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Hi Rhododendrites,

This is to let you know that the featured picture File:Dark purple Trichoglottis (70213s)c.jpg, which you uploaded or nominated, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for October 18, 2020. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2020-10-18. If you have any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 09:55, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

Trichoglottis atropurpurea

Trichoglottis atropurpurea, the dark purple trichoglottis, is a species of orchid endemic to the Philippines. Orchids have developed highly specialized pollination systems to achieve cross-fertilisation, insects often being visually attracted by the shape and colours of the lip, which guides them to the centre of the flower for their reward. The lip is actually the upper medial petal, but as the flower develops, its pedicel rotates through 180 degrees. This photograph of T. atropurpurea was taken at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City. The fleshy whitish structures visible on the left and behind are aerial roots that are able to collect nutrients from the surroundings.

Photograph credit: Rhododendrites

Recently featured:

Reasonable criteria and the "List of fictional vegetarian characters"

So, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of fictional vegetarian characters just closed. I saw you said that you "have no trouble imagining that a reasonable inclusion criteria could be established" and that you have "concerns about the notability of the subject as established by coverage as a group." Can you explain more about that? Since the page is preserved, I want to try and revise it so that another AFD doesn't come up again. --Historyday01 (talk) 22:02, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

@Historyday01: By the former I did not mean that I had one particular set of criteria in mind but that I have no trouble imagining that there are [various] ways that could be accomplished (implying that that doesn't look like a reason for deletion here). By notability, I mean some solid coverage of "fictional vegetarians" as a group, apart from low quality blog listicles, etc. It may exist, but on my cursory look I didn't see much of that. I may be wrong, though; I didn't look all that hard since I was already coming down on the keep side of things. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 22:42, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
Ah, good point there. Yeah, it is hard to find anything on them, but I think that's just a consequence of the fact that far too few people have written about it. That's my thought on it at least.Historyday01 (talk) 23:13, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
Exactly. And whether enough people have written about a subject is what Wikipedia means by notable. :) Anyway, I don't intend on following it up with a new nomination for deletion or anything FYI. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 23:21, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Religion and philosophy request for comment

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This Month in GLAM: September 2020





Headlines
  • Brazil report: Wikidata birthday celebrations, Wiki Loves Monuments, new partnerships and more!
  • Colombia report: GLAM and virtual education
  • France report: AAF training course; Workshops in Strasbourg; European Heritage Days: Rennes; Wiki Loves Monuments
  • Germany report: Ahoy! Wikipedians set sail to document the reality of modern seafaring
  • Indonesia report: New GLAM partnerships on data donation; Commons structured data edit-a-thon
  • Norway report: Students taking on GLAM Wiki women in red
  • Sweden report: Musikverket: more folk music and photos; Hack for Heritage 2020; Wiki Loves Monuments; Wikipedia in the libraries; Digital Book Fair on Wikipedia
  • UK report: National Lottery; Khalili Collections
  • USA report: Virtual events MetFashion, 19SuffrageStories, WikiCari Festival and more
  • Open Access report: New publication about access to digitised cultural heritage
  • WMF GLAM report: Launching Wikisource Pagelist Widget
  • Calendar: ctober's GLAM events
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Feedback request: Politics, government, and law request for comment

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Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

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Nomination of Ruth Zukerman for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Ruth Zukerman is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ruth Zukerman until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. DGG ( talk ) 06:49, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

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Feedback request: Media, the arts, and architecture request for comment

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October 21, 7pm: ONLINE WikiWednesday Salon NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-8pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop. To join the meeting from your computer or smartphone, just visit this link. More information about how to connect is available on the meetup page.

We look forward to seeing local Wikimedians, but would also like to invite folks from the greater New York metropolitan area (and beyond!) who might not typically be able to join us in person!

In honor of Wikidata's 8th birthday earlier this month, we especially encourage lightning talks related to Wikidata and Wikidata adjacent projects and tools. We'll also discuss the recent proposal to change the Wikimedia Foundation Bylaws, including the Statement of Opposition from Wikimedia NYC.

