Bayesian.Ninja

Wikimania Goes Outdoors  (please never again) Thanks to the kind support of Wikimedia Israel, I attended Wikimania 2016 in the alpine village of  Esino Lario located in the Lombardy region of northen Italy. I was also able to attend the Hackathon event.  Compared to other Wikimedia conferences which I have attended this was a challenging event. The Wikimedia foundation has undergone a management crisis with the result of staff leaving in droves. For this Wikimania, the number of scholarships for staff has been restricted so attendance by staff developers was much less with many development teams not being represented.  This has had two outcomes one is that it is unclear what is being developed by WMF these days but the upside is that community projects and developers got more emphasis. The Kiwix Ecosystem Kiwix - the offline wikipedia reader Two such projects are Kiwix and the " community wishlist ". Kiwix is the brainc...

education (image credit: Sean MacEntee ) Thanks to a generous grant by MW.IL and WMF I was able to attend the 2013 Wikisym/Open Sim 2013 which took place at the Cyberport in Hong Kong.  I will not be going into details about all the conference session as I and others will be covering it in detail in Wikimedia's research newsletter syndicated in English  Wikipedia 's signpost as well as on meta.  Goals I came to wikisym 2013 to demo some new technology aimed at supporting educators and their students during formative assessments . Specifically I have developed a number of metrics to assess student activity on wiki.  Cyberport-cinema (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I had written a draft of a paper covering the subject, but since I am more of a developer  than an educator, I was somewhat at a loss to complete the paper before wikisym. My plan was in essence to: Reach out and locate other researchers and p...

MIND THE GAP (Photo credit: sarahstierch ) At Wikisym last year I discussed an unpopular opinion that readers who see errors and don't fix them are free riders and how a similar case holds for readers who do neither edit nor contribute to the fundraiser. Of course there are many caveats such as not ever seeing the edit button, difficulties in using the UI and of course the community.  At the time the feedback tool had been launched and this had lowered the bar to participation. Until the community decided other wise - raising the bar to participation and cynically pointing out that in most cases this was worse then free riding - it was encouraging "parasitic" behaviour - participation that was not constructive and which only sucked up resources. As my own experience in the Yoga project was radically different I had not bothered to go into this. One of the questions that tends to come up when considering women and the gender gap is in Wikipedia is: ...

A segment of a social network (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In my opinion, the most notable missing features of Wikipedia is the ability to network socially . Lack of social features conspire to minimise participants'  social capital (the expected collective or economic benefits derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and groups). Lack of networking capabilities is in line with a pervasive attitude that ownership of contributions should be suppressed, external authority ignored and that knowledge matters in the project. Accordingly social costs of participation are growing. Participants in the project have great difficulty in acquiring social capital. The stakes of establishing world opinion tend to outweigh social stakes. Accordingly there is a growing gender gap, under-representation of cultural minorities and disrespect of real world authority. Currently users will try to establish social capital by listing on their user page their m...

Last week I was asked by +Charles Matthews  to review WM.UK upcoming Wikipedia tutoring system being developed on on the open source Moodle system. I've been thinking of different option to better support Wikipedia coaching in different languages  I have been reviewing and testing Moodle in the last few weeks to that end. I'm really interested in developing course ware for both English and Hebrew editions (as a start). Multilingual content While Moddle is internationalized, support of multilingual content requires using a somewhat clumsy technique. One need to use html and store different languages content in top level div elements. Then you have to switch on Moodle's multilingual filter which can hide all the language version which are incompatible with the language selector's settings. However due to a bug the the html editor mangles the html code and mangles the top level <span...