User talk:Harej/Archive17
This is an archive of past discussions with User:Harej. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Capitol Hill training?
Hi! I just sent you an email with some questions, but I thought I'd draw your attention to it here just in case. Do you have any thoughts on the possibility of doing a training for Hill staffers on Wikipedia editing? It seems especially relevant in light of the new twitter account that is tracking their existing editing. Thanks! HistoricMN44 (talk) 17:57, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- Congressional staffer here. That sounds like a great idea. I attended an edit-a-thon event at the Museum of American Art before I started working on the hill and something like that would be great for Congress. --PiMaster3 talk 23:28, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- Hi PiMaster3! Thanks for your interest. We're definitely going to do a program - probably two actually. One would be on the Hill as more of a briefing on Wikipedia, Conflict of Interest rules (and how not to violate them), information on legislation on Wikipedia, and why staffers should be more interested in it. The second would be more of a training/edit-a-thon type event where staffers could actually edit alongside experienced Wikipedians. No promises yet, but I think we've worked out a date for the briefing. I'll try to remember to let you know when things are finalized. :) HistoricMN44 (talk) 13:44, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
- Harej, nice work on that. Most of the media reports I have been forwarded regarding that Twitter handle suggested people were just poking fun at innocuous edits being made by staffers on awkward pop culture stuff. I never knew there was any actual COI/disruption going on. Having the community (rather than paid editing/financial interests) educate them is exactly what should happen and I was very surprised to see someone pick up the baton proactively. CorporateM (Talk) 04:54, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
The Capitol Hill training is up! An open to the public lunch event will be on August 18, 2014 at Noon in the Rayburn House Office Building. You can RSVP here! HistoricMN44 (talk) 13:23, 30 July 2014 (UTC)
Learning Quarterly: July 2014
L&E Newsletter / Volume 1 / Issue 1 / July 2014
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Sunday August 17: NYC Wiki-Salon and Skill Share
Sunday August 17: NYC Wiki-Salon and Skill Share | |
---|---|
You are invited to join the the Wikimedia NYC community for our upcoming wiki-salon and knowledge-sharing workshop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Afterwards at 5pm, we'll walk to a social wiki-dinner together at a neighborhood restaurant (to be decided). We hope to see you there!--Pharos (talk) 15:58, 4 August 2014 (UTC) |
(You can unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by removing your name from this list.)
Deprecation of Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Request board
I've proposed discontinuing the RfC request board you created in 2010 and thought you might like to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment. Thanks. G. C. Hood (talk) 05:30, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
GAC Submission
Hey James, this is Alleycat80 (talk), formerly NLIGuy, from the GAC. I've spoken shortly with Asaf and he suggested I reach out to you to talk about the GAC submission. If you like that, ping me here or on my userpage. You can always reach me at ido[at]wikimedia.org.il, if you want an off wiki chat. Alleycat80 (talk) 09:50, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: July 2014
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WikiProject Elections and Referendum article tagging
Hi Harej. Sorry to have to post directly on your talk page, but you may have noticed (on the WP:Elections and referendums talk page) that I am trying to get all the election and referendum articles tagged for the project. Unfortunately this is not making any progress, as people are claiming there is no consensus to do this, as no-one has responded on the Project talk page. Could you possibly comment on the proposal at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums#Bot to tag articles for the WikiProject, as I'm getting rather frustrated by the attitude of the people at WP:BTR. Cheers, Number 57 12:34, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia and YOUR History: Taking Control of the Internet
Come one and come all. To a presentation at the Laurel Historical Society about how you can help verify, validate, and edit the information that is on the front line of local history.
- Show the Internet who is the better editor.
- Be the creator of culture that you know you are.
- Spread the knowledge of noteworthy people who no one but you cares about.
- Lead the charge to a better Wikipedia --- eventually.
