an info-box.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Quim Gil, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Contributor Coordinator, recently wrote about internship programs that the Wikimedia tech community participates in. These programs provide a valuable platform for a diverse group of contributors and nurture deeper collaboration across open source communities. He also shared details about participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) for Wikimedia projects.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team welcomes students to participate in the projects listed for Google Summer of Code and those listed for the Outreach Program for Women. The projects listed aim to resolve shortcomings or enhance various language tools that the team maintains; they include:

• improving the jQuery.ime input method library;
• building browser extensions for stand-alone operation of input methods;
• creating a dashboard for language coverage information;
• converting legacy wiki content into translatable entries.

Providing support for nearly 300 languages is no easy feat. There is constant demand for enhancements of tools, and this demand is only expected to grow. The team constantly encourages volunteers including students, language community members and others, to work with them on internationalization challenges. This includes various components like Translate UX (TUX) and Project Milkshake, in which participants can:

• increase coverage of input methods and font library;
• improve language rules for the internationalization library;
• test and prepare validation tools;
• test and enhance the translation tool;
• write documents.

They can also contribute by building extensions like SpellingApi and LocalisationUpdate, or even creating usable multi-lingual CAPTCHAs.

Open projects are also added to the master list maintained for all mentorship programs. After ascertaining the availability of mentors, participants can collaborate on a project of interest. If no mentors are listed, students can ask the team on  #mediawiki-i18n (Freenode IRC) or write to me (runa at wikimedia dot org) for more information.

We look forward to all the exciting proposals for our projects for Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women. Student applications close on May 3rd and May 1st respectively.  Time is short — apply now!

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Last week the New York Times published an Op-Ed from author Amanda Filipacchi headlined Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists, in which she criticized Wikipedia for moving some authors from the “American novelists” category into a sub-category called “American women novelists.” Because there is no subcategory for “American male novelists,” Filipacchi saw the change as reflecting a sexist double standard, in which ‘male’ is positioned as the ungendered norm, with ‘female’ as a variant.

I completely understand why Filipacchi was outraged. She saw herself, and Harper Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Judy Blume, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Higgins Clark, and many others, seemingly downgraded in the public record and relegated to a subcategory that she assumed would get less readership than the main one. She saw this as a loss for American women novelists who might otherwise be visible when people went to Wikipedia looking for ideas about who to hire, to honor, or to read.

In the days following, other publications picked up the story, and Filipacchi wrote two followup pieces — one describing edits made to her own biography on Wikipedia following her first op-ed, and another rebutting media stories that had positioned the original categorization changes as the work of a lone editor.

For me–as a feminist Wikipedian–reading the coverage has been extremely interesting. I agree with many of the criticisms that have been raised (as I think many Wikipedians do), and yet there are important points that I think have been missing from the media discussions so far.

In Wikipedia, like any large-scale human endeavor, practice often falls short of intent.

Individuals make mistakes, but that doesn’t and shouldn’t call into question the usefulness or motivations of the endeavor as a whole. Since 2011, Wikipedia has officially discouraged the creation of gender-specific subcategories, except when gender is relevant to the category topic. (One of the authors of the guideline specifically noted that it is clear that any situation in which women get a gendered subcategory while men are left in the ungendered parent category is unacceptable.) In other words, the very situation Filipacchi decries in her op-ed has been extensively discussed and explicitly discouraged on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a continual work-in-progress. It’s never done.

In her original op-ed, Filipacchi seems to assume that Wikipedians are planning to move all the women out of the American Novelists category, leaving all the men. But that’s not the case. There’s a continuous effort on Wikipedia to refine and revise categories with large populations, and moving out the women from American Novelists would surely have been followed by moving out the satirical novelists, or the New York novelists, or the Young Adult novelists. I’d argue it’s still an inappropriate thing to do, because women are 50 percent of the population, not a variant to the male norm. Nevertheless the move needs to be understood not as an attack on women, but rather, in the context of continuous efforts to refine and revise all categories.

Wikipedia is a reflection of the society that produces it.

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, and as such it reflects the cultural biases and attitudes of the general society. It’s important to say that the people who write Wikipedia are a far larger and vastly more diverse group than the staff of any newsroom or library or archive, past or present. That’s why Wikipedia is bigger, more comprehensive, up-to-date and nuanced, compared with any other reference work. But with fewer than one in five contributors being female, gender is definitely Wikipedia’s weak spot, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it would fall victim to the same gender-related errors and biases as the society that produces it.

Are there misogynists on Wikipedia? Given that anyone with internet access can edit it, and that there are roughly 80,000 active editors (those who make at least 5 edits per month on Wikimedia projects), it would be absurd to claim that Wikipedia is free of misogyny. Are there well-intentioned people on Wikipedia accidentally behaving in ways that perpetuate sexism? Of course. It would be far more surprising if Wikipedia were somehow free of sexism, rather than the reverse.

Which brings me to my final point.

It’s not always the case, but in this instance the system worked. Filipacchi saw something on Wikipedia that she thought was wrong. She drew attention to it. Now it’s being discussed and fixed. That’s how Wikipedia works.

The answer to bad speech is more speech. Many eyes make all bugs shallow. If you see something on Wikipedia that irks you, fix it. If you can’t do it yourself, the next best thing is to do what Filipacchi did — talk about it, and try to persuade other people there’s a problem. Wikipedia belongs to its readers, and it’s up to all of us to make it as good as it possibly can be.

Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

When a subject does not "merit" an article in Wikipedia, it does not follow that the same subject is not of value in Wikidata. Consider for instance the son of a famous person who died at the age of three. He completes the list of all the children of that person something that is definitely "a good thing" in Wikidata.

It is certainly true that many subjects that "merit" an article do not have an article. There may be an article in one language and not in another. Wikidata has the option to add a label for such an article as a place holder and while it has not been written it can show nicely red on a disambiguation page. The point here is that it is legitimate for lists and disambiguation pages to have red links. When such lists are completed in Wikidata they can easily be translated to other languages and provide basic information that may be of interest.

The red links in the list of Muhammeds are both kings of the Sayfawa dynasty. Sadly they are not even all the kings called Muhammed who are part of the Sayfawa dynasty with a red link. Just consider what would happen when disambiguation lists are presented from Wikidata; it makes it easier to start articles because relevant information may be available thanks to work done in another language.

When you consider the options, all "red links" could be known to Wikidata. As a result you can complete all lists without having to write articles and, you will deal with disambiguation issues sooner rather than later and, why have wikilinks when integrity is better maintained in Wikidata anyway?
Thanks,
      GerardM

A selection of the texts added to Wikisource in April are as follows:

• Mimicry in Butterflies (1915) by Reginald Crundall Punnett
• Inaugural address delivered to the University of St. Andrews, Feb. 1st 1867 (1867) by John Stuart Mill
• The volunteer, and other poems (1916) by Herbert Asquith
• The poor Sisters of Nazareth (1889) by Alice Meynell
• Cotton and Immigration (1871) by Robert Turner Saunders
• The spirit of place, and other essays (1899) by Alice Meynell
• Historical characteristics of the Celtic race (1885) by William Duguid Geddes
• Address to an emigrant (1839) by the Religious Tract Society
• The Australian Commonwealth and her relation to the British Empire (1912) by George Houstoun Reid
• The Intrusion of Jimmy (1910) by P. G. Wodehouse
• A Critical Examination of Dr G. Birkbeck Hills “Johnsonian” Editions (1898) by Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald
• Poems, now first collected (1897) by Edmund Clarence Stedman
• President Ford–King Hussein memcon (1974) by Gerald Ford, Hussein of Jordan, et al
• The Great Secret (1895) by James Hume Nisbet
• The Life of Tolstoy (1911) by Paul Birukoff
• Barchester Towers (1857) by Anthony Trollope
• The New Arcadia (1894) by Horace Tucker
• Interference Phenomena in a new form of Refractometer (1882) by Albert Abraham Michelson
• Box and Cox (1847) by John Maddison Morton
• Artabanzanus (1896) by William Moore Ferrar
• Major Achievements in the Courtroom: Terrorism Cases: United States v. Zachary Chesser (2012) by Neil H. MacBride
• Fighting in Cuban Waters (1899) by Edward Stratemeyer
• Sonnets to Duse and other Poems (1907) by Sara Teasdale
• Franken Inquiry to Holder Over Death of Reddit Co-Founder Aaron Swartz (2013) by Al Franken

Love taking photos on your smartphone? Now you don’t need to wait to get home to upload your high quality educational photos to Wikimedia Commons, the free image repository used by Wikipedia and many other projects.

