This paper (first reference) is the result of a class project I was part of
almost two years ago for CSCI 5417 Information Retrieval Systems. It builds
on a class project I did in CSCI 5832 Natural Language Processing and which
I presented at Wikimania '07. The project was very late as we didn't send
the final paper in until the day before new years. This technical report was
never really announced that I recall so I thought it would be interesting to
look briefly at the results. The goal of this paper was to break articles
down into surface features and latent features and then use those to study
the rating system being used, predict article quality and rank results in a
search engine. We used the [[random forests]] classifier which allowed us to
analyze the contribution of each feature to performance by looking directly
at the weights that were assigned. While the surface analysis was performed
on the whole english wikipedia, the latent analysis was performed on the
simple english wikipedia (it is more expensive to compute). = Surface
features = * Readability measures are the single best predictor of quality
that I have found, as defined by the Wikipedia Editorial Team (WET). The
[[Automated Readability Index]], [[Gunning Fog Index]] and [[Flesch-Kincaid
Grade Level]] were the strongest predictors, followed by length of article
html, number of paragraphs, [[Flesh Reading Ease]], [[Smog Grading]], number
of internal links, [[Laesbarhedsindex Readability Formula]], number of words
and number of references. Weakly predictive were number of to be's, number
of sentences, [[Coleman-Liau Index]], number of templates, PageRank, number
of external links, number of relative links. Not predictive (overall - see
the end of section 2 for the per-rating score breakdown): Number of h2 or
h3's, number of conjunctions, number of images*, average word length, number
of h4's, number of prepositions, number of pronouns, number of interlanguage
links, average syllables per word, number of nominalizations, article age
(based on page id), proportion of questions, average sentence length. :*
Number of images was actually by far the single strongest predictor of any
class, but only for Featured articles. Because it was so good at picking out
featured articles and somewhat good at picking out A and G articles the
classifier was confused in so many cases that the overall contribution of
this feature to classification performance is zero. :* Number of external
links is strongly predictive of Featured articles. :* The B class is highly
distinctive. It has a strong "signature," with high predictive value
assigned to many features. The Featured class is also very distinctive. F, B
and S (Stop/Stub) contain the most information.
:* A is the least distinct class, not being very different from F or G. =
Latent features = The algorithm used for latent analysis, which is an
analysis of the occurence of words in every document with respect to the
link structure of the encyclopedia ("concepts"), is [[Latent Dirichlet
Allocation]]. This part of the analysis was done by CS PhD student Praful
Mangalath. An example of what can be done with the result of this analysis
is that you provide a word (a search query) such as "hippie". You can then
look at the weight of every article for the word hippie. You can pick the
article with the largest weight, and then look at its link network. You can
pick out the articles that this article links to and/or which link to this
article that are also weighted strongly for the word hippie, while also
contributing maximally to this articles "hippieness". We tried this query in
our system (LDA), Google (site:en.wikipedia.org hippie), and the Simple
English Wikipedia's Lucene search engine. The breakdown of articles occuring
in the top ten search results for this word for those engines is: * LDA
only: [[Acid rock]], [[Aldeburgh Festival]], [[Anne Murray]], [[Carl
Radle]], [[Harry Nilsson]], [[Jack Kerouac]], [[Phil Spector]], [[Plastic
Ono Band]], [[Rock and Roll]], [[Salvador Allende]], [[Smothers brothers]],
[[Stanley Kubrick]]. * Google only: [[Glam Rock]], [[South Park]]. * Simple
only: [[African Americans]], [[Charles Manson]], [[Counterculture]], [[Drug
use]], [[Flower Power]], [[Nuclear weapons]], [[Phish]], [[Sexual
liberation]], [[Summer of Love]] * LDA & Google & Simple: [[Hippie]],
[[Human Be-in]], [[Students for a democratic society]], [[Woodstock
festival]] * LDA & Google: [[Psychedelic Pop]] * Google & Simple: [[Lysergic
acid diethylamide]], [[Summer of Love]] ( See the paper for the articles
produced for the keywords philosophy and economics ) = Discussion /
Conclusion = * The results of the latent analysis are totally up to your
perception. But what is interesting is that the LDA features predict the WET
ratings of quality just as well as the surface level features. Both feature
sets (surface and latent) both pull out all almost of the information that
the rating system bears. * The rating system devised by the WET is not
distinctive. You can best tell the difference between, grouped together,
Featured, A and Good articles vs B articles. Featured, A and Good articles
are also quite distinctive (Figure 1). Note that in this study we didn't
look at Start's and Stubs, but in earlier paper we did. :* This is
interesting when compared to this recent entry on the YouTube blog. "Five
Stars Dominate Ratings"
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html…
I think a sane, well researched (with actual subjects) rating system
is
well within the purview of the Usability Initiative. Helping people find and
create good content is what Wikipedia is all about. Having a solid rating
system allows you to reorganized the user interface, the Wikipedia
namespace, and the main namespace around good content and bad content as
needed. If you don't have a solid, information bearing rating system you
don't know what good content really is (really bad content is easy to spot).