Geraldshields11 (talk) 02:08, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia and YOUR History: Taking Control of the Internet
See you at the Laurel Pool Room, 9th and Main Street, Laurel, MD on Thursday, September 11, 2014 at 7:00 PM EST. See http://www.meetup.com/Wikimedia-DC/events/205494212/ for more information. Geraldshields11 (talk) 02:13, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Wikimedia DC invites revolutionaries, free thinkers, and other sundry editors to a DC WikiSalon
The WikiSalon is a special meetup usually held during the first and third full weeks of every month, from 7 PM to 9 PM. It's an informal gathering of Wikimedia enthusiasts, who come together to discuss Wikimedia wikis and collaboratively edit. There's no set agenda, and guests are welcome to recommend articles for the group to edit or edit on their own.
If you're coming by Metro, the closest station is Dupont Circle (on the Red Line). If you're driving, a lot of parking opens up downtown after 6:30 PM, so finding a parking space (even a free one) should be easy. Once you've found the building, go to Cove on the second floor. We will be in the conference room.
When: Wednesday, September 17, 2014 at 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Where: The Cove, Dupont Circle, 1730 Connecticut Avenue NW, 2nd floor, 20009, DC
For more information, see http://www.meetup.com/Wikimedia-DC/events/205500822/
My best regards, Geraldshields11 (talk) 02:26, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Wikimedia DC's Wonderful meetups
Wikimedia DC's Upcoming meetups
- Thursday, September 11: “Wikipedia and YOUR History: Taking Control of the Internet, One Article at a Time!”
- A presentation at the Laurel Historical Society about how you can help verify, validate, and edit the information that is on the front line of local history. Laurel Pool Room, 9th and Main Street in Laurel, MD. 7 PM.
- Wednesday, September 17: WikiSalon
- Come for the pizza, stay for the conversation. 7 PM – 9 PM
- Saturday, September 20: September Meetup
- Get dinner and drinks with fellow Wikipedians! 6 PM
- Sunday, September 21: Laurel History Edit-a-Thon
- Local history for Wikipedia! 10:15 AM – 4 PM
- Saturday, September 27 – Sunday, September 28: Please RSVP for the Open Government WikiHack at Eventbrite by clicking on the link. The National Archives and Records Administration and Wikimedia DC are teaming up to come up with solutions that help integrate government data into Wikipedia. 10:30 AM – 5 PM each day
My best regards, Geraldshields11 (talk) 22:50, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: August 2014
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COI help?
Hi Harej! One of my co-workers at Cato has recently realized that her boss's wikipedia entry is very wrong, to the point that it says he doesn't even work there anymore. They'd like the intro updated to give his current title at Cato and say that he formerly worked where it (wrongly) says he currently works. We both have a clear COI (since she works for him directly), but we think this is a fairly simple change. She's posted a request on his talk page, but hasn't gotten any replies. Can you help us out here? We want to be completely above board on this. Thanks! HistoricMN44 (talk) 14:11, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
MediaWiki message delivery
Your bot is delivering directly to project pages, and not talk pages. Some of them will definitely be removed. It is very non-standard. Please, fix it. Aditya(talk • contribs) 15:38, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- It's a discussion topic, please stop populating project main pages. I see several on my watchlist and it is very annoying. ww2censor (talk) 15:43, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Please read the section immediately above this. Harej (talk) 15:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Well at least you are very quick at reverting the problem. If all other editors were so prompt it would be great. Thanks. ww2censor (talk) 15:50, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
WikiProject X proposal
This mass message delivery is being posted on project, rather than project talk pages. Was this a mistake? Rcsprinter123 (witter) @ 15:22, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Ditto, was about to ask the same thing! C679 15:27, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Reverted from WP:FOOTY and WP:LAW. GiantSnowman 15:27, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- It was a mistake, based on a misunderstanding of the Special:MassMessage logic. I am working on a mass rollback. Please bear with me. Harej (talk) 15:28, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Here for the same reason, glad to see you are working on it. Skyerise (talk) 15:30, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- It was a mistake, based on a misunderstanding of the Special:MassMessage logic. I am working on a mass rollback. Please bear with me. Harej (talk) 15:28, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Reverted from WP:FOOTY and WP:LAW. GiantSnowman 15:27, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