The official Wikimedia Commons app for iOS and Android allows you to quickly and easily upload your photos to Commons. You can also upload multiple files and add categories (Android only so far) and share your uploads through your favorite image sharing sites. Your contributions to Commons can help illustrate the world’s largest encyclopedia and make knowledge come to life for millions of readers around the globe.

In the future, we hope to add more features and make it easier to browse and discover all the great content Commons has to offer. We also look forward to being able to run more campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments, encouraging expert Commons users and people new to Wikimedia projects alike to contribute to high-need content areas.

As always, we need your help and input to make these apps better. Take the apps for a test drive and let us know if you encounter bugs, or if you have great ideas for features we should add in the future.

And if you don’t have an iOS or Android device, don’t feel left out! Uploads to Commons for a wider selection of phones and browsers are supported on the mobile version of all Wikimedia projects.

Maryana Pinchuk, Associate Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Recently, some have claimed that the English Wikipedia was "segregating" female novelists.

I don't follow the complexities of WP as closely as I once did but classification is one of those seemingly innocuous, nerdy things that is more difficult and profound than one would think. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote a (now classic) book entitled Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences in 1999 that showed how nurses' work and the racial distinctions in South Africa reflected the biases and power structures of their societies; they wrote "Systems of classification (and of standardization) form a juncture of social organization, moral order, and layers of technical integration" (p. 33). For instance, my understanding of this Wikipedia case is that Amanda Filipacchi's conclusion was correct: some women had been moved from "American Novelists" to "American Women Novelists" and this was viewed as a demotion.

However, while this can be used as an example of androcentrism or perhaps the work of misguided contributors, it doesn't recognize that the design, function and implementation of categories is far trickier than we might think.

Taxonomy: How ought we organize our conceptual world?

Since the Enlightenment most encyclopedia abandoned earlier efforts to create a taxonomy of knowledge and simply provided entries via alphabetical order: it's that hard. (Encyclopedia Britannica's Propædia was an effort to try to retain some sort of integrated view of knowledge but was in no way comprehensive.) While Wikipedia is sometimes characterized as a "Web 2.0" site, this system of categories and subcategories is out of step with sites that simply permit people to tag things, and then query those tags.

Manageability: What makes a good category page?

In an attempt to create a taxonomy of concepts and related articles, you might end up with massive pages. Hence, many of the decisions at Wikipedia aren't so much about taxonomy but usefulness, and massive pages aren't useful. Hence, there are efforts to pare down pages when possible by moving things to subcategories, which I think is what was happening here.

Biases: How do categories reflect social/historical biases?

Yet, the notion that men are the default is problematic. Why should women be "dumped" in a subcategory? (Similarly, Sam Klein noted that male beauty pageants are separated from beauty pageants.)

Wikipedia's guideline permits gender specific subcategories "where gender has a specific relation to the topic."

For example, Category:Women contains articles such as International Women's Day, Women's studies, and female-specific subcategories. Similarly, Category:Men contains articles such as father, men's studies, boy and human male sexuality, as well as male-specific subcategories. Neither category, however, should directly contain individual women or individual men.

Women novelists doesn't strike me as "a specific relation" and I believe the movement of authors was more of an effort to pare down the size of the page.

Meaning: Is being moved from "American Novelists" to "American Women Novelists" a "demotion"?

I think so, and most agree this is problematic. Indeed, while the Wikipedia guideline recognized "specific relation" subcategories, instances of those subcategories should still be included in the parent category. In the example of heads of government "Both male and female heads of government should continue to be filed in the appropriate gender-neutral role category (e.g. Presidents, Monarchs, Prime Ministers, Governors General)."

Usefulness: Is being able to easily find "American Women Novelists" useful?

Indeed. As Liz Henry and Sarah Stierch have argued, attempts to delete/neuter pages about women novelists, scientists, and others are also problematic.

Technology: How best to implement the functionality we want?

Is it possible that instances of a subcategory could also show up alongside instances of a parent category? This isn't technically supported now and parent category pages would continue to be massive. Could we instead have tags (instead of categories and taxonomy) which are queryable (e.g., "show me all novelists who are also female")? This is the "Web 2.0" way of things, and can be done, but its not how Wikipedia is presently built.

Practice: Imperfect

I continue to be surprised Wikipedia works at all. Many Wikipedians often do their best, but it is very messy: sometimes there is little consensus and people do things in good faith without understanding the implications. This work can also be incremental and haphazard, giving an incomplete or confusing picture at any specific moment in time, or reveal a latent and distributed bias.

Given the technology on hand, I think it makes sense to create "specific relation" pages but ensure their content is not presented as segregated or less-than other content.

I love #Wikidata, it gets so many things right. At the same time it fails by design. Consider; there is this article about a woman. In English she may have a spouse. In translation there is a problem; because the spouse has a spouse and it is a different word depending on the gender of the person involved.

This is the kind of problem that has been solved for the MediaWiki software. It means that you consider the sex of the person involved. Applying this principle on Wikidata is possible because we do register if a person is male or female.

It seems obvious; sex matters. In many languages you address people based on their sex. As long as Wikidata is not able to address this issue, it is broken. When this is intentional, it is broken by design.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The English Wikipedia is currently embroiled in a debate on sexism (local copy), because of classifying female American novelists as “American Women Novelists” while leaving male American novelists in the more general category “American Novelists”, suggesting a subordinate role of female novelists. I find this debate regrettable for the apparent sexism but also interesting for the technology underlying such changes, which I would like to focus on here.

With technology, I mean bureaucratic practices, conceptual modeling of the world and Wikipedia content, and software tools to support changes to those models.

First, who made the decision to move the articles on female novelists to an “American Women Novelist” category? Wikipedia bureaucracy is structured into “improvement projects”, groups of volunteers who care about a particular topic, and work together to improve this topic’s presentation on Wikipedia. It is part of the large bureaucratic underbelly of Wikipedia that few care to look at (who are not editors). So in most cases, there would be an American Novelist improvement group. Any complaints should be directed to that group. (And not the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit which operates Wikipedia. The various Wikipedia communities have been very clear that they don’t want the Wikimedia Foundation to meddle with content. As a consequence, the Wikimedia Foundation only interferes with grave violations of conduct or if laws are being violated.) In this particular case, I have not been able to figure out who actually is behind these changes. Anyway, let’s assume there is such an improvement project.

