A few hours ago, a year after the discussion on this list about editor
retention and communication,[1] email notification[2] of edits to
watchlisted pages has been enabled on all Wikimedia projects — at last!
Until yesterday, only 16 lucky content projects, including Commons (plus
a bunch of small backstage wikis), benefited from this feature.
There are still a few steps left, to monitor performance impact.[3]
The only inconvenience is that both new and old users still have to
manually enable the feature on their preferences, while it would make
more sense to make it opt-out, as for user talk: users want to disable
it only on the very few wikis they monitor very closely, when/if the
watchlist gets crowded and would generate too much spam. Some thought is
needed to address this pat of the problem because of course we don't
want to suddenly send thousands of emails to the super-users with (tens
of?) thousands of pages in their watchlist before they opt-out.
Nemo
[1]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-April/thread.html#65…
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Watching_pages#E-mail_notification
[3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28026#c53
Dear Wikipedia contributors,
We did it! For the past six weeks, you have all graciously tolerated my
emails requesting participants for my undergraduate senior thesis
project<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Motivations_to_Contribute_to_Wikipe…>
on
users’ motivations to contribute to Wikipedia. On Monday, I reached out to
this community, begging for just eighteen more participants to reach my
target sample size of 100 respondents. We not only reached that goal, but
exceeded it: 161 Wikipedia contributors responded to my questionnaire!
Your insightful responses are invaluable to my project and I cannot express
my gratitude for this community enough, so thank you, thank you, thank you!
When my final paper is written in June, I will make it available to the
Wikipedia community.
Thank you once again for your insight, thoughtful questions, and feedback.
Best,
Audrey
This is big news -- though still only part of Harvard's full
collection of records.
Following the British Library's release of 3M bib records under CC0 18
months ago:
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&pageid=icb.page498373
David Weinberger writes:
> This is the largest contribution of full bib records we know of.
>
> Stuart Shieber [of the Berkman Center] (and of the Office of Scholarly
> Communication) was the driving force behind this.
>
> Woohoo!
>
> David W.
Firstly, let me say this is very very cool news.
I went to go and have a browse though, and it's all tied up in a
massive (around 3gb) archive file rather than being easily browsable.
I know that WikiData is the obvious place to put it, but perhaps it
would be useful as a reference work on Wikisource in its own right,
decompressed and machine formatted into an easier to search format?
Cheers,
Craig
On 25 Apr 2012, at 19:29, emijrp wrote:
> 2012/4/25 Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com>
>
>> Thanks for sharing, I had read about it on the NYT but nothing was said on
>> license.
>> So now the USA have more open bibliographic data than Germany/Europe? :)
>> lobid.org is a very nice initiative, but other catalog systems have very
>> complex interactions between hundreds or thousands of entities and it's
>> very hard to change the licenses.
>> The main problem is usually deduplication and quality of the records, any
>> information on this for Harvard's data?
>>
>> Mateus Nobre, 25/04/2012 19:44:
>>
>>> Add ALL at Wikisource!
>>>
>>
>> Wikisource? This is only metadata.
>>
>
> Perhaps it is OK for Wikidata.
A mass dump of all of the information onto Wikisource wouldn't be good
- but being able to extract complete bibliographies of specific
authors on demand would actually be quite useful for properly building
author pages on Wikisource, rather than the current ad-hoc and
incomplete lists that currently exist. (With the consequence that
bibliographies on Wikipedia could be 'outsourced' to Wikisource,
bringing that project much-needed readers and editors).
Thanks,
Mike
A sign of a healthy committee is that it does its work promptly and
undramatically. The ombudsman commission is such a committee. Charged
with investigating alleged privacy violations around the checkuser tool,
the commission has functioned with a high degree of professionalism and
efficiency. The commission is appointed under the auspices of the Board,
who have delegated this role to the staff - first to Cary, and then I took
it on.
Accordingly, after a great bit of deliberation, I offered the ombudsmen the
ability to extend their current term for one additional year. All, with the
exception of one, have chosen to do so. The one who has not is Pundit, who
has accepted a position as a steward. Dweller, who was an advisory member
of the commission, takes Pundit's seat.
It should be noted that this was done some time ago - I have been extremely
remiss in sending out the notification. There was no lapse of commission,
and the commission functioned fully during the gap period.
Best wishes,
pb
___________________
Philippe Beaudette
Director, Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
415-839-6885, x 6643
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
It is my great pleasure to announce a new program being launched in
the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Development department and a new
member of the team: Haitham Shamma has been engaged as program
consultant for the Editor Growth and Contribution Program. Pending
approval of the U.S. immigration visa process, we intend to bring
Haitham to San Francisco, full-time, as Contribution Research Manager
in the coming months.