I hope your day gets better :) --Hammersoft (talk) 15:50, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Hi Harej. Your project sounds really interesting despite the minor bot snafu. Would you mind if I reposted your message which you removed from WP:WikiProject Opera to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera or would that just complicate things? Best, Voceditenore (talk) 16:02, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Hi Harej - mistake or not, thanks for posting that. Sounds like a really interesting an valuable project! -- 17:32, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- I look forward to you reposting it to the WP:WER Talk page. And good luck! ```Buster Seven Talk 19:24, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
Project X Proposal
Please post the Project X Proposal on my talk page.--DThomsen8 (talk) 20:51, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
Definition of an active project
Hi there, over the past few years I have seen many discussions about WikiProjects being active or not, based primarily on how much discussion their is on the project's talk page or noticeboard. I hope that you don't stop at that to determine how active a project is. Personally, I rarely post to talk pages/notice boards, but constantly use WikiProject related items. Whether it is the cleanup lists (ie https://tools.wmflabs.org/bambots/cwb/bycat/Australian_rules_football.html), the WP:1.0 article logs and counts (I watch Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Australia articles by quality log to see moved, new and deleted pages) or even the popular pages logs (Wikipedia:WikiProject Western Australia/Popular pages, most of the useful tracking systems are WikiProject based. It is probably the best way to sort articles into topics, and whilst isn't a "automatic" as a recursive category system, it can allows for the precise allocation of articles into related topics better than a cat based system. It will be very difficult to measure the quantity and/or usefulness of project for these purpose, but I think that it is something that is overlooked by many editors here. The-Pope (talk) 04:18, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
- Thank you The-Pope for your feedback. You raise a good point; often times, a WikiProject is useful because it's a convenient way of sorting articles. To measure WikiProject activity I may want to measure more than edits; perhaps things like number of watchers or page views. Harej (talk) 05:49, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
- In every the Wikipedia:WikiProject Bangladesh has only 3-4 regulars, who though pretty much focussed on articles covered by the project, can hardly maintain a decent level of activity. Since the expansion of Bengali Wikipedia, the regulars have become busy with that one.
- My question is: how do we measure the activity levels? Not just parameters and criteria, it also is about tools. Are we supposed to measure it manually? That may turn out to be very unfeasible. I want to participate, but I also am a bit apprehensive of the methodology and resources. Aditya(talk • contribs) 07:24, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
- Aditya, there is a lot that can be measured by querying Wikipedia's database—most of the research will be done that way. Regarding measuring the development of tools within a WikiProject, it might be possible to look for recurring patterns that indicate the presence of a tool; for example, if a WikiProject has assessment categories, then it is engaging in article assessment. It may be inevitable that I will have to load each WikiProject and simply observe what's present on the page, but I am happy to do that if it gives me more insight than the other measurements. Harej (talk) 19:45, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
WPX
I was wondering if you were also going to mass message Project Task Forces / Work Groups? I've seen that for some projects, the subproject TF/WGs seem more active than the main project (or atleast their talk pages) -- 65.94.171.225 (talk) 03:03, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
- I'm not totally sure how to go about that. My understanding has always been that task forces are subsidiaries of WikiProjects, so that it would be redundant to notify both the task force and the WikiProject. Can you think of specific cases where the task forces churn on as the WikiProject HQ goes unwatched? Harej (talk) 03:09, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
- Off the top of my head, I can't recall which ones, but I do recall that I've seen it. As I ask questions at various WPP/TF/WG about articles in their topic areas, I've encountered it a few times. A few people at those various TF/WGs have stated that they don't read the main WPP talk page. -- 65.94.171.225 (talk) 03:58, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
WPPX
You might also want to examine the effect of deleting project banners. Both WPUSA and WPCANADA have preivously aggressively deleted the project banners of regional projects located within the confines of those countries and replaced those banners with their own. Anecdotally, it appears that this leads to a drastic decrease in participation at the local wikiproject; and at the general project, not everyone migrates over; and much less knowledgable participation occurs about local-area topics, with some incorrect assumptions about how things function from analogous situations in other regions of the country leading to incorrect article "corrections" also occurring. There's also the incorrect assignment of importance by national editors for regional importance; which may lead to editors assuming the local wikiproject doesn't know the local topics, thus aren't a good area to discuss local topics. -- 65.94.171.225 (talk) 04:05, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
The wonderful annual meeting! And more!
