@Wikipedia; the dread that is one identity that binds us all

On Twitter Janeen Uzzell praised a blogpost that is the Wikimedia Foundation All Hands: 2020 Sketchbook and indeed it informs about current thinking, most of it is great and still, I find it absolutely terrifying.

There are several great sketches in there. Katherine Maher gave an asperational talk, I love it for Wikimedia to be seen as infrastructural, inclusive and even that that what we do does not have to be in our projects. Important is that she mentions "support systems" because they provide the input for much of our processes.

Important is the page on security and risk. All the important concepts are mentioned among them; likelihood, relative impact and management preparedness but also "plan for and mitigate risks".

What truly makes me uneasy is when it is said that we aim to clarify who we are in the world in one brand, Wikipedia. The idea is that when we are all branded as Wikipedia, things are likely to become easier. When you check out the website brandingwikipedia.org there is no argument; Wikipedia is free knowledge. When you check out what it is to do

• project and improve our reputation
• support our movement/growth
• be opt-in

In the abstract Wikipedia IS wonderful, in reality the concept of what Wikipedia is, is largely determined by the English Wikipedia. It it is fiercely independent, it is hardly inclusive and it has largely determined the maneuvering space the Wikimedia Foundation has. In order to "plan for and mitigate risks", I will mention several reasons why I am anxious because of this branding initiative.

• In the Commons OTRS they use English Wikipedia notions to determine if pictures can stay or are to be removed. Commons provides a service to all Wikimedia projects
• The query functionality for Commons is maintained by people from the Foundation. For more than half a year it puts a strain on the growth and usefulness of Wikidata. Tools have become glacially slow and often malfunction because an edit is not available when needed in further processing. It is not known what the position of the WMF director is in this. 
• This is about marketing and we have never done much marketing for any of our projects. What we have done was reactive and has been all about the English Wikipedia. Now consider this:
• Wikisource, we do not know what is available at what quality, it is all about editing and not about having people read the finished article, consequently we do not value Wikisource and fulfill its potential.
• So far Commons has always been English only. With the support of the "depicts" functionality, there is room to enable and market  a multilingual search engine. In the spirit of "it is a Wiki", it serves as an open invite to add labels in any and all of our languages and open up what Commons has to offer. It is how to market free content the Wiki way.
• In Wikidata we know many more concepts than what we know in any individual Wikipedias. We could use our data and inform as we have done for years in multilingual tools like Reasonator. This is an example in English Russian Chinese and Kannada. NB it takes additional labels to improve results and consequently this is the inclusive approach.
• When Wikipedians were willing to reflect on their own performance, we could help them solve their false friends issues.

One sketch in the sketchbook is a presentation by Jess Wade. It says that even Academia is biased. As the Wikimedia community we do not need to be subservient to any bias and most certainly not the bias that Wikipedia has brought us.

#Sharing in the Sum of all #Knowledge from a @Wikimedia perspective I

Sharing the sum of all knowledge is what we have always aimed for in our movement. In Commons we have realised a project that illustrates all Wikimedia projects and in Wikidata we have realised a project that links all Wikimedia projects and more.

When we tell the world about the most popular articles in Wikipedia, it is important to realise that we do not inform what the most popular subjects are. We could, but so far we don't. The most popular subjects is the sum of all traffic of all Wikipedia articles on the same subject. Providing this data is feasible; it is a "big data" question.

We do have accumulated data for the traffic of articles on all Wikipedias, we can link the articles to the Wikidata items. What follows is simple arithmetic. Powerful because it will show that English Wikipedia is less than fifty percent of all traffic. That will help make the existing bias for English Wikipedia and its subjects visible particularly because it will be possible to answer a question like: "What are the most popular subjects that do not have an article in English?" and compare those to popular diversity articles.

In Wikidata we know about the subjects of all Wikipedias but it too is very much a project based on English. That is a pity when Wikidata is to be the tool that helps us find what subjects people are looking for that are missing in a Wikipedia. For some there is an extension to the search functionality that helps finding information. It uses Wikidata and it supports automated descriptions.

Now consider that this tool is available on every Wikipedia. We would share more information.With some tinkering, we would know what is missing where. There are other opportunities; we could ask logged in users to help by adding labels for their language to improve Wikidata. When Wikidata does not include the missing information, we could ask them to add a Wikidata item and additional statements, a description to improve our search results.