7:00pm - 8:00 pm online via Zoom (optional breakout rooms from 8:00-8:30)

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--Wikimedia New York City Team 04:10, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

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two cents

I was just thinking, shouldn't you write "my two cents" instead of "$0.02" ! Govvy (talk) 17:21, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

@Govvy: Quite possibly. I've wondered in the past if the meaning might not translate well outside of the US/UK, but within those countries I presume $0.02 would be understood the same way as 2¢ (which I'd write instead if only that pesky ¢ character were more easily accessible)? :) — Rhododendrites talk \\ 17:43, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
Even know it's American I actually think that "my two cents" has becoming part of the lexican in the UK, although I don't think it's used that much. Govvy (talk) 17:49, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 1 November 2020

November 21st, 11am-1pm E.S.T: NYC COVID-19: Environmental Justice in Public Health Edit-A-Thon - ONLINE

Hello Rhododendrites! You are invited to join the Brooklyn based Sure We Can community for our 2nd NYC COVID-19 themed Wikipedia Edit-a-thon / translate-a-thon - ONLINE - this Saturday, Nov 21st, 2020 11am - 1pm. The edit-a-thon is part of Sure We Can's work with NYC Health + Hospitals to stop the spread of Covid-19. We plan to continue to work on translating the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City article into the many languages spoken in New York City; as well as, work on other ideas about how wikipedia could slow the spread of Covid-19.

We’ve compiled, with the help of translators, translations of the first four paragraphs of the COVID-19 in NYC article into Swahilli, Malagasy, Yoruba, Hebrew, Hindi, and Tagalog. You can see the translations in the Meetup page. We are looking for help publishing this translated information onto the appropriate wikipedia projects.

Please join us, we'd love to see you (online).

11:00am - 1:00 pm E.S.T online via Zoom (optional breakout rooms available)

--Wil540 art (talk) 17:26, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup 2020 November newsletter

The 2020 WikiCup has come to an end, with the final round going down to the wire. Our new Champion is England Lee Vilenski (submissions), the runner-up last year, who was closely followed by England Gog the Mild (submissions). In the final round, Lee achieved 4 FAs and 30 GAs, mostly on cue sport topics, while Gog achieved 3 FAs and 15 GAs, mostly on important battles and wars, which earned him a high number of bonus points. Botswana The Rambling Man (submissions) was in third place with 4 FAs and 8 GAs on football topics, with New York (state) Epicgenius (submissions) close behind with 19 GAs and 16 DYK's, his interest being the buildings of New York.

The other finalists were Gondor Hog Farm (submissions), Indonesia HaEr48 (submissions), Somerset Harrias (submissions) and Free Hong Kong Bloom6132 (submissions). The final round was very productive, and besides 15 FAs, contestants achieved 75 FAC reviews, 88 GAs and 108 GAN reviews. Altogether, Wikipedia has benefited greatly from the activities of WikiCup competitors all through the contest. Well done everyone!

All those who reached the final will receive awards and the following special awards will be made, based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, these prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round, or in the event of a tie, to the overall leader in this field.

Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate; the WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2021 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13, Sturmvogel 66, Vanamonde and Cwmhiraeth MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:38, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Awarded to Rhododendrites, who scored the most points for Featured Pictures in any individual round of the 2020 WikiCup and in the whole contest.

Congratulations! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 19:01, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2020





Headlines
  • AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: Wikipedia in African Libraries Project
  • Brazil report: Abre-te Código hackathon, Wikidata related events and news from our partners
  • Finland report: Postponed Hack4FI GLAM hackathon turned into an online global Hack4OpenGLAM
  • France report: Partnership with BNU Strasbourg
  • Germany report: Coding da Vinci cultural data hackathon heads to Lower Saxony
  • India report: Mapping GLAM in Maharashtra, India
  • Indonesia report: Bulan Sejarah Indonesia 2.0; Structured data edit-a-thon; Proofreading mini contest
  • Netherlands report: National History Month: East to West, Dutch libraries and Wikipedia
  • New Zealand report: West Coast Wikipedian at Large
  • Norway report: The Sámi Languages on wiki
  • Serbia report: Many activities are in our way
  • Sweden report: Librarians learn about Wikidata; More Swedish literature on Wikidata; Online Edit-a-thon Dalarna; Applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Librarians and Projekt HBTQI; GLAM Statistical Tool
  • UK report: Enamels of the World
  • USA report: American Archive of Public Broadcasting; Smithsonian Women in Finance Edit-a-thon; Black Lunch Table; San Diego/October 2020; WikiWednesday Salon
  • Calendar: November's GLAM events
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Books & Bytes – Issue 41

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 41, September – October 2020

  • New partnership: Taxmann
  • WikiCite
  • 1Lib1Ref 2021

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:48, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

October 18: ONLINE WikiWednesday Salon NYC (plus weekend editathons)

October 18, 7pm: ONLINE WikiWednesday Salon NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-8pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop. To join the meeting from your computer or smartphone, just visit this link. More information about how to connect is available on the meetup page.