Hello, fellow Wikipedian!
I am excited to announce our upcoming Annual Meeting at the National Archives! We'll have free lunch, an introduction by Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, and a discussion featuring Ed Summers, the creator of CongressEdits. Join your fellow DC-area Wikipedians on Saturday, October 18 from 12 to 4:30 PM. RSVP today!
Also coming up we have the Human Origins edit-a-thon on October 17 and the WikiSalon on October 22. Hope to see you at our upcoming events!
Best,
(To unsubscribe, remove your username here.) 21:20, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for coming to the Mount Sinai Edit-a-thon
I just wanted to thank you for making your way out to New York City last week. I think the edit-a-thon went well, and we are eager to have more support from the Wikipedia community. If you have any comments or suggestions for future events, let me know!
Thanks, Mjbailey (talk) 21:13, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
- Hello User:Mjbailey. The event was great; thank you for hosting. I hope to see you in January for our NIH workshop series, once we have that scheduled. We will also have our Wikipedia Public Health Summit in September. Harej (talk) 06:03, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: September 2014
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Wikidata weekly summary #128
- Discussions
- Open RfA: Nikosguard
- Events/Blogs/Press
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- All human genes are now wikidata items, for example: Here is one (of approximately 40,000) called "spinocerebellar ataxia 37" - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18081265. Blog post about this to appear here: http://blog.wikimedia.de/tag/wikidata/
- Want to be kept up-to-date on structured data on Commons? There is now a new newsletter you can subscribe to.
- Interested in some statistics about the data on Wikidata? Check Wikidata Stats every now and then. (Thanks Magnus for moving it to the new dump format.)
- Did you know?
- Development
- Spent the week with the WMF multimedia team and volunteers to get more clarity about structured data on Commons. We'll be asking for feedback on a lot of stuff over the next weeks. The main info hub is taking shape at Commons:Structured data.
- More fixes for the switch to HHVM
- Looked into possible performance improvements. Some of them will be taken into the next sprint.
- Battled a handful of nasty issues on the live-site
- Wikibase DataModel 1.1 was released
- Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
re: WikiProject_X
That's a nice idea. In fact I proposed a somewhat similar research piece two years ago (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Project_Ideas/Wikiprojects_Success,_Failure_and_Impact_on_Content_and_Community) through I didn't have enough pull to get it through. Let me know if you'd be interesting in collaborating on this; I'd be happy to help out. As you may know, I am an active researcher of Wikipedia; my newest paper got published just now ([1]) and I have a piece about why editors burn out and retire in review (I'd be happy to share a copy with you as it seems related to the wikiproject research somewhat). You can find more papers of mine on Google Scholar. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:58, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
- Piotrus, I am very pleased to see that we both are interested in this matter. How much experience do you have in querying Wikipedia's database directly and doing research based on the retrieved data? Harej (talk) 19:50, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
- While I have worked with some larger datasets, my primary focus in on theory and qualitative understanding of the studied phenomena. The short answer to your question is 1) little and 2) some. Longer is as follows: if I need to query the database, I ask someone to help me with it, while I focus on the theory, lit review, and later, analysis. I am also a bit wary or relying too much on database queries. Big data is great, but micro scale qualitative studies (such as interviews or surveys) shouldn't be ignored. It is my experience (and/or opinion) that way too much of Wikipedia studies come from well-meaning computer scientists/other "hard" sciences majors, who crunch numbers, play with big data, use impressive statistics and formulas, and fail to either ground their studies in proper theory, or produce a proper analysis of what their number means, or both (just like the paper I criticized in my last Wikimedia Research Newsletter, which is a prime example of what I consider to be useless and unreadable work). Too often they seem like a "proof of concept" studies - proving that some data can be analyzed, but not explaining why it was done at all. The end result is often a paper presented at one of the CS conferences, or worse, a conference poster, and that's it - little benefit for the community (not sure about the scientists careers, I hear in CS field such conferences do mean a ot). In my field, conferences count for nothing career-wise, we have to publish papers, usually in SSCI, which means that they go through much more of a review, and I also try to write up my work so it is useful for the wider populace. Now, don't take what I write as criticism of big data or quantitative approach - I respect statistics (and have used regressions and such in some of my papers). Rather, it's a long reply to your question: if you are looking for a quantitative big data coding expert, I am not going to help you much. The assistance I am offering comes from 1) being an active participant of Wikipedia community, up to and including running several WikiProjects for many years and 2) having a record of publishing SSCI-journal Wikipedia research that often merges qualitative and quantitative aspects. I'd love to help with studying WikiProjects, as I think it's a very interesting, important and understudied area with which I have some first-hand experience, but if you are already covered in those expertises, and just need a big data coder to round up your team, than I am afraid I will not be able to help you with that. Cheers, --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:58, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