:* My Wikimania talk was all about gathering data from people about articles
and using that to train machines to automatically pick out good content. You
ask people questions along dimensions that make sense to people, and give
the machine access to other surface features (such as a statistical measure
of readability, or length) and latent features (such as can be derived from
document word occurence and encyclopedia link structure). I referenced page
262 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to give an example of the
kind of qualitative features I would ask people. It really depends on what
features end up bearing information, to be tested in "the lab". Each word is
an example dimension of quality: We have "*unity, vividness, authority,
economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance,
precision, proportion, depth and so on.*" You then use surface and latent
features to predict these values for all articles. You can also say, when a
person rates this article as high on the x scale, they also mean that it has
has this much of these surface and these latent features.
= References =
- DeHoust, C., Mangalath, P., Mingus., B. (2008). *Improving search in
Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery*. Technical Report.
PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/6/68/DeHoustMangalat…>
- Rassbach, L., Mingus., B, Blackford, T. (2007). *Exploring the
feasibility of automatically rating online article quality*. Technical
Report. PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/d/d3/RassbachPincock…>
Hoi,
I have asked and received permission to forward to you all this most
excellent bit of news.
The linguist list, is a most excellent resource for people interested in the
field of linguistics. As I mentioned some time ago they have had a funding
drive and in that funding drive they asked for a certain amount of money in
a given amount of days and they would then have a project on Wikipedia to
learn what needs doing to get better coverage for the field of linguistics.
What you will read in this mail that the total community of linguists are
asked to cooperate. I am really thrilled as it will also get us more
linguists interested in what we do. My hope is that a fraction will be
interested in the languages that they care for and help it become more
relevant. As a member of the "language prevention committee", I love to get
more knowledgeable people involved in our smaller projects. If it means that
we get more requests for more projects we will really feel embarrassed with
all the new projects we will have to approve because of the quality of the
Incubator content and the quality of the linguistic arguments why we should
approve yet another language :)
NB Is this not a really clever way of raising money; give us this much in
this time frame and we will then do this as a bonus...
Thanks,
GerardM
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: LINGUIST Network <linguist(a)linguistlist.org>
Date: Jun 18, 2007 6:53 PM
Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
To: LINGUIST(a)listserv.linguistlist.org
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831. Mon Jun 18 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.
Subject: 18.1831, All: Call for Participation: Wikipedia Volunteers
Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar(a)linguistlist.org>
Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry(a)linguistlist.org>
Reviews: Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project
<reviews(a)linguistlist.org>
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/
The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University,
and donations from subscribers and publishers.
