Hi everyone,
I'm pleased to announce that Derick Ndimnain Alangi, Biplab Anand, and Sami
Mlouhi have appointed to the Affiliations Committee as new members. In
addition, two incumbent members -- Maor Malul and Emna Mizouni -- have been
re-appointed for an additional term. Please join me in welcoming our new
and returning members.
The committee extends its profound gratitude to Galileo Vidoni, who is
stepping down after having served six years on the committee, and to
everyone who participated in the recent selection process, whether by
standing as a candidate or by providing feedback on the applications.
Regards,
Kirill Lokshin
Chair, Affiliations Committee
Hello, I have a question: is it legal and valid for Wikipedia communities
put promotion links to their Facebook pages on public space as Main Page or
Sitenotice?
I see many of Wikimedia projects doing this, as Indonesia Wikipedia, Arabic
Wikipedia, etc... Their Facebooks page also have blue checkmark of Facebook
as verified.
All what I concern is: Facebook is a commerical website, we put a link as
"official" to them, will it same with Wikipedia biased for Facebook and
violated the NPOV policy? And in finally: is it OK if other projects can do
that? Vietnamese Wikipedia also have a discussion about sitenotice
promotion to Facebook at <
https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Th%E1%BA%A3o_lu%E1%BA%ADn/Qu%E1%BA%…
>. If this is OK, I think we have no reason to reject it.
Thank you!
Trần Nguyễn Minh Huy
Vietnamese Wikimedian
This discussion is going to be fun! =D
A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
"List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
articles from the expanded list[2].
Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
good translation tools.
I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
have to be full translations of the source article.
A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_hav…
> building an authoritative dictionary is considerably
> harder than building a (de facto) authoritative encyclopedia.
What reason is there to think that? My any measure of editor hours, or
the amount of money it would take to replicate the effort, or the
maintenance load going forward, I'm sure that even a three shelf foot
encyclopedia is harder than a 100,000 word dictionary.
> We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles.
What is the difference between delivering the text of an encyclopedia
article and teaching it? Encyclopedias are not written to be
accompanied by a lecturer, tutor, or teacher. We even teach how to
write them, to students, in schools, and the students often if not
almost always get academic credit for their work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_program/Educators
Knowing any language is a privilege, and suggesting that there is any
reason to narrow the Foundation's focus away from language instruction
seems completely absurd to me.
> Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki articles.
Why? We are already the best at that. Why not make the wiki articles
in Wiktionary better by not just playing audio recordings of words,
which volunteers (not the Foundation) already provide, but meeting
that initiative by recording utterances and predicting whether they
are intelligible pronunciations, and doing the same with recording
gadgets in Wikipedia's pronunciation articles? http://j.mp/irslides
I'm serious that I think the Foundation should hire all my Google
Summer of Code students to support doing that, because it will take
about that many people to set it up so that volunteers can complete
the work for all languages, not just English.
There is no reason that the Foundation can't both pay to translate
Wikipedia articles and pay to up Wiktionary's language instruction
game at the same time. That would have made sense ten years ago, and
the budget is much larger now. We are at a juncture in aligning our
long term strategy to the mission, so I hope both projects get funded.
If it has to be proposed budget-neutral to be compelling, then get rid
of the mobile app and mobile web versions except on platforms where
they are genuinely easier for editors, not just readers, to use.
Best regards,
Jim
(Hello, I am trying something new this week by writing in Spanish. I am
hoping to encourage people to contribute to this conversation in their
preferred languages.)
Hola, estoy intentando algo nuevo esta semana escribiendo en español. Espero
animar a las personas a contribuir a esta conversación en sus idiomas
preferidos.
Algo que me hace feliz esta semana es la disponibilidad de "diffs visuales"
como se describe en el Blog de la Fundación Wikimedia:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/02/20/visual-diffs/.
¿Qué te hace feliz esta semana?
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
Hoi,
There is a lot of data available to us that is not presented as information
in any and all languages. Our mission is one where we share in the sum of
all knowledge. There is however a big difference between knowledge and
information.
We do not provide knowledge, we provide information. When the information
is in a digistable format, people understand the information and it is
integrated in their knowledge. It takes knowledge to provide information.
It is needed by the authors of Wikipedia articles, it is needed by the
people adding data to any and all of the Wikimedia projects.
When we have enough data in Wikidata to provide information, we could
provide this information when this data is sought. This award [1] does not
have an article in any language, it is a prestigeous award that I added
because I learned that [2] received the award in 2017. There is a very
moving Youtube clip that explains what this organisation does [3]. When you
check the links you may be informed in any language, the youtube clip is
English only.
When we consider what we do, we overestimate what we achieve with
Wikipedia. We could inform our audience much better when we start providing
information. We can generate text in any language if we choose to. We would
probably do a better job when we write the prose but we fail completely
when we do not provide the information.
In answer to the question, who if not Wikipedia.. We could provide
generated information even text when there is nothing available. In this
way we will provide a better service in any language. We could do this
within any Wikipedia .. who / where if not Wikipedia?
Thanks,
GerardM
[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q50227997
[2] https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=49330
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDL1ADvimxg
Hi Wikimedians!
Hoping to see you there in April! Thanks for your attention.
Jennie
--------
The Creative Commons annual Global Summit is from April 13-15 in Toronto.
Planned Wikimedia-related events include a keynote by Katherine Maher and
several discussions and sessions on how Wikimedia and Creative Commons
works together. We'd love to have a strong Wikimedia presence at the summit
– join us in April! Register here: https://summit.creativecommons.org/register2018/
The annual Global Summit brings together an international community of
leading technologists, legal experts, academics, activists, and community
members who work to promote the power of open and future of the Commons
worldwide.
The Summit provides leaders, stakeholders, and the broader open web
community an opportunity to drive the open movement forward,
cross-pollinate ideas and expertise, and expand our impact.
Our 2018 Global Summit will take place in Toronto, Canada from April 13-15,
2018, at the Delta Toronto Hotel. See you there!