Haitham is joining the Wikimedia Foundation in order to support new
editor growth on small-to-medium sized Wikimedia projects, and the
Editor Growth and Contribution Program is a new program being launched
at WMF to focus on the on-wiki needs of these projects. Haitham will
be partnering with the community to design, test, and implement online
programs to attract and retain more editors in these language
communities. The program aims to increase the number of active editors
on Wikimedia projects by working with the community to understand the
online needs of each project, and taking a data-driven approach to
implement solutions based on these needs. The pilots and programs
on-wiki that the Editor Growth and Contribution Program will use in
order to encourage new editors are intended to serve as a complement
to off-wiki outreach activities already underway in other teams.
WMF is really excited to be working with Haitham because he has been a
very active Wikipedia editor for several years and has an extensive
technical background in research and experimentation. Soon after he
began editing Arabic Wikipedia, Haitham began implementing systems and
tools to support editors and improve the quality of the Arabic
encyclopedia. He has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering
and a master’s and PhD in Precision Engineering. As a volunteer in
the Arabic community, he has recently been helping with WMF’s Arabic
Language Initiative. Haitham speaks English, Arabic, and Japanese, as
well as some German, French, and Chinese. He’s also no stranger to
MediaWiki, C++, Java, Python, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Haitham will be beginning his work with the Arabic Wikipedia
community, and based on what is learned there, he’ll be moving into
other languages and geographies soon. The Editor Growth and
Contribution Program will be connecting with the Fundraising team to
build contribution campaigns that encourage readers to become editors,
taking lessons learned from fellowship projects and the new Editor
Engagement Experiment team’s work, and partnering with each target
language community to figure out what approaches work best to support
editor growth in a given language, culture, and size.
Some initial documentation and FAQs about the program are being
developed on meta wiki:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Growth_and_Contribution_Program
We’re looking forward to everyone’s input and feedback there.
Meanwhile, please join me in welcoming Haitham!
--
Siko Bouterse
Head of Community Fellowships
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
sbouterse(a)wikimedia.org
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Tangential, but highly relevant to the goal of free content:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-pu…
"Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic
publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to
make their research freely available through open access journals and
to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls."
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup…
"The Library has never received anything close to full reimbursement
for these expenditures from overhead collected by the University on
grant and research funds. The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library,
representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation
with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major
periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published
by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these
subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing
so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas,
already compromised."
- d.
All,
We think you might find our latest blog post interesting. It's about
research in which an online survey of medical staff at two large hospital
trusts in England was conducted. Nearly all the 109 responses included
free-text comments.
Unsurprisingly, the respondents - all medical professionals - all consult
Wikipedia.
Worth a read, I think! It's at
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/04/doctors-use-but-dont-rely-totally-on-w…
We owe a big thanks to Suzanne Hardy of Newcastle
University<http://www.medev.ac.uk/> for
bringing the research to our attention, and Dr David Mathieson of the
University of Nottingham for help with this summary. Big thanks also go to
Martin Poulter, who facilitated things at our end.
All the best,
Richard Symonds
Office & Development Manager
Wikimedia UK
0207 065 0992
07885 764 613
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Company Limited by
Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827.
Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development
House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom.
Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who
operate Wikipedia,
amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with
no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.
Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk
Dear friends of free knowledge,
As of May 1, Wikimedia Nederland is going to have a director: Sandra
Rientjes. After a lengthy selection process the Board was able to
choose between two candidates, preselected by the professionalization
committee.
The Board felt that Sandra Rientjes presented an excellent mix of
friendliness, determination and skills. Originally she trained as a
sociologist and she has working experience in the non-profit sector,
including the national NGO Nature and Environment. In her spare time,
she is a volunteer neighborhood mediator. Although she has no
experience working on Wikipedia, we feel she will fit in especially
well with our organization.
The employment contract was signed on April 21. Initially, Sandra
Rientjes will be shown the ropes by Marjon Bakker and others. Frans
Grijzenhout and I will be her contacts in the Board. Please welcome
her in our big Wikimedia family.
Ziko van Dijk
president WMNL
-----------------------------------------------------------
Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter
http://wmnederland.nl/
Wikimedia Nederland
Postbus 167
3500 AD Utrecht
-----------------------------------------------------------
Hello All
The project we have been working on to develop medical content and
translate it into other languages is going well. We have an initial set of
13 top importance GAs ready for translation by "Translators Without
Borders". Article should begin arriving in a couple of weeks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…
We are looking at starting with an initial group of 9 languages and need
Wikipedians to help incorporate article into that wiki language in 7 of
them including: Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Persian, Romanian
and Turkish. If there are people with these language / wiki abilities who
wish to help volunteers would be much appreciated. Please sign up here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…
Also if you know of anyone who is not on this list who might be interested
send them my way. Many thanks
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian