Wikimedia Highlights
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The monthly Wikimedia Highlights summarize the most notable WMF activities and other movement news from the Wikimedia blog. The intention is to provide value for those readers who might not have the time to read the entire blog, and to facilitate translations.
The Wikimedia Highlights were started in 2011 as a combination of the most notable aspects of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation report and the Wikimedia engineering report (including basic financial and traffic data) with a brief selection of other important events in the Wikimedia movement during that month. Following the growth of the Wikimedia blog in scope and coverage, and with the Foundation's reporting switching from a monthly to a quarterly publication schedule, the Wikimedia Highlights now (since the October 2014 issue) focus on summarizing news from the Wikimedia blog entirely.
Each new issue is posted on the movement-wide announcement list WikimediaAnnounce-l and on the blog of the Wikimedia Foundation (RSS). You can also subscribe here to get a summary message delivered to your user talk page on any Wikimedia project right after each issue is published.
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"Sunset over Lake Mälar with 1854 statue of Carl XIV John of Sweden removed" by Jacob Truedson Demitz and KJacobsen, CC BY-SA 4.0; "Wmhack-5" by Saurabh Jain, public domain; "Wikidata English map" by Markus Krötzsch, TU Dresden, public domain/CC0. Collage by Andrew Sherman.
Here are the highlights from the Wikimedia blog in April 2016.
Find, Prioritize, and Recommend: An article recommendation system to fill knowledge gaps across Wikipedia
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Map by Markus Krötzsch, TU Dresden, public domain/CC0.
The Wikimedia Research team has designed a system that finds, ranks, and recommends missing articles to be created across different language versions of Wikipedia. It takes into account editor interests (extracted from their public contribution history), proficiency across languages, and the projected popularity of an article in the target language, if it were to be created. One controlled test of these results show that recommendations tripled the rate at which editors create articles, while maintaining the same level of article quality.
The tool comes with an API, currently integrated into the Content Translation tool. Over the coming months, the Wikimedia Research team will be monitoring the tool closely to learn more about how it’s being used by editors and how it can be further improved. If you try out the article recommendation tool, you can provide the Research team with feedback on our discussion page.
Participants fixing bugs. Image by Saurabh Jain, public domain.
The Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee hosted a one-day session to help students understand the working of the MediaWiki community. The day-long hackathon included every aspect of MediaWiki, from installing the software, setting up the environment to fixing some easy bugs, and submitting the patches for review. It was attended by 20 students, who were given certain pre-requisites and were selected based upon the fulfillment of these, thereby making certain that all the attendees were at the same phase. At the end of the day, we had 15 successful patch submissions (pushed) to the core. Additionally, 5 more changes have been committed locally and are to be pushed (as of now).
Photo by Jacob Truedson Demitz and KJacobsen, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Supreme Court of Sweden has ruled against Wikimedia Sverige (Sweden) in a case involving freedom of panorama in the country. The Court decided that Swedish copyright law does not allow Wikimedia Sverige to post images in its online database offentligkonst.se (a website / database covering publicly placed art) without permission from the artist.
The Wikimedia Foundation respectfully disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decision to erode the freedom of panorama that is a fundamental part of freedom of expression, freedom of information, and artistic expression. As we read it, the Swedish copyright law in question only limits the production of three-dimensional copies of sculptures, and cannot be interpreted as placing limits on pictures of public art being published on the internet. The fact that the copyright law allows images of public art on postcards, even for profit and without the artist’s consent, demonstrates this intent and, in our opinion, is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law.
In Brief
[edit]- TED is partnering with the Wikimedia community to add “ideas worth spreading” to Wikimedia projects: In a new partnership with Wikimedia community members, TED has donated the massive amount of metadata behind more than 2,000 talks, many of which have been transcribed and translated by a worldwide network of TED volunteers. By adding TED metadata to Wikidata, Wikimedians Jane Darnell and Andy Mabbett are documenting what knowledge is available from TED talks and making it easier for that information to be found and used across Wikimedia projects.
- Europeana Art History Challenge begins: With 40 languages, 30 countries, and hundreds of artworks, the Europeana Art History Challenge has now begun—the largest ever GLAM-Wiki competition and the first to highlight Wikidata. The project is “based” on Wikidata, and improving the quality of the metadata there about these works, their artists, genres etc. is just as much a part of this competition as are the translations on Wikipedia.
- He reaches across continents: editing the Urdu Wikipedia from the Czech Republic: Over the past seven years, Jiří attained a remarkable command of the Urdu language, which is the official language of Pakistan and six states in India, and has written or expanded a number of articles in the language’s Wikipedia. Jiří likes to contribute articles especially on historical, biological and pharmacological topics. He is especially proud of his contributions on Czech history, although he would like to focus on articles about medicinal plants in the near future.
Andrew Sherman, Digital Communications Intern
Wikimedia Foundation
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