This data approach is based on the result of a process; the negative results of our own Search and it is based on active cooperation of our users. At the same time, we accumulate negative results of search where there has been no interaction, link it to Wikidata labels and gain an understanding of the relevance of these missing articles. This fits in nicely with the marketing approach to "what it is that people want to read in a Wikipedia".
Thanks,
      GerardM

A #marketing approach to "what it is that people want to read in a @Wikipedia"

All the time people want to read articles in a Wikipedia, articles that are not there. For some Wikipedias that is obvious because there is so little and, based on what people read in other Wikipedias, recommendations have been made suggesting what would generate new readers.This has been the approach so far; a quite reasonable approach.

This approach does not consider cultural differences, it does not consider what is topical in a given "market". To find an answer to the question: what do people want to read, there are several strategies. One is what researchers do: they ask panels, write papers and once it is done there is a position to act upon. There are drawbacks; 

• you can only research so many Wikipedias
• for all the other Wikipedias there is no attention
• the composition of the panels is problematic particularly when they are self selecting
• there are no results while the research is being done

The objective of a marketing approach is centered around two questions: 

• what is it that people are looking for now (and cannot find) 
• what can be done to fulfill that demand now

The data needed for this approach; negative search results. People search for subjects all the time and there are all kinds of reasons why they do not find what they are looking for.. Spelling, disambiguation and nothing to find are all perfectly fine reasons for a no show. 

The "nothing to find" scenario is obvious; when it is sought often, we want an article. Exposing a list of missing articles is one motivator for people to write. Once they have written, we do have the data of how often an article was read. When the most popular new articles of the last month are shown, it is vindication for authors to have written popular articles. It is easy, obvious and it should be part of the data Wikimedia Foundation already collects.. In this way the data is put to use. It is also quite FAIR to make this data available. 

For the "disambiguation" issue, Wikidata may come to the rescue. It knows what is there and, it is easy enough to add items with the same name for disambiguation purposes. Combine this with automated descriptions and all that is requires is a user interface to guide people to what they are looking for. When there is "only" a Wikidata item, it follows that its results feature in the "no article" category.

The "spelling" issue is just a variation on a theme. Wikidata does allow for multiple labels. The search results may use of them as well. Common spelling errors are also a big part of the problem. With a bit of ingenuity it is not much of a problem either.

Marketing this marketing approach should not be hard. It just requires people to accept what is staring them in the face. It is easy to implement, it works for all the 280+ language and it is likely to give a boost to all the other Wikipedias but also to Wikidata.

Thanks,

        GerardM

#Wikimedia #swag

My key chain is probably the best #Wikipedia related object that I have. It is big, it is sturdy and before I had business cards it was a nice gimmick introducing the organisation I work for.

My key chain was given to me at a conference and now you can add it to your cart and have your own. The impression of the Wikimedia shop is one of a work in progress. There are already fifteen things you can choose from. The Wikipedia mug for instance is not yet available nor are the computer bags or baseball caps.

The shop started small and it is in English only. The good news is that there is so much room for growth. They could sell more things and there could be things to do with other projects. Internationalisation of the software used is under way and as the software is open source, translatewiki.net is an option.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Publishing final versions

On #Wikipedia, an article never finds its final form. There is no final form, there is always a potential next iteration, never mind the quality of the current version. The same is true for Wiktionary; there is always room for another translation, another attribute.

When you want final forms, you produce something static. There are many reasons why this is done. One reason is to create a final version and create a collection of articles and calling it a book. Such books can be priced and it is quite legitimate to sell them on ebay. This has been done and when another such publication is found there are usually some people who complain about it.

For Wikisource and Wikibooks however there are finished products. In Wikisource a project can be considered finished once the proof reading of a digital text has been completed of what started as a scanned text. Only when it is finished, it is ready for easy public consumption.

What Wikisource does is provide the tools for this process. Essentially Wikisource serves a community that is engaged in a workflow. What it does not do so well is publish the finished products and find an audience for them.

The work at Wikisource is important. Its finished products are relevant and they are worthwhile. They fit in our aim to share in the sum of all knowledge. We can give things away, we can ask for a contribution but we owe it to our public that we make a best effort in making all this knowledge we are the custodian of easily accessible.

We may need a new project .. "Wikipublish" where we publish final versions of our "Wikisources". Where we publish collections of Wikipedia articles. Where we publish our "Wikibooks". We do not need much marketing, we need to make our finished goods available to a public and provide it in a format that it finds easy to digest.
Thanks,
       GerardM