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Gerard, it would be good, if you could add links to all the extension
pages in <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Uniwiki>, which point
to pages which use those extensions. There are links to two pages who
use the Uniwiki package, but I was not able to find live examples of
most of the single extensions. Where can I find CreatePage live in
action, or 'Generic Edit Page' or Layouts? Screenshots on the single
extension pages would be good too.


Marcus Buck

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Fajro wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:08 PM, geni <geniice@gmail.com> wrote:
>> No. You can argue for the tolerance of minority languages but actively
>> promoting them conflicts with Wikimedia's stated objectives.
>
> How?
>
> Do you edit wikipedia to give "Free Access To All Human Knowledge"
> only to the educated elite?

It seems to me that this would differ greatly depending on the minority
language. Some minority languages, despite being "minority", have
millions of monolingual speakers. Clearly if these people are going to
get Wikipedia's information without learning a new language, we need a
good Wikipedia in that language, because otherwise the information is
not available in a language they can understand.

But other minority languages have few to no monolingual speakers; some
barely have any native speakers at all. The presence or absence of a
Wikipedia in those language is more of an issue of language politics and
language preservation than actual dissemination of an encyclopedia's
contents.

-Mark

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Hoi,
In the blogging I have done on this subject, I included screen shots of the
CreatePage extension. One screen shot shows the extension without a change
to the skin, the other shows the same extension on a UNICEF wiki. The screen
shot was created while we were testing it on one of the
ExtensionTesting<http://extensiontesting.wikiation.nl/>environments.
This environment has now been scratched because we moved on
with the testing to other extensions.

What the UNIWIKI clearly shows, it that the CreatePage extension is used in
combination with templates for an article of a specific type. This would
urge users to include predefined headings and categories. This would be a
boon to newbie editors and it would be a gentle way to urge a start with a
more complete structure. In this way we might even get less stubs as a
connsequence of implementing this functionality.

Marcus, you are probably right. As you are obviously getting your mind
around this issue, you are in a great position to do exactly what you
propose.
Thanks,
GerardM

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2008/11/improving-mediawiki-usability.html

2008/12/2 Marcus Buck <me@marcusbuck.org>

> Gerard, it would be good, if you could add links to all the extension
> pages in <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Uniwiki>, which point
> to pages which use those extensions. There are links to two pages who
> use the Uniwiki package, but I was not able to find live examples of
> most of the single extensions. Where can I find CreatePage live in
> action, or 'Generic Edit Page' or Layouts? Screenshots on the single
> extension pages would be good too.
>
>
> Marcus Buck
>
> _______________________________________________
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Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> When 80% are considered to be a failure,

We might have failures, but "80% of projects" is not a useful
metric. As we define new projects, such as the Swahili Wikinews,
Swahili Wikiversity and Swahili Wikispecies, there is no end to
the number of failures we might have. We can easily reach 98%
failures. So we cannot use the improvement of this metric as our
goal.

To further illustrate this, by closing down the failing 80% of WMF
projects, the remaining projects would be 100% successful.

So please use statistics and metrics that make sense.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Hoi,
Another way to approach the number would be; currently 80% of our projects
are failing. Improved usability may mean that this number goes down to 60%
maybe even 40%. This would be a big improvement. I am not in favour of
creating 100% success by excluding others until it is necessary and until
out options to improve their chances of success. Given the aims of the WMF,
projects that are currently failing are still projects where the WMF intends
to do well. As the costs of the failing projects is negligible there is no
real reason to remove them.
Thanks,
GerardM

2008/12/2 Lars Aronsson <lars@aronsson.se>

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
> > When 80% are considered to be a failure,
>
> We might have failures, but "80% of projects" is not a useful
> metric. As we define new projects, such as the Swahili Wikinews,
> Swahili Wikiversity and Swahili Wikispecies, there is no end to
> the number of failures we might have. We can easily reach 98%
> failures. So we cannot use the improvement of this metric as our
> goal.
>
> To further illustrate this, by closing down the failing 80% of WMF
> projects, the remaining projects would be 100% successful.
>
> So please use statistics and metrics that make sense.
>
>
> --
> Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
> Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
> _______________________________________________
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> To further illustrate this, by closing down the failing 80% of WMF
> projects, the remaining projects would be 100% successful.
>
> So please use statistics and metrics that make sense.
>
>
Lars, have you read my message today in the other thread? I argue that
dividing stuff by projects is not a good metric to determine what is
successful and what is not.

