isn’t just a “meetup”. Please don’t hold the fact that we actually have meetings against us!

Many excellent American non-profits choose to work on something less than a continental scale, and we hope to follow their model- one of my favorite local ones is the .

To see some of the other stuff we’re doing, come on down to in July!

It\’s worth pointing out, however, that the resistance we found is suggestive of the fact that the newbies are finding it hard to contribute material that passes the filter of the community. This is somewhat consistent with your interpretation.

The most interesting bit to me is about growing “resistance” and the shrinking “middle class”. I wonder if, rather than resistance pushing the middle class out, both trends are primarily the result of articles maturing. Immature articles generally grow without much serious refactoring or reversion, but once they basically have material that touches on all the content relevant to the article, improving quality (inevitably?) entails more of the kind of editing that shows up as “resistance”, and is the kind of work that fewer people enjoy doing. In other words, it’s all about low-hanging fruit.

It is Wikipedia, with ads!! You guys should comment that on the next podcast.

If you want to be part of future episodes, the skype public chat linked in the sidebar is the place to watch. If you have skype, click on that.

Am I in the wrong place?

Maury

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning.php
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning-ii.php

The only criteria for deciding article deletion should be “is it possible that someone might want to read this”? If you delete articles because they are too short, poorly referenced, or in list format, you are damaging your customer relationship - and for what?

Legitimate encyclopedia envy is a poor motivation for policy making.

If some small minds wish to make a “professional” wiki, so be it, but the popular content should not be destroyed.

How about a check box in the search page stating “Include only articles which meet Wikipedia’s minimum standards”

http://www.wikihorror.wordpress.com

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_missed_articles

Of the most popular search terms without articles, most are music-related, and I think come from external sites that try to automatically link artist names to articles. Almost all of these have never been created (often because the artist is new and/or technically non-notable, or because the title is not really a legit article title). But there are a bunch of long list titles that represent deleted content. These deleted lists, like “List of U.S. Army acronyms and expressions” and “List of advertising slogans”, were getting hundreds of hits per day, and are still getting tens of residual hits per day (from outside links?) months after deletion.

One of my favorites, deleted a while ago, was “List of snowclones”. Alas. I’ve long felt that we should have different inclusion standards for lists than for articles. Even if those types of things are ultimately unmanageable, they were the kinds of things that made people (myself included) love Wikipedia in its early years. At least we still have “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush”

We are not representing any official position and all opinions are the responsibility of their owners. Furthermore, we make no suggestion that we are “neutral” nor overtly non-political. When politics strays into our area of conversation then we make our opinions known.

Finally, although I don’t recall if I said “good guys” as a quote, even if I did it was not to imply that the Australian-left is always good and everyone else isn’t. Rather, that in the topic of Internet censorship (in Aust.) anyone who is fighting that is, in my books, a “good guy”.

I hope this clarifies things.

I like the “fair notice” concept a lot, Andrew.

Regarding the Technology Review article, I thought about this a bit because as with you I thought it was obviously and utterly wrong to say that Wikipedia ever purports to present the “truth”. But I think perhaps the author’s point, which was not well articulated, may have been that the problem is that people treat it as “the truth”, because of the -pedia moniker which is a kind of appeal to authority. That maybe readers think the deal is, “Trust us because we are a reference work, part of an academic tradition.” Of course we Wikimedians don’t exactly intend to offer this deal, but that is what people take from it.
And probably that is a problem, but I am not sure it is totally Wikipedia’s problem, rather than the populace at large’s.

http://ericsaysfuckyou.blogspot.com/2008/10/as-promised-heres-wikipedia-is-broken.html

So yeah, basically it’s audio versions of wikipedia articles. I’m sorry if this is the wrong forum for letting you know about this but I couldn’t find a contact link on your site.

Regarding Wikiquote, the very first post I wrote on my blog was about why I thought Wikispecies & Wikiquote would be the first projects to “leave the family”, so to speak. Wikiquote is not well-defensible from the WMF Mission or Vision.

As an aside note, isn’t it a bad thing if Wikipedia content is written in the same way as academic content? Aren’t we trying to bring knowledge to the people, instead of making it dry and “academic-sounding” for no particular reason?

Cheers,

Thomas Larsen

As for the conference format, I think that’s a great idea. There should be tutorial and how-tos at the beginning of the conference. Part of my proposal to Taiwan was doing some training/hands on in the Wikimania Lounge, so let’s see if we can’t get them to do more of that.

For future Wikimanias, I would like to see a program like this:

MON: “Wikimedia Academy”. Purely newbie day, lots of ‘what is X project’ sessions, how to contribute.
TUE: “Talkfest” - BoFs + possibly unconference format. Very broad topics: Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Commons, Wikinews, Wikisource, Copyright/licenses, Chapters, Wikimedia & education, Wikimedia & academia, Translation, Community.
WED-FRI: Traditional conference format.

