Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-07-18/News and notes

The Wikimedia Foundation published the 2011–12 Annual Plan. Three of the seven stated goals for the year ahead relate to increasing editor numbers: overall, increasing active editors from 90,000 in March 2011 to 95,000 by June 2012. Over the same period, the Foundation seeks to increase the number of editors from the Global South from 15,700 to 19,000 and the number of female editors from 9,000 to 11,700. The plan includes a target to increase the number of page views from mobile devices from 726 million to two billion. Other planned improvements include increasing read uptime from 99.8% to 99.85%, creating a new development sandbox, and developing the visual editor for initial test deployment in December 2011. Full details are available on the Foundation wiki.

In unrelated news, the Foundation blogged about the new Article Feedback tool, advising that it is now in the process of being rolled out to all articles on English Wikipedia. The tool was first set up in September and has been slowly rolled out, being added to a total of 100,000 articles in May before the latest expansion. Now 370,000 articles will be added every day until all articles have been covered. According to research findings published in the blog post, one of the benefits of the tool is its increase in the number of people editing. The tool appears to provide a useful measure of quality for the criteria "completeness" and "trustworthiness", despite concerns that the system might be gamed by partisan editors or just misused by people to express their love or contempt for the topic rather than the quality of the article itself. Marshall Kirkpatrick at the technology blog ReadWriteWeb sums up the case for the change: "Rating articles looks like an even easier way for people to give feedback - and once you've started contributing that much, why not go a step further and improve the article you just rated?"

Wikipedia's emergence as an educational tool

In the aftermath of the

At the recent LocalGovCamp unconference in Birmingham, Wikipedia editor Andy Mabbett spoke about the GLAM-WIKI project, the relevance of Wikipedia for local government, his challenge to local councils to start articles about themselves, his interest in becoming a GLAM Ambassador or Wikipedian-in-residence (he's since been appointed Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador to ARKive) and a certain dead pigeon – The King of Rome, whose Wikipedia article he wrote as a result of a

• Wikimedia in Higher Ed documentation: Various media from the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit have been published online. They include videos of Sue Gardner's keynote, the student panel discussion and slides of the talks.
• Wikimedia UK seek chief executive: The British chapter of the Wikimedia movement have placed an advert for the organisation's first Chief Executive. The successful candidate should have "exceptional communication and relationship building abilities" and is expected to represent and promote the chapter to the wider world. The search was also declared on the wikimediauk mailing list; applications close on August 1.
• Israel anticipates Wikimania: The Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs issued a press release ahead of the annual Wikimania event, due to be held this year in Haifa from August 4-7. Describing the event as a coup for the city, the statement focused on the achievements of the Hebrew Wikipedia and Wikimedia Israel, as well as highlighting an initiative to donate to Cameroon and Benin computers preloaded with a static copy of the French Wikipedia for classrooms without Internet access.
• Plagiarists have to fear Wikipedians: An academic plagiarism case that was discovered in March by German Wikipedians while examining two medical dissertations as references for a Wikipedia article has now led the
  Wikia-hosted wikis (cf. previous Signpost coverage: "Citations needed in minister's thesis and elsewhere", "Jimmy Wales on wikis and plagiarism", see also VroniPlag Wiki
  ).
• Wikimedia Research Index: Dario Taraborelli, a Senior Research Analyst for the Foundation, blogged about a new Wikimedia Research Index, designed to "centralize documentation on research of Wikimedia projects, but also to create a place for the community to discuss and learn about this research" (the index itself).

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18 July 2011

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"Article Feedback" - I hope that it can be stopped from entering on plwiki (In the worst case it can be hidden in all skins) Bulwersator (talk) 07:25, 19 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"one of the benefits of the tool is its increase in the number of people editing" -> "Once users have successfully submitted a rating, a randomly selected subset of them are shown an invitation to edit the page. Of the users that were invited to edit, 17% attempted to edit the page." - so maybe invitations caused this effect? Bulwersator (talk) 07:27, 19 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah! I've always been a fan of article feedback. We'll have it on every article in no time. --Nathan2055^talk 17:19, 20 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The phrase "attempted to edit" is a little worrying. Rich Farmbrough, 09:12, 21 July 2011 (UTC).[reply]

I've come across this before, I think it means we have stats on people who click on edit, but not everyone who does so successfully saves. For busy articles such as brand new ones that could mean edit conflicts, popular wisdom has it that a large proportion off those who click edit but don't save are thrown by the html. Some of course will simply be defeated by the slow connection speeds, particularly in parts of the world where Wikipedia access is slowest. I hope quite a few are dissuaded by the editfilters, and of course some people will have second thoughts and decide that maybe the existing wording is the least inelegant way to express something. I don't think we should expect that every time someone clicks edit they will go on to click save, but its good to see that for this group it is a large majority. ϢereSpielChequers 12:26, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Media coverage of the feedback tool: http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1030099--you-can-now-rate-wikipedia-entries-not-everyone-is-pleased?bn=1 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.88.10.35 (talk) 11:12, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]