- Piotrus, though I am looking for a "hard" science person, I am happy to get all the help I possibly can. Obviously you understand the issue and you have a background that would help prevent me from making amateur research mistakes. Would you be interested in serving as an advisor to the project? Harej (talk) 03:42, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
- With my Wikipedia volunteer hat, I am more than happy to provide any assistance in the spirit of helping Wikipedia. I'll try to read your project page carefully and give some suggestions over the next few days in that vein. With my researcher hat, I would like to ask what are the project goals in the realm of publishing? Are you thinking of a conference paper, or a journal paper, or both? As I noted, I have a decent track record of getting things published, so I'd like to help with that as well. This kind of research should be made as visible as possible; it would be a shame to keep it just on wiki pages (in the past some WMF research, while quite interesting and useful, got poor visibility because it was restricted to wiki pages only). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:14, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
- That is a good question, Piotrus. I had thought of research as being done more for the sake of developing a product, rather than something that could be published on its own. But I think getting the research published in a journal would be an excellent idea—the issues we broach are relevant to broader questions of online crowdsourcing and community building. As part of that, I'd like to make sure that our approach to researching this issue is sound. Please let me know once you've read through the grant proposal and if you have any specific concerns. Harej (talk) 19:24, 4 October 2014 (UTC)
- Given that you're asking for almost 25,000 dollars in grant money, unless those t-shirts you're raffling are gold-lined, I would expect nothing less than academic presentation in the wrap-up. Your starting point should be an extensive literature review of the many articles and papers already written on the topic of editor retention; being a decentralized open-source project, Wikipedia suffers extensively from duplication of thought, and your current proposal seems to me to be in danger of simply spinning one aspect of this particular wheel yet another time without substantial results. See for instance this paper, or (self-promotion alert) this essay. ResMar 23:46, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
- User:Resident Mario: for that much money I would certainly expect serious effort into academic publication (I published all my research without any grants, not counting few hundred $ over the years for conference reimbursements, and such...). If the Wikipedia community is forking the money, they should receive as much as possible for their (our...) expenditure, and that should include a serious attempt to get this research seen by other academics. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:48, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
- Harej, you wrote of "developing a product"; I'd assume "Design a prototype workflow and interface that can be deployed to improve other WikiProjects". I've finally found time to read your proposal carefully, and I think it is a valuable proposal. As an editor heavily engaged with numerous WikiProjects, I certainly agree this is an area that has been neglected by developers, and yet has potential to help with editor's retention. I do in fact would have quite a few ideas on how to do so (I've, in the past, redesigned the pages of WikiProjects Sociology and Poland, so I've tried to do what you are talking about in practice, too). Some additional comments: " hypothesis that WikiProjects help facilitate Wikipedia-editing in a given subject area by organizing contributors around a cause and by providing resources and social support" - this is a compound hypothesis and should be split into at least two if not three, and its components need to be operationalized. 2) You seem to omit a good source of data - Signpost WikiProject reports. 3) I'd suggest adding a metric of increased engagement with WikiProject tools and/or satisfaction (with WikiProject or volunteering at Wikipedia in general). Overall, I support this project, and I hope you get a grant. And as I noted before, I offer my help in getting the data published in a peer reviewed outlet (and no cost; I don't need any of the grant money, just your willingness to share the data (survey, interviews and developed quantitative/qualitative models) and preferably, include me in your discussions and co-write parts of the paper dealing with aspects I won't be working on but others will). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:48, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
- Hello Piotrus! Thank you for reviewing the proposal and for participating on its talk page. How did the re-designs of WikiProject Sociology and WikiProject Poland go?