Consdering how little support the non-Wikipedia projects generally get (is MediaWiki even removely suited to a lexicography resource or is it just the tool we have at hand?), I wonder if the question should be put to the community rather than the Board.

Also, I wouldn’t have said WV was the most hobbling of the WMF projects. C’mon, it’s like a year old! What shape was Wikipedia in at that time?

We actually packed out our small room. I guess some people liked having an alternative. But it was funny; about 10-15 minutes into our workshop, there was 2 or 3 *loud* announcements that Jimmy’s talk was now starting in the other room. As if to tell our audience, “This is your last chance!”

That said, I found it to be a somewhat disconcerting notion that basic geographical information added en masse by a bot would be considered to be a negative thing simply because of a “data management” issue. From an ideal point of view, I see this to be analagous to making a dictionary but leaving out all of the words that start with X because they are used less and would take extra work to find.

To summarize, I think that the amount of entries on Wikipedia is its key greatness–for a resident of Smalltown in Tinyland to find a preexisting entry will allow that resident to add that, say, it recently opened a school, and the article becomes all the better. However, the same casual user might be ignorant to creating a new article, thus the information goes unadded.

Again, this point of view is idealistic, and I certainly bow to practical voices who say that otherwise.

First, your information about what this proposed bot would do is a little out-of-date. After many editors expressed their concerns, the bot owner announced he would work closely with the relevant WikiProjects. I don’t know how this will work with some countries without related WikiProjects (for instance, Somalia), but this is a good move.

Second, of some 530 woredas, or local districts, & the 300 (out of 930) towns in Ethiopia, I’ve been surprised (both in a positive & negative way) of what I have been able to find. For instance, one fellow editor, Yom, who knew of my personal effort directed me to a useful compendium of material at the website of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala — which I reference in many of my articles. I would be surprised if similar resources don’t exist manhy of other countries.

Geoff

RE +34:51 Album cover and fair use

I have the idea when I listen to this item that the point that Gerard is trying to make clear why some Wikipedia’s are not using the nude album cover is not understand or at least not like it is intended.

The including or not including of certain possible offensive pictures or what ever type of illustration is always a local
decision made by the community of that wiki.

But before you can possibly include a certain illustration that image must have an acceptable license regardless about what it is about. That is step 1.

Going back to the album cover issue of the nude girl;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg

There is a reason why it is uploaded to EN Wikipedia and not commons. It is used as “fair use”. Fair use, as an US law concept to use copyrighted material is in direct violation of the core mission of Wikipedia to create a free encyclopedia that can be freely used, spread and modified because it contains copyrighted content; the fair use content.

Because most non-English languages Wikipedia still believe in the original mission of Wikipedia to create a truly free encyclopedia the do not allow the inclusion of copyrighted material on there wiki. Especially because using it with be in violation of the local laws regarding copyright. Despite the beliefs of certain people US laws are not applicable in Europa for example.

The end result is off cource that this album cover is not used on most Wikipedias. Not because what is depicted on it but because it is illegal to use it by law and in violation of the objective of the Wikipedia mission.

Yes, the panel was right, Volapuk was the work of a bot run amok. The bot operator ‎Smeira (the only active member of the Volapuk community) said that he wanted to ‎artificially inflate his numbers to advertise the Volapuk language. Please note there are an estimated 20 speakers of this language world-wide.‎

The bot-operator essentially took databases of geographic data combined it with data out ‎of the various wikis, and fed them to his bot and out spat a bunch of articles. ‎Unfortunately, last I checked, the bot wasn’t well-controlled, and many of the pages were ‎filled with leftover vestiges of text and broken templates where the article was stolen ‎from. So, yes, there are 115000 stubs there, but they probably wouldn’t be considered ‎quality stubs by the other 19 Volapukists of the world.‎

Since the guy started there have been a couple of failed attempts to get him to stop ‎puffing up the scores in the form of Requests for Deletion at Meta. In the second ‎proposal, Jimmy Wales himself has asked them to stop it and play nice, but stopped short ‎of declaring an edict to close it down. I think both of those proposals were defeated by ‎Smeira’s bringing in outside voters to support his position, and browbeating everyone ‎that disagreed with him.‎

Essentially, the Volapuk Wikipedia is chock-full of geography stubs. 97% of their ‎activity supports the bot-made cookie-cutter geography stubs. ‎

The only good that I’ve seen come out of this is the Esperanto Wikipedia giving up bot-‎creation of articles cold-turkey. We have called a moratorium on new articles by bot, and ‎we’re now creating articles the good old fashioned way. Yes, it’s slower, but there’s a big ‎difference in quality.‎

I appreciate some of Erik Moelle ideas but I fear things are cascading towards a Cathedral Model. I could be wrong, it may be just my own fears speaking ! But I think there is still a tendency for 1. “Experts” to take control saying that they are being beneficial … 2. Users to become subjugated to those experts because “they know best”. It’s a sort of insidious drip drip effect. Are there enough people involved in the debate ? Why am I the only comment here? Maybe I’m missing where the discussion is ?