Editor for this issue: Ann Sawyer <sawyer(a)linguistlist.org>
================================================================
To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html
===========================Directory==============================
1)
Date: 18-Jun-2007
From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org >
Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers
-------------------------Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:49:35
From: Hannah Morales < hannah(a)linguistlist.org >
Subject: Wikipedia Volunteers
Dear subscribers,
As you may recall, one of our Fund Drive 2007 campaigns was called the
"Wikipedia Update Vote." We asked our viewers to consider earmarking their
donations to organize an update project on linguistics entries in the
English-language Wikipedia. You can find more background information on this
at:
http://linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2007/wikipedia/index.cfm.
The speed with which we met our goal, thanks to the interest and generosity
of
our readers, was a sure sign that the linguistics community was enthusiastic
about the idea. Now that summer is upon us, and some of you may have a bit
more
leisure time, we are hoping that you will be able to help us get started on
the
Wikipedia project. The LINGUIST List's role in this project is a purely
organizational one. We will:
*Help, with your input, to identify major gaps in the Wikipedia materials or
pages that need improvement;
*Compile a list of linguistics pages that Wikipedia editors have identified
as
"in need of attention from an expert on the subject" or " does not cite any
references or sources," etc;
*Send out periodical calls for volunteer contributors on specific topics or
articles;
*Provide simple instructions on how to upload your entries into Wikipedia;
*Keep track of our project Wikipedians;
*Keep track of revisions and new entries;
*Work with Wikimedia Foundation to publicize the linguistics community's
efforts.
We hope you are as enthusiastic about this effort as we are. Just to help us
all
get started looking at Wikipedia more critically, and to easily identify an
area
needing improvement, we suggest that you take a look at the List of
Linguists
page at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguists. M
Many people are not listed there; others need to have more facts and
information
added. If you would like to participate in this exciting update effort,
please
respond by sending an email to LINGUIST Editor Hannah Morales at
hannah(a)linguistlist.org, suggesting what your role might be or which
linguistics
entries you feel should be updated or added. Some linguists who saw our
campaign
on the Internet have already written us with specific suggestions, which we
will
share with you soon.
This update project will take major time and effort on all our parts. The
end
result will be a much richer internet resource of information on the breadth
and
depth of the field of linguistics. Our efforts should also stimulate
prospective
students to consider studying linguistics and to educate a wider public on
what
we do. Please consider participating.
Sincerely,
Hannah Morales
Editor, Wikipedia Update Project
Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable
-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1831
[I am crossposting this announcement to two mailing lists, feel free to
pick up the topic on either of them.]
Dear All,
I am--yet again!--delighted to announce that Wikimedia Polska, the
Polish chapter of the WMF, is organising a travelling exhibition of the
winning POTY contest pictures. 16 images chosen by Wikimedians from all
over the world in the annual POTY contests from 2006 onwards are going
to be shown at exhibitions in various places around Poland.
As some of you may recall, the exhibition premièred during the 10th
anniversary of the Polish Wikipedia conference, having been visited by a
few hundred visitors in just two weeks; some images from the pubic
viewing of the exhibition are available on Wikimedia Commons at
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Picture_of_the_Year_exhibition_-…>.
Our first stop is Przystanek Książka (a Polish wordplay for "Book
Break"), a media library of the Public Library of the district of Ochota
in Warsaw. The exhibition starts on Monday, November 28, and will remain
until the end of the year. 16 pictures, the best of the best of the
Wikimedia movement, will be shown in an exhibition open for the public,
with descriptions available in Polish, English and German.
For those of you currently living in Warsaw or going to visit the
capital in the upcoming weeks: the library is located at 42 Grójecka
Street, just two tram stops (and 8 minutes) away from the Warsaw Central
railway station (tram lines "9" and "25"), and is open on working days
from 10 AM until 7 PM (2 PM-7 PM on Wednesdays).
We are still looking for more organisations and institutions willing to
hold the exhibition--if there's anyone from the neighbouring (European)
countries willing to get involved or just looking for some information,
feel free to approach me at <tomasz.kozlowski @ wikimedia.pl>.