- 1) Good point regarding the hypothesis. I'll see if I can come up with more proper hypotheses, including corresponding null hypotheses.
- 2) I'll take a look at the Signpost reports. I imagine they factor into the qualitative aspect of the research, or do you have other ideas?
- 3) Increased engagement with WikiProject tools would be a worthwhile metric. It'd even be interesting to see if WikiProjects promote more editing of Wikipedia in general; that would be cool.
- I am happy to include you as a participant and to share data with you. I would also like you to review any papers we write as a project, especially since you would know more about that than I would. Would it be published through your university or would you find another venue? Harej (talk) 23:28, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
- Re 1) Nobody ever commented on WP:POLAND as redesigned by me, but nobody complained, either. I've never asked... could be worth a mini-survey. For WP:SOCIO, I was reverted after few months by another regular who thought my design was too confusing (even through I intended it to be very newbie friendly). What the newbies, or anyone else thought, is again unknown, as nobody else ever commented on this. 2) Yes, a good source of qualitative data. 3) Yes, but difficult to measure outside surveysinterviews, and even that is difficult - if you asked me if a WikiProject made me edit something more, I'd honestly say I don't know. Maybe, but there are so many other factors. Also, are we looking at "more total edits" or "shifting pattern of edits", i.e. a friendly interaction at WikiProjet XYZ may make me want to edit XYZ topics for a while, but I doubt they make me want to edit more total. But maybe I am wrong, after all I don't know what makes me edit exactly... that's a very subjective question. I am happy to be on board; publication-wise, I would aim for an SSCI-indexed journal if possible, with draft paper versions serving as a conference fodder in the meantime (Wikimania/sym, etc.). I hope to finish my current major project this year, so I could help with serious writing around, hopefully, XMAS/winter. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:22, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
- Given that you're asking for almost 25,000 dollars in grant money, unless those t-shirts you're raffling are gold-lined, I would expect nothing less than academic presentation in the wrap-up. Your starting point should be an extensive literature review of the many articles and papers already written on the topic of editor retention; being a decentralized open-source project, Wikipedia suffers extensively from duplication of thought, and your current proposal seems to me to be in danger of simply spinning one aspect of this particular wheel yet another time without substantial results. See for instance this paper, or (self-promotion alert) this essay. ResMar 23:46, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
- That is a good question, Piotrus. I had thought of research as being done more for the sake of developing a product, rather than something that could be published on its own. But I think getting the research published in a journal would be an excellent idea—the issues we broach are relevant to broader questions of online crowdsourcing and community building. As part of that, I'd like to make sure that our approach to researching this issue is sound. Please let me know once you've read through the grant proposal and if you have any specific concerns. Harej (talk) 19:24, 4 October 2014 (UTC)
- With my Wikipedia volunteer hat, I am more than happy to provide any assistance in the spirit of helping Wikipedia. I'll try to read your project page carefully and give some suggestions over the next few days in that vein. With my researcher hat, I would like to ask what are the project goals in the realm of publishing? Are you thinking of a conference paper, or a journal paper, or both? As I noted, I have a decent track record of getting things published, so I'd like to help with that as well. This kind of research should be made as visible as possible; it would be a shame to keep it just on wiki pages (in the past some WMF research, while quite interesting and useful, got poor visibility because it was restricted to wiki pages only). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:14, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
- Piotrus, though I am looking for a "hard" science person, I am happy to get all the help I possibly can. Obviously you understand the issue and you have a background that would help prevent me from making amateur research mistakes. Would you be interested in serving as an advisor to the project? Harej (talk) 03:42, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