This group decided that “American Women Novelists” is a good new category. The original motivation was to keep categories small, which may or may not have been a reasonable decision. But the choice of the category term shows all the things that are wrong with the category system, leading to wrong or misleading labeling, and [sarcasm on] may well lead to war between nations in the future [sarcasm off] as Wikipedia may become the oracle of all things knowledge.

The first thing that is wrong is that next to “American Women Novelists” there obviously should be “American Men Novelists”. I’m sure there should also be an “American Other Novelists” category to not exclude the LGBT community. That third term is obviously clumsy and makes clear that a better choice of name would have been “female/male/other American Novelists”.

Considering this, it becomes clear that the category name mixes various things. “Novelist” as a role people play, “female/male/other” as properties of people, and the implicit classification that the article is about a person (as derived from the role “novelist” which applies to humans only and not to mammals or cities or t-shirts). If the current approach was a proper approach to classification, a growing body of knowledge on Wikipedia would soon have us introducing categories like “tall slender blonde other American Novelist”. (I trust the common sense of the respective improvement project not to follow this example.)

A more thorough approach to categorizing the content of articles on Wikipedia would rely on a model of content categories. For articles about people, the central concept would likely be person, an identifiable object, with roles that a person performs in various contexts, for example, mother or father, novelist or publisher or bartender or race car driver or nurse. Properties like male or female, birth day or age would be broken out and attached to the appropriate concept, whether a central or auxilliary concept. In fact, the Wiki Data project tries to do just that.

Computer science is a discipline that has long worked on such challenges. There are two main approaches, a more rigid and precise one (conceptual modeling or object-orientation), and a fast-and-loose one based on graph theory (ontologies). The second one is the one being favored by Wikipedia. I’m in the first camp and believe that a model should have defined semantics, but I recognize the value that the second approach provides, namely that you don’t have to think too deeply while making changes. Wikipedia is always “good enough” and where it isn’t, you fix it up after the fact rather than getting it right immediately.

Which brings me to tool support, finally. In Wikipedia, categories are just textual labels. There could be anything in there. A single typo and you fall out of the category. Today, there is no single place where you could change a category name. Rather, you need to send out a group of volunteers to look at every page and change the label by hand. This easily can take days if not weeks. This is why in the sexism debate, the original reporter complained about a gradual change rather than suddenly being confronted with an instantaneous change. The way the Wikipedia technology has been built, such changes can’t be implemented instantaneously.

Over at the Sweble project, my research group has been developing technology that lets editors make wide-ranging changes like renaming a category at the click of a button.

This includes instantaneously reverting mistakes.

---

PS: My Ph.D. student wants me to note that his work has been tested in the laboratory only and not on the real Wikipedia. We use a different underlying technology (Java rather than php) so adapting our work to Wikipedia would take substantial effort.

The contest has been finished for a while, but we know that many of our followed still would like to see a little more of what beauty has been submitted in the different countries. That is why we give today a bit of extra attention to the top-10 of the Israeli 2012 contest!

Israel is of course known primarily for its many ancient and religious monuments. It is hard not to see a church, mosque or synagogue at any given place in the historical city centers. And this is clearly visible in the winning pictures too. Multiple religions are represented. But most interesting is perhaps, that one monument made it twice to the top-10: the Tower of David in Jerusalem, even though it is hardly comparable. On the first place the Tower is covered in snow, and if it weren’t for the call on the far left, it could have been a photo of ages ago. The Tower re-appears on the eighth place, where it has a much more modern look, with the lights of the trafic visible in the long exposure photograph. The two views on this same monument couldn’t be much more different.

Read more:

• Wikimedia Commons project page with more national images
• Elaborate report in BLAAT

As noted last week by AuditCom chair Stu West.

More than 40 people from 25 countries gathered together in person in Milan, Italy, last week to discuss Wikimedia projects’ use in education. Representatives from Wikimedia chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation, and universities worldwide discussed ways to further develop the relationships between educational institutions and Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

The Education Program Leaders Workshop was held in conjunction with the Wikimedia chapters conference in Milan, an annual opportunity for representatives from around the world to meet in person to discuss the future of the movement. The enthusiasm worldwide for the program bodes well for the future of Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia and education.

Notes from the workshop highlight the incredible depth and breadth of activities happening worldwide in the education sphere. Some programs, like in Serbia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Brazil, and Egypt, have been in operation for several terms and have been achieving incredible results on their language Wikipedias. Others, including programs in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, have dedicated staff people working on furthering their goals. Programs in Mexico, Switzerland, and Saudi Arabia are small but effective thanks to the dedicated work of individual volunteer educators whose drive to use Wikipedia in their own classrooms has furthered their language Wikipedias. Still others are just getting started, and many are exploring opportunities to collaborate with governmental bodies who work on creating curriculum and education policy to include Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

“Education” is a broad field, and participants represented programs working with everyone from school-aged children to seniors. Workshop participants discussed the different activities relevant to education programs, and talked about the best way of setting goals for programs as a whole. The Wikimedia Foundation remains committed to supporting education programs worldwide through such support resources as brochures, a MediaWiki extension, and online trainings. Workshop participants agreed that developing a better system to share experiences across countries — perhaps a searchable database of learnings — would help programs learn from each others’ mistakes and determine the best path forward for their own programs. With more than 30 programs in operation worldwide, the future is bright for Wikimedia projects and education.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

These days we are welcoming a new wave of candidates for Google Summer of Code and FOSS Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships. Interested? Stop reading and hurry up! Or keep reading to learn why these free software mentorship programs are doing so much good.

Since 2006, Wikimedia has mentored 32 GSoC students. From those, only one (3.13%) was a woman (accepted in 2011), and she didn’t stick around. This number is even lower than the general percentage of women accepted in GSoC 2012 (8.3%) although perhaps it is in line with the composition of our own tech community (data missing). Can we do better?

We think we can. This is why we joined OPW last November. It was the first round open to organizations other than the GNOME Foundation, founders of the initiative. After 5 rounds of OPW, GNOME women are not an exotic exception anymore. It is too soon to evaluate results in the Wikimedia tech community, but the six interns we got during the 5th round delivered their projects in the areas of software development, internationalization, UX design, quality assurance and product management, and so far they are sticking around. We also learned some lessons that we are applying to the next internship programs. As we speak, several women are applying for Wikimedia in the current GSoC edition. A promising trend!

But there is more positive change. Paid internships are like subcutaneous injections for a free software community: in just one shot you get a full time contributor dedicated to help you within a defined scope and amount of time, with the incentive of a stipend ($5,000). The lives of the injected contributors change in the new environment. They learn and they adapt to new situations. They acquire a valuable experience that will help them becoming experienced volunteers and better professionals. At least this is the goal. But the life of the community receiving the injection also should change for good with the arrival of these full time contributors. This is also the goal. So what has improved so far in our tech community?

Scaling up complex projects

Mentorship programs require a good alignment of project ideas supported by the community and by available mentors. Thanks to the efforts of many, we have now a list of possible projects, including a selection of featured project ideas ready to start. The list includes proposals coming from different Wikimedia projects, Wikimedia Foundation-driven initiatives and MediaWiki features for third parties.

These project ideas link to Bugzilla reports in order to keep track of the technical discussion, involving the candidates, the mentors and whoever else wants to join. Full transparency! We also provide basic guidelines for candidates willing to propose their own projects.

All this has been done for the current GSoC and OPW round, but is potentially also useful in the context of other initiatives like OpenHatch, SocialCoding4Good, or Wikimedia’s Individual Engagement Grants. If you want to propose a technical project that could keep a person or team busy for 3–4 months, now you know where to start.