We hope to have a great event, and even if you can't visit the
exhibition, please keep your fingers crossed that it goes well, and
spread the news!
PS For those going to take a peek at the exhibition _in real life_,
there's also a Facebook event:
<https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=100219446762276>.
Regards,
--
Tomasz Kozłowski | [[user:odder]]
There are an increasing number of organisations which have indicated
that their output is Creative Commons by default, however there are
not as many that have a public IP policy which clearly allows staff to
publish "their" work.
i.e. We have moved from the IP policy being the stick used to prevent
openness, and the "work for hire" and "publish process" are the next
frontier.
A few staff at University of Canberra (UC) have written an IP policy
proposal which clearly gives staff ownership of their work, and
requires CC licensing if their staff use organisational infrastructure
to create their work.
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/University_of_Canberra/Proposed_policy_on_in…
Otago Polytechnic adopted an IP policy like that in 2007.
http://wikieducator.org/Otago_Polytechnic/Intellectual_property
Are there other examples, within or outside academia, where the
organisation empowers its staff by providing a policy which clarifies
when "work for hire" principle is enforced in this murky world of
online collaboration?
Does the WMF have an intellectual property policy for works created by
WMF employees?
Employees edit and upload using free licenses under their own name,
but does the copyright belong to the employee or to the WMF?
Is anyone in our community going to:
Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest
Washington College of Law
American University, Washington, DC
August 25-27, 2011
http://infojustice.org/public-events/global-congress
--
John Vandenberg
Remember there was MSN Explorer (desktop software) that let you browse MSN
and use MSN services such as Hotmail?
Remember Google Earth (desktop software) that lets you browse the Earth and
provides additional services based on the Earth?
We can also make a "Wikipedia Explorer" (desktop software) that lets you
browse Wikipedia AND provides an added layer that enables users to:
* Chat/discuss with other users interested in the same topic (Wikipedia
article).
* Announce/find resources related to a topic (products, books, jobs,
anything).
* More.
I intend to see such a "Wikipedia Explorer" developed, or personally
develop it. Any comments?
Hello all,
I just want to send a note to celebrate the enormous success of the
2011 fundraiser. It used to be the case that I was pretty involved in
the annual campaign. For the last two fundraiser, Zack Exley's been
running the show, and I'm enormously impressed by and proud of what he
and his team have been able to accomplish.
When we prepared the budget for 2011-12, I worried that we'd need to
cross new lines in order to generate that much revenue. The 2010
campaign already felt like we were hitting the ceiling of how much can
be raised from a large number of individual donations. Last year, we
were showing Jimmy's face and appeals in many different variations
through much of the fundraiser. We had tried some pretty aggressive
banners, like these ones:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem…http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem…http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem…http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&tem…
Jimmy certainly didn't crave this level of attention, but he was a
good sport and gave his approval. The campaign was tremendously
successful. But after it was over, we weren't just worried that our
readers might be feeling "Jimmy fatigue", we were all feeling it,
including, I'm sure, Jimmy himself. But it simply remains true that
people strongly identify with him, and that his appeals tend to
motivate people to give more clearly than anything else.
So it was with some anxiety that we approached the 2011 campaign. Zack
isn't the kind of person who makes a grand master plan and then sticks
to it, so until it played out, I really didn't know what the 2011
campaign would look like. Instead of dreaming up plans, though, Zack
and team had spent the months leading up to the fundraiser A/B testing
and experimenting with ways to shorten the fundraiser and reduce our
reliance on a single message/message-bearer. And so they learned tons
of stuff: How long an appeal needed to be to work, what kind of
photo/lighting/background was effective, what payment process would
work, etc. And there was the usual usability testing, optimization of
donations forms, etc.
This, by the way, told us that we didn't need graphically obnoxious
banners -- the simple text on plain white with a photo worked just
fine. (But it needed to be the right kind of photo, and yes, moving it
to the left helped as well.)