Cheers
Yaroslav


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Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> It seems obvious to people who deal with small projects that usability is
> one of the big issue when it comes to the moribunt status of our small
> projects. The question I put to you, what are we going to do to first agree
> that this is an issue and then to deal with this issue. Do we care that 80%
> of our projects are failing?

I don't think the metric you propose is a particularly useful one. We
could reduce it to 0% overnight by just deleting all the wikis that, by
your definition, are failing. Or we could increase it to 90% by relaxing
the project creation rules. It's not demonstrably bad for small projects
to speculatively create wikis and then wait to see if they flourish.

Perhaps it would be better to evaluate our success in terms of our goals.
We aim to bring the sum of all human knowledge to the people of the world
in their own language. So how many words (or other unit of information) do
we have in each language, and what do you get when you multiply that by
the number of speakers of the language and sum over all projects? The
result could be compared to older methods of information transfer, such as
libraries.

-- Tim Starling


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Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Another way to approach the number would be; currently 80% of
> our projects are failing. Improved usability may mean that this
> number goes down to 60% maybe even 40%. This would be a big
> improvement.

Gerard, you're very stubborn, even when you're wrong. Look, I'm
not against improving projects. I'm not against you. I'm just
against using poorly defined metrics for measuring improvement.

A working metric could be the total number (not the share) of
successful projects. Do we have 130 successful projects today?
(This is just a quick guess: 80 languages of Wikipedia having more
than 10,000 articles, plus 50 other projects.) Maybe we can have
170 next year. This metric is not affected by whether or not
Swahili Wikinews (supposedly yet another failed project) gets
started. Let's study whether the page creation extensions can
make that number 160 or 180.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Nathan <nawrich@gmail.com> wrote:
> Milos - you wrote: "To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful
> Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian
> Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles
> than en.wp." Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes
> sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful
> than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm
> curious to know what data changed your mind.

I have to make one correction: Usually, when I say "Serbia", I think
"Belgrade". My "intuition" is connected to Belgrade and I am not so
able to analyze the whole Serbia. Belgrade develops similarly to other
European cities, while parts of Serbia may vary significantly
regionally. But, including Belgrade's "gravitation area", it includes
between 1/4 and 1/3 of population of Serbia (without Kosovo).

I had social bias for a long time. For people around me, which means
fairly educated persons between their 20s and 50s, English Wikipedia
is indeed the most useful project. When some of them is trying to find
informations about [[Earth]], [[Alexander the Great]], [[Amazon]],
[[Arthur C. Clarke]], [[Mikhail Bulgakov]], [[Apache HTTP Server]]
etc., they are going to en.wp. A number of them are not able to
participate actively in English, but they are fully able to understand
what is written in one encyclopedic article.

A couple of years passed from the time when I realized that it was my
social bias. I think that in 2005 I've started to have this kind of
conversations: "Wikipedia is very useful for me!" -- "You mean,
Wikipedia in English?" -- "No, Wikipedia in Serbian."

One more personal bias which I had was a reason why I am using one
encyclopedia. I am using it to find informations which don't below to
something which may be called "a basic set of informations". I am
using Wikipedia to find informations which don't below to my general
knowledge. So, when I am searching for, let's say, some information
from astronomy, I am not going to the articles like [[Moon]] or
[[Jupiter]] are, but about newly discovered planets, [[Timeline of the
Big Bang]] or [[Ultimate fate of the universe]].

BUT, it seems that the most important role of Wikipedia is not to
cover those fields. The most important role is to cover the basic
educational fields, where pupils may find informations for their
classes. So, even I think that [[Ultimate fate of the universe]] is a
very important article, much more important than the article about
lesser known Serbian feudal ruler, like [[sr:Grgur Brankoviæ]] is, for
one pupil who learns history from the 5th grade of primary school
(while astronomy is a course just in some of the high schools at, I
think, 4th grade), this Serbian feudal ruler is much more important.

There is no article about the ultimate fate of the universe on sr.wp,
while there is no article about Grgur Brankoviæ on en.wp. Conclusion
about usefulness is obvious: for the most of pupils and their parents
the article about Grgur Brankoviæ may be used (and it is in Serbian),
while speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are
comparable with watching Battlestar Galactica or Star Track (and it is
in English).
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Milos Rancic wrote:

> A couple of years passed from the time when I realized that it
> was my social bias. I think that in 2005 I've started to have
> this kind of conversations: "Wikipedia is very useful for me!"
> -- "You mean, Wikipedia in English?" -- "No, Wikipedia in
> Serbian."