Improving our Welcome carpet

Each mentorship program brings a wave of newcomers willing to get up to speed as soon as possible. We are betting on the “the medium is the message” approach, giving as much importance to the proposals as to the participation and collaboration of the candidate in our regular community channels. But all this requires better landing surfaces in mediawiki.org.

This pressure and the repetition of similar questions by newcomers have encouraged the creation or promotion of references such as Where to start, How to contribute and Annoying little bugs. We keep working on an easier introduction to our community through the fresh and work-in-progress Starter kit, a team of volunteer Greeters and other initiatives discussed at the new Project:New contributors. And you know what? Several former interns are involved!

Diversity enters our agenda

We believe that “a healthy mix of demographic and cultural characteristics everywhere throughout the movement is key to Wikimedia’s success.” Diversity is good for creativity and sustainability, which are primary goals of any free software community. Yet diversity in these communities tends to be quite limited, and our case is not an exception.

We have mentioned the problem of male predominance, but there are other biases and types of discrimination that we would like to help leveling. What about working on other barriers caused by abilities, age, language, or cultural, ethnic, or economic background? Just like we are doing with OPW, we can start with programs for specific audiences that we can sync with mainstream activities like GSoC, increasing their diversity. Ideas are welcome.

Quim Gil, Technical Contributor Coordinator (IT Communications Manager)

Among the Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia has the highest number of individual language projects — 285. The Language Engineering team focuses on building language tools and assets that improve the ability to interact with any article on Wikipedia. Language assets like fonts and input methods are integrated into MediaWiki and its extensions, and our wikis are localized using collaborative translation with translation tools to ensure a decent user experience.

Collaboration in Language Projects and the Language Maven Program

Language tools are constantly evolving to ensure support for our users. It is a slow if not impossible task to scale our small engineering team to support hundreds of languages without close collaboration with our language communities, which have many capable and technically-savvy editors and administrators.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team has compiled a proposal for the formation of a special interest group named the Language Mavens. With members from various language communities from around the globe, we hope to learn from our users, seek advice, guidance and validation on language features. We hope that the Language Mavens will pull in participation from community members and experts who care about language support features and their adoption in the wikis they read and contribute to.

Getting started with the Maven Program

The Language Maven pilot was rolled out earlier this month on April 13 with a meeting that was well attended. Program scope and activities were discussed. One of the recommendations was to ensure that documents and handy checklists be prepared for easy reference to the language tools available to each language community. Activities that the Mavens can participate in include usability tests, bug triages, testing days and even blogging to share valuable insights about the internationalization tools in their favorite language wiki projects.

The Mavens program is aimed to focus on collecting feedback and providing support for language tools and assets being deployed by the team. This will help develop a long-term user group that will be instrumental in helping other language community members learn more about the latest language features and tools being rolled out. The Maven team expects to meet once every month and communicate through the mediawiki-i18n mailing list. To participate as a Language Maven, please fill up this form to let us know about your interest or ping me (runa at wikimedia dot org) for any questions!

Help us make your language experience better — join the Mavens!

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

An account creation and login process that is simple and pleasurable to use is a must-have for engaging more contributors to Wikimedia projects. On just Wikipedia’s English-language version, more than 3,000 people sign up for an account on an average day. These interfaces are often the first time a new editor interacts with the site, beyond consuming content.

We’re happy to announce that, starting today, users of all Wikimedia projects will be able to try a new look for our account creation and login. For about a week, we’re asking all Wikimedia volunteer editors to give the update a try and help us spot any nagging bugs or errors in translation. We’ll then enable the new forms as the default on all our wikis.

Help test the new forms

If you’re a current or prospective member of a Wikimedia community, we need your help. Please give the new interfaces a try, report bugs, or leave comments for us on your wiki’s preferred noticeboard.

We’re providing this week-long testing period–instead of simply rolling out the new interface with less advance notice–to get help making sure our localizations are correct and the interfaces will be bug free for the 800 or so wiki communities we support.

• See the new account creation form
• See the new login form

Both links above are to our largest and most active community, English Wikipedia, but if you’re a contributor to any other project, you can try out the new forms by simply appending &useNew=1 to either URL on your favorite wiki. You can also find more detailed, step-by-step testing instructions if you’re willing to go a little deeper with testing the forms.

How we got here

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Experiments team has been optimizing these forms, using weekly controlled tests to measure the impact of our new signup form and iterate on our ideas. (See our original announcement.)

Overall, the results of these experiments were encouraging. Using English Wikipedia as our proving ground, our most successful experiment gained around 800 additional signups over a two week period. The relative increase in conversion was 4 percent, from 28 percent to 32 percent of users successfully creating an account after visiting the signup page. The total number of new users gained will change based on seasonal trends. We also decreased the number of errors which held up users after they submitted the form by 14 percent.

This interface redesign marks the first time MediaWiki core (the platform shared by all our projects) is using the new form styles that we have experimented with in account creation, our new onboarding experience for Wikipedia editors, and in other features. The patterns we’re introducing via the new account creation and login, codenamed “Agora” by the Wikimedia Foundation design team, will now be able to be reused in a more standardized way by MediaWiki developers.

The redesigns we’re introducing to login and account creation are hardly radical. Simple use of typography, color and vertically-aligned form fields are not what could be called bold innovation in design. Nonetheless, we’re extremely happy to be releasing an experience that will make signing up and logging in less of a burden for the many contributors to Wikimedia communities, and thus enable them to create great, free educational resources.

Steven Walling,
Associate Product Manager

This post was written by Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst of the Wikimedia Foundation. It was originally posted on the Foundation’s blog here.

A year after its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006,Wikidata has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.

By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the encyclopedia. Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata’s universal, machine-readable knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous external applications.

“Wikidata is a powerful tool for keeping information in Wikipedia current across all language versions,” said Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner. “Before Wikidata, Wikipedians needed to manually update hundreds of Wikipedia language versions every time a famous person died or a country’s leader changed. With Wikidata, such new information, entered once, can automatically appear across all Wikipedia language versions. That makes life easier for editors and makes it easier for Wikipedia to stay current.”

The dream of a wiki-based, collaboratively edited repository of structured data that could be reused in Wikipedia infoboxes goes back to at least 2004, when Wikimedian Erik Möller (now the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation) posted a detailed proposal for such a project. The following years saw work on related efforts like theSemantic MediaWiki extension, and discussions of how to implement a central data repository for Wikimedia intensified in2010 and 2011.

The development of Wikidata began in March 2012, led by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement. Since Wikidata.org went live on 30 October 2012, a growing community of around 3,000 active contributors started building its database of ‘items’ (e.g. things, people or concepts), first by collecting topics that are already the subject of Wikipedia articles in several languages. An item’s central page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links that previously connected these articles about the same topic in different Wikipedia versions.

Wikidata’s collection of these items now numbers over 10 million. The community also began to enrich Wikidata’s database with factual statements about these topics (data like the mayor of a city, the ISBN of a book, the languages spoken in a country, etc.). This information has now become available for use on Wikipedia itself, and Wikipedians on many language Wikipedias have already started to add it to articles, or discuss how to make best use of it.

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it,” said Wikidata project director Denny Vrandečić. “Whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.”

The next phase of Wikidata will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata. Wikimedia Deutschland will continue to support the project with an engineering team that is dedicated to Wikidata’s second year of development and maintenance.

Wikidata is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and its fact database is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Funding of Wikidata’s initial development was provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [AI]², the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Google, Inc.

Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst, Wikimedia Foundation

English

Editors on fifteen Wikipedias – Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish – can now get an idea of what the VisualEditor looks like in the “real world”, so they can give us feedback about how well it integrates with their current editing processes. We also want to get their thoughts on what aspects of development we should be prioritizing in the coming months.

The editor is still at an early stage and is missing significant functions, which we will address in the coming months. Because of this, we are mostly looking for feedback from experienced editors; the alpha VisualEditor is insufficient to really give new volunteers a proper experience of editing. We don’t want to promise an easier editing experience to new editors before it is ready.

As we develop improvements, we will push them live every two weeks to the wikis, allowing you to give us feedback as we go, and tell us what you want us to work on next.

How can I try it out?
The VisualEditor is now available to all logged-in accounts as a new preference, switched off by default, on the fifteen Wikipedias listed above. If you go to your “Preferences” screen and click into the “Editing” section, it will have an option labelled “Enable VisualEditor.”

Once enabled, for each article you can edit, you will get a second editor tab labelled “VisualEditor” next to the “Edit” tab. If you click this, after a little pause you will enter the VisualEditor. From here, you can play around, edit and save real articles and get an idea of what it will be like when complete.

At this early stage in our development, we recommend that after saving any edits, you check whether they broke anything. All edits made with the VisualEditor will show up in articles’ history tabs with a “VisualEditor” tag next to them, so you can track what is happening.

How can I help?
It’s vital that our software is available in the native language of as many of our volunteers as possible. If you speak one of these languages – or any of the other 280 languages that we support, like Welsh, Punjabi, Urdu or Scots Gaelic - please consider looking at the translations and helping us improve them!

We would love your feedback on what we have done so far — whether it’s a problem you discovered, an aspect that you find confusing, the areas you think we should work on next, or anything else, please do let us know.

James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor and Parsoid

Deutsch

Teste jetzt die Alpha-Version des VisualEditors – verfügbar in 15 Sprachen

Heute haben wir die für jeden aktivierbare Alpha-Version des VisualEditors in 14 Sprachausgaben der Wikipedia eingeführt. Bereits seit Dezember gibt es diesen auch schon in der englischsprachigen Wikipedia. Der VisualEditor erlaubt es Artikel in Wikipedia ganz anders als bisher direkt so zu erstellen und zu bearbeiten, wie sie danach auch aussehen – wie beispielsweise in einem üblichen Schreibprogramm am Computer.

Autoren aus 15 Sprachausgaben der Wikipedia – der arabischen, chinesischen, deutschen, englischen, französischen, hebräischen, hindi, italienischen, japanischen, koreanischen, niederländischen, polnischen, russischen, spanischen und schwedischen – können sich nun ein Bild davon machen, wie der VisualEditor „in Wirklichkeit“ aussieht, damit sie uns Feedback geben können, wie gut er sich in ihre derzeitigen Arbeitsprozesse in der Wikipedia integriert. Wir wollen aber auch Input erhalten, auf welche Aspekte wir in den kommenden Monaten der Entwicklung unser Hauptaugenmerk richten sollen.

Der VisualEditor befindet sich immer noch in einer sehr frühen Phase und es fehlen immer noch wichtige Funktionen, die wir in den nächsten Monaten angehen werden . Deshalb freuen wir uns besonders auf Feedback von erfahrenen Wikipedianern, denn diese Alphaversion des VisualEditor ist unserer Meinung nach nicht besonders geeignet um Neulingen das Bearbeiten in der Wikipedia nahe zu bringen. Wir wollen niemandem ein einfacheres Bearbeiten versprechen, bevor der VisualEditor fertig ist.

Wir werden stetig Verbesserungen entwickeln und diese etwa alle zwei Wochen freischalten, so dass ihr uns kontinuierlich Feedback geben und sagen könnt, woran wir als nächstes arbeiten sollten.

Wie kann ich den VisualEditor ausprobieren?
Der VisualEditor ist jetzt für alle eingeloggten Konten in den Einstellungen der oben genannten 15 Sprachausgaben der Wikipedia verfügbar, wobei er standardmäßig ausgeschaltet ist. Du kannst den VisualEditor einschalten, in dem Du in deine Einstellungen gehst und dort auf den „Bearbeiten“-Reiter klickst. Dort siehst Du die Option „VisualEditor aktivieren.“

Einmal eingeschaltet, wird dir bei jedem Artikel, den Du bearbeiten kannst, neben dem Reiter „Bearbeiten“ ein Reiter „VisualEditor“ angezeigt. Wenn Du darauf klickst, wirst Du nach einer kurzen Pause in den VisualEditor gelangen. Von hier aus kannst Du herumspielen, bearbeiten und echte Artikel speichern und dir ein Bild davon machen, wie der VisualEditor aussieht, wenn er fertig bist.

In dieser frühen Entwicklungsphase des VisualEditors empfehlen wir dir nach dem Speichern immer zu überprüfen, ob es nichts kaputt gegangen ist. Alle mit dem VisualEditor erstellten Änderungen werden in der Versionsgeschichte den Hinweis „VisualEditor“ tragen, sodass Du das einfach überprüfen kannst.

Wie kann ich helfen?
Es ist wichtig, dass unsere Software für so viele Freiwillige wie möglich in ihrer Muttersprache verfügbar ist. Wenn Du beispielsweise eine dieser Sprachen sprichst – oder eine der 280 anderen Sprachen, die wir unterstützen, beispielsweise Türkisch, Nordfriesisch, Obersorbisch oder Alemannisch – sei so nett, und überprüfe die Übersetzungen und verbessere sie, falls nötig!

Es wäre toll von dir Feedback zu bekommen – egal ob es ein Problem ist, oder irgendetwas, was Du verwirrend findest. Vielleicht willst Du uns ein Hinweis geben, woran wir arbeiten sollten, oder es ist etwas ganz anderes: lass es uns wissen!

James Forrester, Produktmanager bei der Wikimedia Foundation für VisualEditor und Parsoid

Français

Essayez la version alpha de l’ÉditeurVisuel, disponible maintenant en 15 langues

Aujourd’hui nous avons lancé une version alpha, disponible par souscription volontaire, de l’ÉditeurVisuel sur quatorze autres éditions de Wikipédia après notre lancement sur l’édition anglophone en décembre. l’ÉditeurVisuel permet aux contributeurs de créer et modifier de vrais articles visuellement, en utilisant un nouveau système où les articles sont écrits avec la même apparence que lorsqu’on les lit — donc de la même façon que lorsqu’on écrit un document dans un traitement de texte.

Les rédacteurs sur les quinze éditions de Wikipédia — allemand, anglais, arabe, chinois, coréen, espagnol, français, hébreu, hindi, italien, japonais, néerlandais, polonais, russe et suédois — peuvent se faire une idée de ce à quoi resssemblera l’ÉditeurVisuel en « situation réelle », afin qu’ils nous laisse leur avis sur la façon dont il s’intègre au sein des processus actuels de rédaction. Nous voulons également obtenir leur point de vue au sujet des aspects de développement sur lesquels nous devrions porter en priorité nos efforts dans les mois qui viennent.

L’éditeur est encore à une étape préliminaire et il lui manque des fonctions significatives, dont nous nous occuperons dans les mois qui viennent. Pour ces raisons, nous recherchons principalement les avis des rédacteurs expérimentés ; l’ÉditeurVisuel alpha est insuffisant pour réellement donner aux nouveaux volontaires une expérience propre pour la rédaction des articles. Nous ne voulons pas promettre aux nouveaux contributeurs une expérience de rédaction plus facile avant que cela soit réellement prêt.