We look forward to seeing local Wikimedians, but would also like to invite folks from the greater New York metropolitan area (and beyond!) who might not typically be able to join us in person!

This month we've invited the creators of instagram accounts @depthsofwikipedia and @wikipediapictures to chat with us about their Wiki* appreciation accounts. If there's a project you'd like to share or a question you'd like answered, just let us know by adding it to the agenda or responding to this message.

7:00pm - 8:00 pm online via Zoom (optional breakout rooms from 8:00-8:30)

Editathons this coming Saturday

You are also invited to join thse two editathon on Saturday November 21:

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--Wikimedia New York City Team 17:57, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

New, simpler RfC to define trust levels for WikiLoop DoubleCheck

HI Rhododendrites/2020d,
I'm writing to let you know we have simplified the RfC on trust levels for the tool WikiLoop DoubleCheck. Please join and share your thoughts about this feature! We made this change after hearing users' comments on the first RfC being too complicated. I hope that you can participate this time around, giving your feedback on this new feature for WikiLoop DoubleCheck users.
Thanks and see you around online,
María Cruz
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:05, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
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POTD subpages which you have contributed to, have been added to portals, including Template:POTD/2018-02-11 at Portal:Technology. Thank you for your POTD contributions. —⁠andrybak (talk) 01:40, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

ArbCom 2020 Elections voter message

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Hatnote on Burberry

Hi, I noticed that you'd removed the hatnote I put on the Burberry article. I put the hatnote there because I found the Burberry article while looking for Barberry, as the two are pronounced almost identically and I'd always thought burberry was the actual name for the plant. I would guess that many other people have this same confusion so I believe the hatnote is justified. RedPanda25 02:37, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

@RedPanda25: Seems like a straightforward WP:NAMB issue. Sounding alike isn't usually a good reason (as far as I'm aware) nor unrelated topics spelled a letter or two away from each other. e.g. we would also need hatnotes at Barbary, Barbery, Bob Berry, etc. If we had some sources which showed there to be confusion between the terms, that might make sense. All this said, it's not something I feel terribly strongly about so if you're in an WP:IAR mood, have at it (I'd just ask that you link to this thread or otherwise contextualize in the edit summary). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 03:01, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Revert on Fox News

Hi, you recently reverted my edit on the Fox News article, alleging WP:FALSEBALANCE. Can you please explain what makes you think this rule applies here? As I said in the edit summary, MSNBC article gets no criticism in lead. Fox denies bias in its reporting content (as opposed to commentary). Allegations of bias are addressed at great length where appropriate, more so than comparable articles. Maintain consistent and fair standards. If the most directly comparable left-of-centre cable networks don't have nearly as much (or, in the case of MSNBC, any) mention of alleged or real bias in their article leads yet Fox does, despite a plethora of reliable sources available, there is clear bias. Not to mention, as I said, Fox denies bias or partisanship in their core news content, which is clearly differentiated from commentary content. If you haven't, I encourage you to read an article of two from (or at least visit the homepages of) both Fox and MSNBC; you might be surprised. Kind regards, thorpewilliam (talk) 02:16, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi Thorpewilliam You're looking for balance between amounts of criticisms or kinds of descriptions between MSNBC and Fox (or something else and Fox). Subjects are covered here according to the way that source has been written about in reliable sources. The false balance is saying it should be written about with consideration of summaries of other subjects like MSNBC. If the MSNBC aren't isn't adequately and proportionally summarizing the body of literature about that subject, that's a matter for that talk page. As far as what they say about themselves, Wikipedia typically cares more about what other people say about a company (or most subjects, really) than what they say about themselves. Sometimes it's worth mentioning that a subject disputes characterizations of bias, but the bulk of the article should be summarizing what other reliable sources say. FYI when it comes to using Fox as a source (this is independent of the content of the article), we do differentiate between the news content and the talk shows (see the WP:RSP entries). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 03:00, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
@Rhododendrites: Duly noted. Thanks for correcting my understanding of the rule. Regards, thorpewilliam (talk) 08:26, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2020