And Zack hired storytellers, not an uncontroversial idea at the time,
whose job it would be to go out there and collect the most compelling
personal stories from people in our movement, wherever they may be and
whatever role they may play. This allowed us to share lots of those
stories, both through the testing and then through the actual
fundraiser itself.
There's more -- prior to the campaign, the tech team worked enormously
hard to integrate a new payment system, GlobalCollect. This would
allow us to accept payments not just in all major currencies, but also
through bank transfer, direct debit, and country-specific payment
methods:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give/en
This, too, in combination with more effectively organized efforts by
hundreds of volunteer translators, meant that banner impressions that
were previously wasted (because people had no way to actually donate)
were now going to turn into support for our work.
All the testing and infrastructure improvements meant that the first
day of the fundraiser was our most effective day ever, by far. And it
meant that we could raise our goal in less time than before. We've
also turned off the banners for registered users in record time, and
for the first time disabled banners for anyone making a donation. But
most importantly it allowed us to share appeals like these:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/22/who-is-asking-you-to-donate-to-wikiped…
These letters help people understand what Wikimedia is about through
many different voices, metaphors and experiences. The story of an
editor like Sengai Podhuvanar from India, or of a donor like Akshaya
Iyengar, or Ward Cunningham's own story. The storytellers worked hard
to capture the essence of these voices, so that they would be heard
loud and clear.
The team could have chosen to use that time to show more effective
Jimmy banners, or to pick one or two other banners and focus the
entire campaign on them. Instead it sacrificed short term revenue
impact for a more diverse and interesting campaign.
Years ago, we used to worry that people wouldn't/didn't understand
that Wikimedia is a non-profit, that it's created by volunteers, that
it's international/multilingual. Many misconceptions still exist, but
for anyone paying attention, we've demolished them.
I know that everyone involved is enormously proud of working their
butts off for Wikimedia and making this endeavor successful. I am, in
turn, really pleased and grateful with where we are as we enter the
new year. Not only do we have more resources at our disposal than ever
to succeed -- we've firmly established that Wikimedia is a new kind of
organization, a new kind of movement. With more than a million people
joining this year to support us, we're continuing to make history
together.
Thanks to everyone involved in making it happen (including, not to
forget, the participating Wikimedia chapters), and to all who've
supported Wikimedia this year. :-)
Happy 2012,
Erik
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:52:03 +0100
> From: Jan Ku?era <kozuch82(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia's secret wikis
> To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID:
> <CA+n47W+4F+KkwrvPvAXqFyfeo1LJpFm7OMOUaYzp4vcTmiUChQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I see following wikis hold secred information:
>
> http://internal.wikimedia.org
> http://office.wikimedia.org
> http://board.wikimedia.org
>
> Imagine a world in which every single human being can NOT freely share in
> the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
>
Having access to some of these "secret" Wikis, let me assure you that
the content of most of them is banal, dull, and there are no juicy
chunks of conspiratorial information in there. But they also contain
the sort of information that can't go into the public sphere, such as
private contact details and other information.
But then again, I suppose that's just what I *would* say, right?
Cheers,
Craig Franklin
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:29:51 -0800, Jay Walsh <jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to announce the release of the 2010-11
> Annual Report, which is now posted on the WMF Wiki at
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report
Thanks for this beautiful Annual Report :) Much appreciated also the
translations!
I have two points I would like see to happen in the process of the
creation of this report:
* a proofread by the community before the final issue; perhaps I missed
it, but I didn’t find anything on foundation-l; for example it has been
remarked a typo on the second page "Jean Javier" -> "Jean Janvier",
corrected in the wiki version
* a proofread of the translated versions; I didn’t noticed anything on
translation-l; I noticed a couple of translation errors in the French
version (example: "155 millions of edits" -> "155 millions de textes", but
"textes" = "texts", "edits" = "éditions")
I know it’s quite difficult to synchronize PDF versions and wiki versions,
but I find it’s worth trying.
Sébastien