- While I have worked with some larger datasets, my primary focus in on theory and qualitative understanding of the studied phenomena. The short answer to your question is 1) little and 2) some. Longer is as follows: if I need to query the database, I ask someone to help me with it, while I focus on the theory, lit review, and later, analysis. I am also a bit wary or relying too much on database queries. Big data is great, but micro scale qualitative studies (such as interviews or surveys) shouldn't be ignored. It is my experience (and/or opinion) that way too much of Wikipedia studies come from well-meaning computer scientists/other "hard" sciences majors, who crunch numbers, play with big data, use impressive statistics and formulas, and fail to either ground their studies in proper theory, or produce a proper analysis of what their number means, or both (just like the paper I criticized in my last Wikimedia Research Newsletter, which is a prime example of what I consider to be useless and unreadable work). Too often they seem like a "proof of concept" studies - proving that some data can be analyzed, but not explaining why it was done at all. The end result is often a paper presented at one of the CS conferences, or worse, a conference poster, and that's it - little benefit for the community (not sure about the scientists careers, I hear in CS field such conferences do mean a ot). In my field, conferences count for nothing career-wise, we have to publish papers, usually in SSCI, which means that they go through much more of a review, and I also try to write up my work so it is useful for the wider populace. Now, don't take what I write as criticism of big data or quantitative approach - I respect statistics (and have used regressions and such in some of my papers). Rather, it's a long reply to your question: if you are looking for a quantitative big data coding expert, I am not going to help you much. The assistance I am offering comes from 1) being an active participant of Wikipedia community, up to and including running several WikiProjects for many years and 2) having a record of publishing SSCI-journal Wikipedia research that often merges qualitative and quantitative aspects. I'd love to help with studying WikiProjects, as I think it's a very interesting, important and understudied area with which I have some first-hand experience, but if you are already covered in those expertises, and just need a big data coder to round up your team, than I am afraid I will not be able to help you with that. Cheers, --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:58, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
Learning Quarterly: October 2014
L&E Newsletter / Volume 1 / Issue 2 / October 2014
Learning Quarterly
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María Cruz, Community coordinator, Program Evaluation & Design (WMF) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:59, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #129
- Discussions
- Do you want to see constraint violation reports and referencing improved? Please provide input.
- Events/Blogs/Press
- IRC office hour about structured data on Commons (log)
- hackathon around scholarly articles on Wikidata (etherpad with notes)
- Blog post about the meeting to discuss structured data on Commons in Berlin
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Clusters of humans and species on Wikidata
- New parameter in the template Property documentation: subject item; see [this example edit] for how to use it
- New tool: Linked Items. Returns sorted, de-duped list of Q values from a Wikipedia page, or chunk of wiki-text. Thank you, Magnus!
- Wikidata annotation tool is looking for feedback
- Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase by Denny and Markus has been published. It gives a very nice non-technical overview of Wikidata.
- Magnus re-wrote Wiki ShootMe to now use Wikidata.
- Did you know?
- Always wanted to know which topics have amazing articles on Wikimedia projects across many languages? Here you go!
- Newest properties: At the Circulating Library ID, MacTutor id (biographies), allmovie identifier, number of survivors, given name version for other gender, name in native language, tempo marking, manifestation of, zbMATH author ID, Executive Order number
- Development
- Improvements to sitelink editing usability
- Released Wikibase DataModel 2.0
- Profiling and performance improvements in Wikibase and Wikibase DataModel
- Implementing LabelLookup, which is needed to improve performance of EntityId formatting. This will lead to improved item page loading times.