Lorsque nous développerons de nouvelles améliorations, nous les activerons en ligne toutes les deux semaines vers ces wikis ; ceci vous permettra de nous donner vos avis pendant que nous poursuivons, et de nous dire sur quoi il nous faut travailler ensuite.

Comment puis-je l’essayer?
L’ÉditeurVisuel est maintenant disponible pour tous les comptes connectés parmi leurs préférences, où il est désactivé par défaut, sur les quinze éditions de Wikipédia listées ci-dessus. Si vous allez dans votre page « Préférences » et cliquez dans la section « Modification », elle comprendra une option libellée « Activer l’ÉditeurVisuel. »

Une fois l’option activée, pour chaque article que vous pouvez modifier vous aurez un nouvel onglet de modification intitulé « ÉditeurVisuel » juste à côté de l’onglet « Modifier ». si vous cliquez dessus, après une petite pause vous entrerez dans l’ÉditeurVisuel. À partir de là, vous pouvez expérimenter, modifier et enregistrer de vrais articles et avoir une bonne idée de ce à quoi cela ressemblera lorsque ce sera complet.

À cette étape préliminaire de nos développements, nous vous recommandons après avoir enregistré toutes vos modifications de vérifier si elles ont pu casser quelque chose. Toutes les modifications réalisées avec l’ÉditeurVisuel s’afficheront dans les onglets historiques des articles avec une balise « ÉditeurVisuel » à côté, afin que vous puissiez suivre ce qui se passe.

Il est vital que notre logiciel soit disponible dans les langues natives d’autant de nos volontaires que possible. Si vous parlez une de ces langues — ou l’une des 280 autres langues que nous soutenons telles que l’alémanique, l’arabe vernaculaire marocain, l’arabe vernaculaire tunisien, le basque, le braber (ou tamazight, berbère centre-marocain), le breton, le catalan, le chleuh (ou tachelhit, berbère sud-marocain), le corse, le flamand occidental, le français cadien (ou cajun), le franco-provençal, le créole haïtien, l’inupiaq, le luxembourgeois, l’occitan, le peul, le picard, le portugais brésilien, le rifain (ou tarifit, berbère nord-marocain), leromanche, le tahitien, le walon — aussi veuillez consulter ou relire les traductions et nous aider à les améliorer !

Nous apprécierions aussi votre avis sur ce que nous avons réalisé jusqu’ici — que ce soit un problème que vous avez découvert, un aspect qui vous parait porter à confusion, les prochains domaines sur lesquels nous devrions travailler, ou tout autre chose — aussi faites-le nous savoir.

James Forrester, Responsable de produits, ÉditeurVisuel et Parsoid

Español

Prueba la versión alfa del EditorVisual, ahora en 15 idiomas

Hoy lanzamos una versión opt-in alfa del EditorVisual en catorce Wikipedias, el cual sigue nuestro lanzamiento en la Wikipedia en inglés en diciembre. El EditorVisual permite a los editores crear y modificar articulos reales de manera visual, utilizando un sistema nuevo donde los articulos que editen se verán igual a como uno los lee — como al escribir un documento en un procesador de texto.

Los editores de quince Wikipedias – alemán, árabe, chino, coreano, español, francés, hebreo, hindi, inglés, italiano, japonés, neerlandés, polaco, ruso y sueco – ahora pueden hacerse una idea de cómo se va a ver el EditorVisual en el “mundo real”, para que nos den sus impresiones sobre si se integra bien a su proceso de edición actual. También queremos recibir ideas sobre qué aspectos del desarrollo deberíamos dar prioridad en los meses venideros.

El editor aún se encuentra en una etapa inicial y le faltan funciones importantes que abordaremos en los próximos meses. Por este motivo queremos conocer la opinión de editores experimentados; el EditorVisual alfa resulta insuficiente para ofrecer una experiencia adecuada de edición a los nuevos voluntarios. No queremos prometerles una forma de editar más fácil antes de que se encuentre listo.

Según vamos desarrollando las mejoras, las iremos incorporando en vivo cada dos semanas en las wikis para que nos den sus impresiones y nos digan en qué debemos trabajar a continuación.

¿Cómo lo puedo probar?
El EditorVisual se encuentra disponible para todas las cuentas activas como una nueva preferencia, la cual se encuentra desactivada por defecto, en las quince wikipedias listadas precedentemente. Si te diriges a tu pantalla de “Preferencias” y presionas en la sección de “Edición”, habrá una opción denominada “Activar el EditorVisual”.

Una vez activado, por cada artículo que puedas editar, tendrás una segunda pestaña denominada “EditorVisual” al lado de la pestaña “Editar”. Si la presionas, después de una breve pausa, ingresarás al EditorVisual. Desde ahí, podrás experimentar, editar y grabar artículos reales y tener una idea sobre como será cuando se encuentre completo.

En esta etapa temprana de desarrollo, recomendamos que después de guardar las ediciones, reviseis si es algo falló. Todas las ediciones realizadas con el EditorVisual se mostrarán en la pestaña del historial de los artículos con una etiqueta de “EditorVisual” junto a ellas, para que puedan seguir lo que está ocurriendo.

¿Como puedo ayudar?
Es vital que nuestro software se encuentre disponible en los idiomas de la mayor cantidad de voluntarios que nos resulte posible. ¡Si hablas uno de estos idiomas – o cualquiera de los otros 280 idiomas que apoyamos, como Galés, Punjabi, Urdu o Gaelico Escocés - por favor considera revisar las traducciones y ayudarnos a mejorarlas!

Nos encantaría recibir tus comentarios sobre lo que ya hemos hecho —ya sea si es un problema que has descubierto, un aspecto que resulte confuso, las cosas que crees deberíamos trabajar a continuación, o cualquier otra cosa, por favor háznoslo saber.

James Forrester, Gestor de Productos, EditorVisual y Parsoid

Svenska

Prova nya alfaversionen av VisualEditor, nu på 15 språk

Idag släppte vi en alfa, valfri version av VisualEditor till 14 Wikipedior, vilka efterföljervårt släpp till engelska Wikipedia i december. VisualEditor låter skribenter skapa och modifiera riktiga artiklar visuellt, med hjälp av ett system där artiklarna de redigerar ser likadana ut som när de läses – som att skriva ett dokument i en ordbehandlare.

Skribenter på femton Wikipedior – arabiska, kinesiska, holländska, engelska, franska, tyska, hebreiska, hindi, italienska, japanska, koreanska, polska, ryska, spanska och svenska – kan nu få ett hum om hur VisualEditor ser ut i “verkligheten”, så de kan lämna kommentarer om hur väl det integrerar med deras nuvarande redigeringsprocess. Vi vill också höra tankar om vilka aspekter av utvecklingen vi ska prioritera de kommande månaderna.

Redigeringsverktyget är fortfarande i ett tidigt skede och saknar viktiga funktioner som vi kommer att hantera i kommande månader. Därför är vi främst ute efter feedback från erfarna skribenter; alfaversionen av VisualEditor är inte tillräckligt bra än för att ge nya skribenter en fullständig redigeringsupplevelse. Vi vill inte utlova en bättre redigeringsupplevelse till nya skribenter innan det är redo.

Allt eftersom vi utveckla förbättringar kommer vi att släppa dem varannan vecka till Wikipediorna, vilket låter dig ge oss feedback under utvecklingsarbetet, och berätta för oss var du vill att vi ska jobba på.