Media Bias in the US

Hi! I noticed that in the history for the page above you reverted my edit with the comment "business week". This is a Harvard document. Where did you get business week? Was it otherwise published in that journal? I accept the revert but the comment confused me. I will be here on and off throughout the day, so feel free to leave a message here or my talk page. Thanks! Dswitz10734 (talk) 12:51, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the message, Dswitz10734. Here's the revert. Scholar.harvard.edu is where Harvard faculty's personal websites are. Sometimes they upload PDF versions of their publications. If you click through the link, you can see it's a print-out/PDF version of an opinion piece in BusinessWeek, not something published in a journal or by harvard. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:07, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

A new page which addresses your concern back in October...

So, back in October, you supported the keeping of the page List of fictional vegetarian characters but only "reluctantly," saying you have "concerns about the notability of the subject as established by coverage as a group, but not quite concerned enough to start scrutinizing that at the end of a snowing AfD." Anyway, the list page has been limited, to the best of my knowledge (although a few characters might have slipped in there) to recurring and main characters. And, I have a page I created today, which I've worked on, off and on, since that deletion discussion, titled Vegetarian characters in fiction, so I thought I'd share that too. --Historyday01 (talk) 03:49, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: November 2020





Headlines
  • AfLIA Wikipedia in African Libraries report: Launch of Wikipedia in African Libraries Project Pilot Cohort
  • Brazil report: Accessibility through audio descriptions, GLAM tutorials, WikidataCon 2021 and more updates on Brazilian GLAMs
  • Canada report: Taking a tour of CAPACOA workshops and some recent example sets from commons
  • Germany report: German symphony orchestra releases audio samples under free license
  • India report: Re-licensing of content on water & rivers in India
  • Indonesia report: #WikiSejarah WPWP Campaign
  • Netherlands report: Wikipedia and Education, Funding granted for two projects in 2021, KB completes collection highlights project
  • Serbia report: GLAM in Serbia makes important steps in the digitization of cultural heritage
  • Spain report: Edit-a-thons on women scientists and painters
  • Sweden report: Music, UNESCO and Wikidata
  • UK report: Hundreds of Khalili images
  • USA report: Black Lunch Table & Museum Computer Network
  • Calendar: December's GLAM events
Read this edition in fullSingle-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Orphaned non-free image File:George Gamow.jpg

⚠

Thanks for uploading File:George Gamow.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 18:35, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

note re meetup

Hi. why hasn't a notice gone out of this upcoming meetup?

--Sm8900 (talk) 00:35, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

@Sm8900: I think that with Wikicon just finishing, it's just nobody's gotten around to it. Thanks for the reminder, though. @Pharos: are you available to do your centralnotice/massmessage wizardry? — Rhododendrites talk \\ 01:44, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
Presto! — Rhododendrites talk \\ 02:00, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
terrific! thanks so much! I do appreciate all your amazing work. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 15:14, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
December 16, 7pm: ONLINE WikiWednesday Salon NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-8pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop. To join the meeting from your computer or smartphone, just visit this link. More information about how to connect is available on the meetup page.

We look forward to seeing local Wikimedians, but would also like to invite folks from the greater New York metropolitan area (and beyond!) who might not typically be able to join us in person!

This month will include a discussion of the sixth annual Community Wishlist Survey, an opportunity for editors and other community members to submit proposals for fixes and features you'd like the Wikimedia Foundation's tech team to address. As always, it's the agenda anyone can edit, so please feel free to add any projects you'd like to share.

7:00pm - 8:00 pm online via Zoom (optional breakout rooms from 8:00-8:30)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

--Wikimedia New York City Team 01:55, 15 December 2020 (UTC)


Discussion on Growth team "add an image" idea

Hello Rhododendrites! I'm Marshall Miller; I'm the product manager for the WMF's Growth team, which works on features to help retain new editors. Lately, we have been working on this set of ideas called "structured tasks", which break down editing workflows into steps that make sense for newcomers and make sense on mobile devices. We're currently thinking about an idea for a workflow in which newcomers would be recommended images from Commons that might be a good fit for unillustrated Wikipedia articles. One of the community members participating in the conversation recommended you as someone who has a particularly strong grasp on the usage of images in articles. Since this project is in its beginning phases, we really depend on community members to help us think through the feasibility, opportunities, and pitfalls. If you have time, it would be really helpful to us if you could check out the project page and weigh in on the discussion. Thank you! -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 05:38, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