- Added new featured list and recommended article badges.
- Remove most usage of class aliases to be compatible with HHVM (dependencies of bugzilla:71295)
- Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
Disambiguation link notification for October 23
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Kirti N. Chaudhuri, you added links pointing to the disambiguation pages Bruce Rogers and Albert Museum. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:59, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
Clean-up. More text in the links now than in the article itself. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 21:58, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #114
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- The Wikidata Game now has a 'Commons Categories' game
- Did you know?
- Development
- Made significant performance improvements (to be rolled out next week)
- Worked on usability improvements to the editing of sitelinks
- When you link to an image on Wikimedia Commons in a statement it will now show up in “global usage” there.
- Made the phpunit tests for Wikibase much faster
- Wikibase phpunit tests on travis pass with hhvm now
- Fixed label/description uniqueness constraint checks
- Work on entity usage tracking
- Year formatter now shows the year instead of the unformatted ISO string in case of a precision mismatch
- Diff and old revision pages don’t run the JavaScript UI any more, should be much faster now
- Introduced a Changers concept to the JavaScript frontend, wrapping the API and entityStore functionality
- Identified issue causing content in the old serialization format to be included in XML dumps
- Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
Amusing mention at Jimbo's talk page
Hi James, I've mentioned an amusing set of deletion summaries that you accidentaly entered a very long time ago at a thread at Jimmy Wales' talk page. Would you mind if it were added to the Village stocks? It would fit perfectly there! Graham87 08:38, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
- Oh brother, I actually remember doing this too. Yes Graham, go right ahead. Harej (talk) 18:06, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
You have been sentenced to the Village Stocks | ||
for trying to promote one of the worst films ever made in the deletion log! |
Graham87 03:47, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
Matthew Gavin Frank
hi, i happened upon Draft:Matthew Gavin Frank, and noticed that the page Matthew Gavin Frank is salted from 2009. would you agree that his reviews in NYTimes, WSJ, make him notable? if so, would you please create. needs some cleanup, so i will. Duckduckstop (talk) 20:39, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
- Duckduckstop, I moved the page to the article space. Go ahead and clean up. Harej (talk) 00:59, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
Disambiguation link notification for October 31
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Clair Mills Callan, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page St. Francis Hospital. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 13:55, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #131
- Events/Blogs/Press
- Wikidata turned 2 on Wednesday! Have a look at the notes from the community and development team and add your note. Also don't forget to check out all the cool presents (a painting, speed improvements, a huge load of unconnected articles that you can help connect via the Wikidata Game, WikidataLDF, a recent changes visualisation)!
- Wikidata II
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Wikidata is nominated for 2 Open Data Awards! \o/ Magnus and Lydia will attend the award ceremony next week. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
- Wikidata as the central hub for open life science data
- What is Wikipedia about? Great data viz based on Wikidata
- Super Lachaise, a mobile app based on Wikidata for a cemetery in Paris
- Random items without statements
- Tutorial: How to make a “descendants of” timeline using Wikidata
- Updated statistics on the topics with most highly-rated articles on Wikipedia
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID, Municipality code of Brazil, Pleiades identifier, MalaCards ID, natural product of taxon, official blog, University of Barcelona authority ID, Beilstein Registry Number, Gmelin Number
- Development
- Worked around memory corruption in zend PHP
- HHVM beta feature is enabled again for Wikidata
- Fixes for various breaking changes in mediawiki core
- Work on language fall backs for new serialization code
- Work on fixing XML dumps
- Work on making Special:Version correct again for Wikidata extensions
- Implemented LabelLookup to improve performance further
- Worked more on remaining tasks for simple queries
- Poked remaining tasks for statements on properties
- Further improvements to the usability and workflow of sitelink editing
- Wrote browser tests for authority control gadget
- Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item