Hur kan jag prova på det?
VisualEditor finns nu tillgängligt för alla inloggade konton som ett inställningsval på de femton Wikipedior nämnda ovan. Om du går till din “Inställningar”-skärm och klickar på “Redigering”-sektionen, kommer det att ha en installning som heter “Använd VisualEditor”.

VÄl aktiverat, får du för varje artikel du kan redigera en andra flik kallad “VisualEditor” bredvid “Redigera”-fliken. Om du klickar på den får du, efter en liten paus, upp VisualEditor. Här kan du leka lite, redigera och spara riktiga artiklar så du får en känsla för hur det kommer att funka när det är färdigt.

Såhär tidigt it utvecklingsskedet rekommenderar vi att du kollar att dina redigeringar inte gör att artiklar går sönder. Alla redigeringar gjorda med VisualEditor kommer att markeras i en artikels historik med orden “VisualEditor”, så du kan se vad som händer.

Det är mycket viktigt att vår mjukvara finns tillgänglig i så många av våra skribenters modersmål som möjligt. Om du talar ett av dessa språk – eller något av de andra 280 språken vi stöder, som till exempel Kymriska, Punjabi, Urdu eller Skotsk gäliska - överväg mycket gärna att hjälpa till med och förbättra våra översättningar!

Vi skulle mycket gärna vilja få feedback om vad vi åstadkommit hittills – om det är problem du upptäckt, något du finner förvirrande, vad du skulle vilja se oss fokusera på, eller vad som helst, hör av dig.

James Forrester, Produktchef, VisualEditor och Parsoid

На русском языке

Опробуйте альфа-версию редактора VisualEditor, теперь на 15 языках

Сегодня мы запустили основную, подтверждённую версию редактора VisualEditorдля четырнадцати разделов Википедии, которая поддерживает нашу редакцию в английской Википедии, опубликованную в декабре. VisualEditor позволяет редакторам создавать и модифицировать конкретные статьи, используя новую систему, в которой редактируемые статьи будут выглядеть так же, как когда читаешь их — подобно написанию документа в текстовом процессоре.

Редакторы пятнадцати разделов Википедии — на арабском, китайском, голландском, английском, французском, немецком, японском, корейском, польском, русском, испанском и шведском языках; на языках иврит и хинди — теперь могут понять, что представляет собой VisualEditor в «реальном мире», таким образом они могут предоставить нам отзывы о том, насколько хорошо он интегрируется с их обычными процессами редактирования. Мы также хотим, чтобы они составили своё мнение о том, какие аспекты усовершенствования должны быть приоритетными для нас в ближайшие месяцы.

Версия всё ещё находится на раннем этапе и испытывает недостаток в важных функциональных элементах, которые мы будем рассматривать в ближайшие месяцы. Поэтому, в основном, нам необходима обратная связь с опытными редакторами; альфа-версии VisualEditor недостаточно, чтобы по-настоящему передать новым добровольцам соответствующий опыт редактирования. Мы не испытываем необходимость обещать новым редакторам требуемый опыт редактирования, прежде чем он будет доступен.

Поскольку мы разрабатываем усовершенствования, каждые две недели мы вводим их в проекты Википедии, что позволяет вам предоставлять свои замечания и комментарии по поводу нашей работы и сообщать нам о том, как вы представляете нашу работу в дальнейшем.

Как я могу опробовать это?
VisualEditor теперь доступен для всех зарегистрированных аккаунтов как новое неиспользуемое по умолчанию преимущество для пятнадцати проектов Википедии, перечисленных выше. Если вы установите собственные «Настройки» трансляции и выберете «Редактирование», оно будет содержать опцию: «Активизировать VisualEditor».

После активизации, для каждой статьи, которую можно редактировать, вам становится доступна вторая вкладка редактора с надписью «VisualEditor» рядом с вкладкой «Править». Если выбрать её, то после небольшой паузы вы войдёте в VisualEditor. Далее вы можете манипулировать, редактировать и сохранять реальные статьи, а также получить представление о том, что произойдёт, когда его работа будет завершена.

На этом раннем этапе нашей разработки мы рекомендуем вам после сохранения любых правок проверять, не нарушилось ли что-либо в результате редактирования. Все изменения, внесённые при помощи VisualEditor будут отображаться в виде вкладок истории статей с сопутствующим дополнением: «VisualEditor», — так что вы сможете отслеживать происходящее.

Как я могу помочь?
Очень важно то, чтобы наше программное обеспечение было доступно на родном языке для как можно большего числа волонтёров. Если вы говорите на одном из этих языков — или на любом другом из 280 языков, которые мы поддерживаем, таких как Валлийский, Панджаби, Урду или Гаэльский — пожалуйста, обратите ваше внимание на переводы и помогите нам улучшить их!

Нам будет небезразлично ваше мнение о проделанной нами работе, — будь то проблемы, которые вы обнаружили, либо аспект, который, как вы считаете, приводит в замешательство, либо области, в которых мы должны работать в дальнейшем, или что-нибудь ещё. Пожалуйста, сообщите нам.

James Forrester, Менеджер по продукту, VisualEditor и Parsoid

A year after its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, Wikidata has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.

By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the encyclopedia. Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata’s universal, machine-readable knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous external applications.

“Wikidata is a powerful tool for keeping information in Wikipedia current across all language versions,” said Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner. “Before Wikidata, Wikipedians needed to manually update hundreds of Wikipedia language versions every time a famous person died or a country’s leader changed. With Wikidata, such new information, entered once, can automatically appear across all Wikipedia language versions. That makes life easier for editors and makes it easier for Wikipedia to stay current.”

The dream of a wiki-based, collaboratively edited repository of structured data that could be reused in Wikipedia infoboxes goes back to at least 2004, when Wikimedian Erik Möller (now the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation) posted a detailed proposal for such a project. The following years saw work on related efforts like the Semantic MediaWiki extension, and discussions of how to implement a central data repository for Wikimedia intensified in 2010 and 2011.

The development of Wikidata began in March 2012, led by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement. Since Wikidata.org went live on 30 October 2012, a growing community of around 3,000 active contributors started building its database of ‘items’ (e.g. things, people or concepts), first by collecting topics that are already the subject of Wikipedia articles in several languages. An item’s central page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links that previously connected these articles about the same topic in different Wikipedia versions.

Wikidata’s collection of these items now numbers over 10 million. The community also began to enrich Wikidata’s database with factual statements about these topics (data like the mayor of a city, the ISBN of a book, the languages spoken in a country, etc.). This information has now become available for use on Wikipedia itself, and Wikipedians on many language Wikipedias have already started to add it to articles, or discuss how to make best use of it.

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it,” said Wikidata project director Denny Vrandečić. “Whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.”

The next phase of Wikidata will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata. Wikimedia Deutschland will continue to support the project with an engineering team that is dedicated to Wikidata’s second year of development and maintenance.

Wikidata is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and its fact database is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Funding of Wikidata’s initial development was provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [AI]², the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Google, Inc.

Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst, Wikimedia Foundation

More information available here:

• Project homepage
• Example of an “item” page
• Description of the project
• How volunteers can get involved with Wikidata

Some of the first applications demonstrating the potential of Wikidata:

• http://simia.net/treeoflife/ – a (still very incomplete) “tree of life” drawn from relations among biological species in Wikidata’s database
• “GeneaWiki” generates a graph showing a person’s family relations as recorded in Wikidata, example: Bach family

This post was written by Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK Programme Manager

Jisc, working with Wikimedia UK, has today announced the joint recruitment (via a tender) of a Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador.