DJ Barney

that would have made more sense if you’d said, “every user would have to download the 133gigabyte full-edit-history dump, in order for a program to analyze any part of it.”

One of the problems I could see w/ a distributed structure is the need for a box in any case to distribute the chunks of the 130GB or so dump and control the whole thing.

That, and we’d need a client. Anyone care to write one?

if you need such a great amount of CPU power to do the statistics for the wikipedia, why don´t you split the CPU Power an a lot aff computers, like the SETI project. Distributet computing is the name for it. That would be a cheap way to get anough CPU power

You know i’ve been buzzing around “getting a few things in place”. Can i just point you at this forum’s thread at Gizmo. http://forum.gizmoproject.com/viewtopic.php?t=8884

Gizmo won’t mean much to yu, but it’s a Skype look-alike which is open.i.e It can talk to other IP networks, which Skype never will. So you’ll understand why I’ve shied off talking so far.

So could I ask that you download & have a play with it, and we get together for a quiet chat below the radar soon. I’m looking at going to HP for funding to broaden the conversations outside the usual WMF world (and stuffed if I’m going to do that for nothing as well, or expect you to).

P.S. Liam, Will probably be meeting your mates at DoS on Thursday, so we’ll see what they (and the National Library) say. regards.

This Flagged Revisions discussion would have been greatly improved if everyone was familiar with the actual proposals on en-wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions/Sighted_versions
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions/Quality_versions

There are separate proposals for “sighted versions” and “quality versions”. Marking “sighted versions”, which just means free of vandalism and is essentially a more open replacement for semi-protection (although the requirement for sighter status is currently proposed as somewhat higher than autoconfirmation) is proposed as the first step.

The more radical change is to actually certify versions according to quality, which will require a more serious introduction of a ‘higher’ form of editor.

The test wiki doesn’t reflect the en-wiki proposals as they currently stand.

But overall my feedback is still basically the same,… MOAR PLZ!

Your point about return to basic principles like WP:DONTBITE and WP:BOLD is well-made. Wikipedia grew to be what it is because of these principles. However, as you also correctly say, what we need now is a different type of editor: experts willing to contribute from their field of knowledge, not hobbyists typing out some stuff they heard on Discovery Channel. The problem is that WP:BITE etc. attract weirdos as much as they attract experts, and weirdos tend to have a lot more free time on their hands. I think that a newbie expert editor understands the need for WP:CITE (after all, similar requirements are made for academic papers). Such an expert will not find it difficult to write a good article about, say, communism and religion in sub-Saharan Africa (to use your example). The problem will be to get the expert to put the article on his watchlist and keep fixing the inaccuracies placed by religious or communist POV-pushers. I have seen several expert users become exasperated with this and leave. We will have to find the golden path between the two parts of WP’s slogan: “the free encyclopedia” and “that anyone can edit.” That golden path may well have to change as WP grows and becomes more professional.

I have lots to contribute and would have a new application on my iPod Touch (iPhone with out the phone and surf the internet by wi fi) which is wikipedia. i would like to talk about where wikipedia will go in WEB 3.0 with iPhone.

I think Andrew’s main argument about future growth is dead on… the numbers don’t lie, but projecting them forward relies on the assumption of things (the social and technological context of editing) basically staying the same. To approach anywhere near “the sum of all human knowledge”, there will have to be major changes that make it more appealing to contribute, especially for professional knowledge workers.

Take a look at my new blog post, part of which is a response to the “future of Wikipedia” discussion: http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2008/03/future-of-wikipedia-my-take-part-1.html

I have to agree with Yaron here, Fuzheado. Perhaps I misunderstood you but I was really dumbfounded by your suggestion Wikipedia already has a majority of the relevant content covered. I come across what I consider to be important gaps all the time. For example, the coverage of philosophy, politics, the social sciences, and especially history is really skimpy. There’s a very large amount of important material in these disciplines with no articles at all, let alone articles approaching acceptable quality or completeness. And this has a bearing on other areas of WP as well. So for example contemporary science is well covered while the history of science is not so well covered. And as a historian Roy Rosenzweig has pointed out, the history which does exist on WP is very factualist in its orientation, whereas a majority of history as a discipline is based on not simply catalogueing discrete events but evaluation their significance in relation to one another.

Fuzheado, you make the comment that we’re approaching a point where most new content will be oriented towards keeping up with current events as time goes on. Well in some sense the same thing has to be done with the past, and that’s a huge undertaking.