Two "user stories" for Nigeria

I spoke with my Nigerian friend Olatunde Olalekan Isaac on Facebook about growing more interest for Wikimedia content in Nigeria. I will not bore you with a verbatim discussion we had. Bringing you two user stories is much more satisfying.

Nigerian kids looking for pictures of a fireman goto their Wikipedia and search for an "onye oku oku". The search engine knows from where the request comes and shows the pictures of Nigerian firemen first.

The pictures are from Commons, in the meta data of the picture it says where the photo was taken. Happy kids, happy teachers and happy Nigerian Wikimedians because this brings more attention for the projects they care for.

At first it is an experiment that brings more traffic in their language. They then launch a photo contest in Nigeria.

People find pictures in Nigerian languages and to increase the choice of pictures to choose from, a photo contest is launched of everyday Nigerian objects, traffic signs, shops of all kinds, professionals, "be bold and show us your Nigeria" is the mantra. People find more pictures about Nigeria and even after the contest people continue to increase the selection people use for an illustration.

The Wikimedia Foundation has another challenge, there are copycats all over the world and the public use of Commons increases by 200% in a few months time.

Thanks,  GerardM 

Calling a spade a spade and the "friendly space policy"

In my previous blog post I established that facts supported by science trump personal opinions, even community consensus. It follows that pointing out a biased opinion can be hugely unpopular and considered offensive. The "friendly space policy" is applied on the spot and at best can be later appealed at the "trust and safety". This is after the fact, it takes a huge time effort and it is why I did not bother. One other reason is that I told the respected Wikipedian that what he said was biased and I did not make excuses for saying so after prodding by a trusted officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. I am sanctioned and can no longer use certain functions.

I run for a seat on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation and even though it is a popularity contest, I am not in it to be Mr Wonderful; I will not kiss babies. My platform is to improve our service particularly to the projects other than English Wikipedia. To be successful, I have established that this is doable and I have to undermine accepted opinions that prevent us from improving on our service.

I truly respect the Wikipedian who made the biased remarks but I will not apologise for pointing his bias out. 

When I am to establish my aims at board level, there must be acceptance that we do not serve everyone with the sum of all the knowledge we have when there is this persistent bias towards our English speaking public. The recent developments at the Croatian Wikipedia show that "community consensus" can be overridden when this is necessary to establish our accepted global Wikimedia policies. It follows that the board should be mindful of the evolving science about the "gender gap" and insist English Wikipedia to consider its recommendations (aka clean up its act). It follows that even the most respected English Wikipedian and in the light of the "friendly space policy" can be called out for such bias.

As to the organisation of the WMF; its director reports to the board and is to inform about the development for other languages and the effects on the traffic in other languages. 

Thanks, GerardM

#Wikipedia for free in #Africa with #Orange

Orange is the first to sign up to Wikipedia zero. Our ambition is a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. It is really awesome that the 70.4 million customers of Orange will be able to access Wikipedia in 20 countries for free on their mobile phone. They are in Botswana, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Jordan, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Madagascar, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, Uganda, Niger, Senegal, Congo and Vanuatu.

Obviously, many languages are spoken in all these languages. It will be particularly interesting to learn what the effect will be on the editor community. So far, most if not all editing is done on computers. With this new potential for growing our readers, the availability of content is what will limit our growth.

These are the languages spoken in Africa, the numbers however reflect global traffic. As you can see, the existing traffic for the languages native to Africa is still really small.

For the Wikimedians interested and involved in Africa, this is the time to write content for Africa. When this content is what people read, it now has much more of a potential to really make a difference in sharing the sum of all knowledge with every human being.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia usage data is more complete

When you compile #statistics about the usage of Wikipedia, you need raw data to base your statistics on. The data was not complete and consequently the resulting statistics can be a little bit off.

Ariel Glenn on Wikitech-l "I think we finally have a complete copy from December 2007 through August 2011 of the pageview stats scrounged from various sources, now available on our dumps server."

Having more complete data will probably not change the understanding of the Wikipedia history that much. As Wikipedia celebrated its 10th anniversary, there is obviously more data that is missing. We do welcome any and all data that gives us even more of an insight.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Why the Chinese #Wikipedia is doing so well

At #Wikimania there was one puzzle that no one new an answer to: Why is the Chinese Wikipedia doing so well. It does so well that it trades places regularly with the Dutch Wikipedia for the 10th place of Wikipedias in reach.

A group of Wikimaniacs where leaving from Ben Gurion international airport and one of them was Chinese. He was able to explain this riddle; the robot.txt for the Chinese Wikipedia used to be both in traditional and simplified Chinese. The result was confusion for the bots of organisations like Google, Microsoft et al.

By changing the text these bots now know how to deal with the Chinese Wikipedia and this results in substantially more traffic. This fits in nicely with the graph that is produced; there is a spike and after this the growth stays on the same trajectory.

The question arises if there are more projects with similar issues.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Traffic for the #Odia #Wikipedia

The Odia Wikipedia has less then 1000 articles and it wants to grow everything. Quantity, quality, traffic, editors, localisations there must be something more.

Thankfully, the main page is with its many red links inviting to new editors. However, if I was one of the editors, I would concentrate on feeding the search engines with articles about popular subjects. The Sambad newspaper or any other newspaper brings today's news, they do this day in and day out. The background information to their news items however is what people often have to find elsewhere.

The recent outreach has had a real effect; almost doubling the traffic in a month. My bet is that with the clever selection of new articles it is feasible to continue this explosive traffic growth. There are a few considerations:

• Wikipedia is about encyclopaedic information, not about news
• people like well chosen illustrations
• subjects that will feature on TV will be popular
• Wikipedia provides a web of information
• red links are good but do not have too many
• select the subjects first that will likely be in the news again
• two linked articles are better then one of the same length
• remember, Google is your friend

With a population in Orissa of 27,112,376 people and a literacy of some 73.45% there is a big enough public for spectacular growth of the Odia Wikipedia. Also Odia is widely spoken outside Orissa as well.

There is not much the Wikimedia Foundation can do for you but provide the best possible platform for you to write your Wikipedia on. Advice is freely available, it is for you to make it work.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Writing what will be popular by readers

blog post by Wizardist on this subject

On the #Belarusian #Wikipedia a stub was written about Robert Bunsen on the day when Google celebrated his birthday with a doodle. This was an experiment to learn if the topic would be popular.

In Belarus people google in Russian when they seek information. When good quality information on the "essential topics" is available in either of the two Belarusian Wikipedias people may get used to seeking information in their own language.

The English article on Robert Bunsen was new as well

The Belarusian article was read 778 times. This is 10 times more then the typical number of reads for a Belarusian article. The numbers for the English article prove that the availability for a popular topic generates a lot of traffic for the English Wikipedia as well.

The Belarusian Wikipedias want to become more popular. They observed that what is in the public's eye generates disproportionally more traffic. In the traffic statistics we can find what people are missing the most. When this information is available, we can prevent misses by writing new articles or by adding redirects. This will not only motivate our editors, it helps us bring knowledge to all the people of our world.
Thanks,
       GerardM