This is the first education-focused long term residency project that Wikimedia UK is embarking on. Both organisations share the goal of giving the widest possible access to the knowledge held or produced by UK institutions. The task of the Ambassador is to advance this shared goal and to help people engage with that knowledge. This could be done via training and co-ordination projects for the use of Wikimedia tools and techniques for educational purposes. The successful candidate will also undertake outreach work to encourage understanding and development of Wikimedia projects within the education sector.

Wikimedia UK’s cooperation with Jisc stems from the WWI editathon that the organisations ran together.

Chris Keating, Chair of Wikimedia UK, said: “I’m very pleased that we are working with Jisc on this project. Both the academic community and the volunteers who edit Wikipedia are in their own ways absolutely committed to the pursuit of knowledge. Bringing the two communities together can help demystify Wikipedia to people who work in higher education, while helping improve Wikipedia articles which form a lasting resource for students at all levels.”

Jisc noted: “With so many students and researchers increasingly using Wikipedia to, at the very least, inform further research, the need for improved accuracy is a pressing issue.”

The project will last for approximately nine months. It is jointly funded by Wikimedia UK and Jisc.

To learn more and apply for the role please visit this page on the Jisc website

To find out more about Wikipedians in Residence, on which the project is loosely based, please visit this page on the Outreach wiki. The deadline for tenders is 12pm UK time on Wednesday 22 May 2013.

OmegaWiki provides functionality that is on the agenda for Wikidata. The OmegaWiki community has ALWAYS wanted to be a Wikimedia project.

What it already provides is:

• links to Wikipedia articles in other languages when the article does NOT exist in the preferred language
• links to a commons category associated with a concept
• a picture painting the thousand words associated with the concept

The Wikimedia Foundation suggests that machine translation is the kind of infrastructure that makes sense to it. Given what it aims to do: making knowledge available to everyone, this makes perfect sense. A lot of translation has already been going on in order to fill many gaps in the many Wikipedias and machine translations were often an important part of this.

One of the arguments why the WMF could enter the fray is that it has something to add. It does have monetary reserves but more importantly it has several resources that may make a difference. The biggest two are Wikipedia itself and the other are its awesome communities.

When translating a Wikipedia article, the concepts that are specific to a subject are likely to be found in that article. Similarly when such concepts have their own article, they will contain a similar set of concepts. Combine this with a multi-lingual dictionary build with Wikidata technology along OmegaWiki lines and it will be relatively easy to find the corresponding expressions in articles in different languages on the same subject.

The point here is that the meanings of words do not exist in a vacuum.

When such concepts have been identified and linked to Wikipedia articles and dictionary meanings it becomes possible to help people understand a text in a different language by providing native language support.

<GRIN> I know Erik Moeller has a lot of experience in this field and I know mutual friends are quite interested to help </GRIN>

Relevant is that we do not have to invent something new; it has been part and parcel of things we have done before. The difference is that we gained in experience and, technology has evolved as well.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Gathered by the Generalist.

A year after its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, Wikidata has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.

By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the encyclopedia. Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata’s universal, machine-readable knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous external applications.

”Wikidata is a powerful tool for keeping information in Wikipedia current across all language versions. Before Wikidata, Wikipedians needed to manually update hundreds of Wikipedia language versions every time a famous person died or a country’s leader changed. With Wikidata, such new information, entered once, will automatically appear across all Wikipedia language versions. That makes life easier for editors and makes it easier for Wikipedia to stay current.” – Sue Gardner

The development of Wikidata began in March 2012, led by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement. Since Wikidata.org went live on October 30, a growing community of around 3,000 active contributors started building its database of ‘items’ (e.g. things, people or concepts), first by collecting topics that are already the subject of Wikipedia articles in several languages. An item’s central page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links which previously connected these articles about the same topic in different Wikipedia versions. Wikidata’s collection of these items now numbers over 10 million. The community also began to enrich Wikidata’s database with factual statements about these topics (data like the mayor of a city, the ISBN of a book, the languages spoken in a country, etc.). This information has now become available for use on Wikipedia itself.

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it.  Whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.” - Denny Vrandečić, Wikidata project lead

The next phase of Wikidata will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata. Wikimedia Deutschland will continue to support the project with an engineering team that is dedicated to Wikidata’s second year of development and maintenance.

Wikidata is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and its fact database is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Funding of Wikidata’s initial development was provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [AI]², the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Google, Inc.

More information available here:

• Project homepage
• Example of an “item” page
• Description of the project
• 
  

Volunteers can get involved with Wikidata in many ways.  Some of the first applications demonstrating the potential of Wikidata applications, and as a platform:

• The simia “tree of life” drawn from relations among biological species in Wikidata’s database
• “GeneaWiki” generates a graph showing a person’s family relations as recorded in Wikidata.  See for example: the Bach family

To my great surprise, I got named in a BBC story today. The article is about the upcoming Wikipedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland; it’s really pleasing that as my own work at the British Library is coming to an end, there’ll be someone else taking up the work at an equally interesting organisation.

NLS is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Here is a list of all the current and past Wikimedians in Residence, and below is a list of everyone who is currently looking for a Wikipedian (or Wikimedian) in Residence that I’ve heard about – please let me know if I’ve missed any!

• The National Library of Scotland (paid)
  Four-month residency working with the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh to help disseminate the Library’s content to Wikipedia, and work with librarians to help encourage understanding and use of the projects.

• JISC “Wikimedia Ambassador” residency (paid)
  Nine-month program looking to build skills and expertise engaging with Wikimedia projects among JISC-funded research programs, and to help disseminate knowledge from that research. (In many ways, this fits very neatly with some of the work I was doing for AHRC…).

• ZDF Television (Germany) (paid)
  Short-term program (until mid-October) to liaise between the organisation and Wikipedia contributors on – I love this – a project to fact-check political claims during the months before the 2013 federal election in September.

• Smithsonian Institution (paid)
  Internship (with stipend), aiming to build on and sustain the existing partnership programs with the Smithsonian.

• Swiss Federal Archives (paid)
  Three to six month program with a particular focus on digitising WWI-related photographs.

• METRO (New York) Open Data Fellowship (paid)
  An interesting two-track program; an eight-week fellowship working as a Wikipedian in Residence for a consortium of cultural institutions, and also as an advisor on open data/licensing/etc. US only, students preferred.

• Olympia Timberland Library (US) (volunteer)
  The library is looking for a “Wiki-Ninja” (now there’s something to put on a job description) to help build and sustain a local-history editing program among the local community.

And, of course, there’s plenty more institutions which are setting up similar volunteer programs without going through a formal recruitment process – it only tends to be needed when money gets involved. If you’re a Wikipedia volunteer thinking of what you could do with a local institution, now is as good a time as any to approach them…

(Die deutsche Version dieses Artikels ist hier)

Since one month 11 Wikipedias have the ability to include data from Wikidata in their articles. Two days ago English Wikipedia was added to that group. Today the remaining 274 are joining. Usage examples are in the last blog entry. There is also an FAQ for this deployment.

This is a huge step for Wikidata and at the same time also another beginning. It’s a huge step because from now on all Wikipedias are able to collect, curate and use data together. For example every Wikipedia can query the ID of a movie on the Internet Movie Database and use it in their article as soon as someone added it to Wikidata. At the same time it is a beginning because there is still a lot to do. Accessing the data has to be made easier. More data has to be added to Wikidata (and translated where necessary). More sources have to be added to existing claims. More data types need to be made available – for example geocoordinates and time. Your help and your Feedback is very welcome and important there.

We’re looking forward to the next steps!