@MMiller (WMF): Thanks for reaching out. I'd be happy to help in any way I can, though I've been really busy with some off-wiki projects in these last few days so haven't had time to read through those pages. If there are specific questions/elements that would be more helpful for me to jump into than others, let me know; otherwise I'll try to take a look at the general topics soon.
In general, I think there's an incredible opportunity not just to "harness the crowd" but also as a low-investment way to bring new people in. My sense of the other data "games" relating to images have had rather mixed results (suggestededits in the wikipedia app and the one that invites people to add "depicts" statements), so my initial reaction from a Wikipedia standpoint is that there's some risk involved. We'd want articles that don't already have images, probably would want to omit all BLPs, and could use a flag that makes third party review easy as a sort of maintenance tag. SuggestedEdits has an edit filter so I could go through and fix a batch of the problematic ones a few weeks ago, for example, but maybe something even more visible in the article? Just first thoughts -- I look forward to learning more. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 18:05, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
@Rhododendrites: thank you for giving this a bit of thought. I'm glad to hear you think the idea has potential. This idea was, in fact, inspired by the "suggested edits" in the Android app, and we're working with that team on ideating around this. They may wind up building something similar. And the Growth team is actually in the middle of building our first "structured task" for adding wikilinks to articles (note that our team deploys everything on smaller wikis first, and we haven't brought any of our features to English Wikipedia yet). Thinking back to the Android context, I think that something that would set this image task apart from some of the other suggested edits is that they would be edits to Wikipedia, rather than to Commons or Wikidata (e.g. depicts statements). This may be more engaging to newcomers, since they would immediately be able to see and show their impact on real articles. But, as you say, it also comes with risk because the visibility is higher.
We would plan to only offer articles that are totally unillustrated, so that newcomers would be adding the first/only image to the article. And we would also include a tag so that people could monitor and patrol them if needed. I like your idea about excluding BLPs -- I presume because a higher level of care is needed for those articles. I can check to see if it's possible to filter our BLPs without filtering out all biographies (there are a fair number of unillustrated historical biographies with good images in Commons). I definitely look forward to when you have time to check out the whole project page and participate on the discussion page (we're hoping to have the bulk of the discussion in the next four weeks or so). But these are the questions that are top-of-mind right now:
  • What rules to use around placing the image into the article? For instance, perhaps we should do something like: if there is an infobox that has a slot for an image, put it in there, otherwise put it below the templates and above the body. But I'm concerned that there would be many edge cases or reasons such a set of rules wouldn't work.
  • How could we help newcomers write good captions for the images?
  • Given that most metadata from Commons is in English, how might we make a similar experience that could work for people who don't read English in other wikis?
  • What other pitfalls should we be concerned about? Where can newcomers go wrong here, so that we can help them?
Thank you for any time you can take on this! -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
@MMiller (WMF): Out of curiosity, is there any research which estimates the number of opportunities there may be. To demonstrate beyond anecdotal evidence that there is a large enough number of clearly relevant images that need to be placed in respective articles? I'm more often hunting down images off-wiki and uploading than searching Commons for what's already there (or it's possible I just do that without thinking!), so don't have a very clear idea. Those figures would, of course, vary by project/language. As for your questions:
Rules: When there's no image currently in the article, except with a rare BLP case I've never seen it be controversial, no matter the quality or whether it directly or obliquely depicts the subject. That placement sounds fine with me, but some people have their own personal preferences that I don't think you need to worry about. Worst case scenario is an image that isn't actually a good infobox photo (so a person in a large group photo for example, or an unknown interior room rather than the exterior of a building), then someone who isn't new can just move it out afterwards. In short, if there's no image at all and the image found does in some way depict the subject, I don't think you need to worry much.
Captions: It might be nice to have some variable caption advice, perhaps based on the "instance of" whatever the image "depicts" (or perhaps Wikidata won't be involved as much?). So advice for a person, a species, a building, etc. But of course we have a whole long MOS page for captions (because of course we do) which is probably better to summarize than anything I'd say.
Languages: It seems like a useful starting point would be just to see what images are in the corresponding English article? But I guess I'm not sure which data set you're working with. While captions are language-dependent, of course, I wouldn't have thought you'd be using those much. Even in English many captions on Commons are missing or poor. Depicts shouldn't be a problem with language, right?
Pitfalls: Based on what you said to my initial comments it sounds like you've already thought about the major "what can go wrong" stuff. Working only with unillustrated articles, removing BLPs, and having an edit filter/tag/whatnot on the edit to make it easy to review them removes a lot of the concerns I'd have. The rest (captions, placement, etc.) is IMO relatively minor and easy for other people to fix if necessary. I'd be curious about the research into suggestededits, though, because if that's any indication, getting people to understand the task at all and engage with it in good faith seems like the challenge. Anecdotally, when I did a spot check more than half of the edits were wrong/low quality. That kind of error rate kind of defeats the point. I raised it on the suggested edits talk page and at AN there, but didn't get much of a response. FYI. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:44, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi Rhododendrites -- I'm sorry for the delayed response; I lost track of your reply over the holidays, but I'm glad I rediscovered it. Here are my responses and follow-up questions:
Number of opportunities: Yes, this is something we looked into early on to make sure we were in the ballpark of having a sufficient number of tasks to offer in any given Wikipedia. You can see some of the rough estimates here, and we're going to make a fresh set of more accurate estimates here. Using English Wikipedia as an example (though we would first try out such a feature on smaller wikis), there are about 2.9 million unillustrated articles, and the algorithm would be able to propose images for something like 300,000 to 400,000 of them (about 10% of the unillustrated articles), with about 36,000 coming from Wikidata's P18 and the majority coming from the images used in the same articles on other language Wikipedias. With hundreds of thousands of images available, I think that's enough opportunity to build a feature for, and enough suggestions that it won't run out quickly. What do you think?
Captions: That's a good idea, to have variable advice for captions, more tailored to the type of article. Or perhaps we could show example captions from images placed on similar articles.
Languages: In running some user tests with our prototypes, it seems like the workflow people go through in doing the task is they look at the unillustrated article (e.g. "St. Paul's Church in Chicago") and see if the image could presumably be that entity (e.g. "yes, this is a church"). Then they look for the title of the article somewhere in the image's metadata to confirm that the image is that specific instance (e.g. "Good, the filename is StPaulsChicago.jpeg"). In these user tests, it looks like the most useful metadata fields from Commons for matching an image are the filename and the description, because those are the ones that have the highest coverage. The Commons captions and depicts are also useful, but are populated a lot less often than the description. And since the Commons image titles and descriptions are usually in English, this causes the challenge in other languages. The main idea I have for this right now is to only offer the task to people who can read English, similarly to how knowledge of two languages is needed to use the Content Translation Tool. This is unfortunate, because it would be best if everyone could use this task, regardless of their language skills.
Pitfalls: I'm glad you have feedback about the Android app's suggested edits. That team has a new product manager who wants to hear community thoughts on how to improve suggested edits. I'll start a new thread on your talk page to introduce her.
Thank you for your help. -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
@MMiller (WMF): Thanks for following up with this information. I'd love to test it out if/when it gets to that point. Just one more question to follow up: I've noticed, of course, that descriptions on Commons are in English by default (the major exceptions being some subset of featured pictures -- POTDs, POTY finalists, etc. -- and even then only a handful of languages). Is it worth making description-level translations more of a priority? Or is the idea to use Wikidata captions/depicts statements as an alternative? — Rhododendrites talk \\ 03:42, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
@Rhododendrites: about the testing, we actually have a new plan for how people like you can try it out. The Android team, the same team as JTanner (WMF) below, is going to use the existing suggested edits feed to build an image recommendation feature for learning purposes. Importantly, this "minimum viable product" won't save any edits to Wikipedia. It's just for us to gather data, improve the algorithm, and learn. It will be made clear to users of the app that their work is only being used for learning, not for edits. We'll let you know when you could try it out (if you have an Android device). About the descriptions: we actually recently calculated some numbers around local-language metadata on Commons. In general, local-language descriptions and local-language Wikidata captions are quite rare at this point. When we look at the images we're able to recommend, in most wikis fewer than 5% of them have local-language descriptions or captions. I agree that there's an opportunity there for some "upstream" tasks to encourage people to increase the coverage (like how the Android has a "translate image captions" task), and then that goodness would flow down into the task to put the images on articles. -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 02:26, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

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Thanks, Narutolovehinata5. Happy holidays to you, too! — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:39, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

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