At the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago, many
of the 100+ participants were librarians or teachers in social
sciences, and a smaller number were into natural sciences and
technology. All presentations were in Swedish and on the first
day's workshops we used the Swedish Wikipedia as our playground.
On the second day, one of the presentations was made by an
astronomer, Dainis Dravins, who talked about his experience from
letting undergraduate college students do their project
presentations either as posters or as Wikipedia articles.

This picture is from his lecture,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LA2_Wikipedia_Academy_2008_lecture_by_Dainis_Dravins.jpg

Only after a while did it become apparent that he was talking of
the English Wikipedia. Some surprised librarian asked "are you
now talking of the English Wikipedia?" His answer was something
like "yes, the Swedish is almost completely useless" (for advanced
astronomy). In the undergraduate astronomy classes he was
teaching, all literature is in English. This seemed like an
unknown planet to the Swedish librarians. And I guess that their
surprise came as an equal surprise to the astronomer.

I think one of the greatest values of Wikipedia Academy is when
the attendees get to see each other's reactions to Wikipedia.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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2008/12/3 Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod@mccme.ru>:

>> Only after a while did it become apparent that he was talking of
>> the English Wikipedia. Some surprised librarian asked "are you
>> now talking of the English Wikipedia?" His answer was something
>> like "yes, the Swedish is almost completely useless" (for advanced
>> astronomy). In the undergraduate astronomy classes he was
>> teaching, all literature is in English. This seemed like an
>> unknown planet to the Swedish librarians. And I guess that their
>> surprise came as an equal surprise to the astronomer.

> After eight years of teaching physics at a Dutch university and active
> participation in scientific activities all over the country, I am still to
> see a scientific talk given in Dutch.


en:wp is very much an international Wikipedia, not just for English
native speakers at all. This leads to some difficulties (apparently
infinite supplies of nationalist POV-pushers in some conflicts, for
example), but is almost certainly good for NPOV.

This is no reason to neglect the other Wikipedias - English just
happens to be the current lingua franca and may not be in 100 years.


- d.

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I agree that creating an article should be much easier. Creating a wysiwyg
editor would greatly facilitate that.

It would also help if we promoted a culture where people are invited to
create new articles. Many hard code wikipedians seem to have adopted the
attitude that red links are ugly - so red links are converted to normal
text. But a red link is and should be an invitation to create an article.

2008/12/3 Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com>

> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Nathan <nawrich@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Milos - you wrote: "To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful
> > Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong.
> Serbian
> > Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles
> > than en.wp." Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes
> > sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more
> useful
> > than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm
> > curious to know what data changed your mind.
>
> I have to make one correction: Usually, when I say "Serbia", I think
> "Belgrade". My "intuition" is connected to Belgrade and I am not so
> able to analyze the whole Serbia. Belgrade develops similarly to other
> European cities, while parts of Serbia may vary significantly
> regionally. But, including Belgrade's "gravitation area", it includes
> between 1/4 and 1/3 of population of Serbia (without Kosovo).
>
> I had social bias for a long time. For people around me, which means
> fairly educated persons between their 20s and 50s, English Wikipedia
> is indeed the most useful project. When some of them is trying to find
> informations about [[Earth]], [[Alexander the Great]], [[Amazon]],
> [[Arthur C. Clarke]], [[Mikhail Bulgakov]], [[Apache HTTP Server]]
> etc., they are going to en.wp. A number of them are not able to
> participate actively in English, but they are fully able to understand
> what is written in one encyclopedic article.
>
> A couple of years passed from the time when I realized that it was my
> social bias. I think that in 2005 I've started to have this kind of
> conversations: "Wikipedia is very useful for me!" -- "You mean,
> Wikipedia in English?" -- "No, Wikipedia in Serbian."
>
> One more personal bias which I had was a reason why I am using one
> encyclopedia. I am using it to find informations which don't below to
> something which may be called "a basic set of informations". I am
> using Wikipedia to find informations which don't below to my general
> knowledge. So, when I am searching for, let's say, some information
> from astronomy, I am not going to the articles like [[Moon]] or
> [[Jupiter]] are, but about newly discovered planets, [[Timeline of the
> Big Bang]] or [[Ultimate fate of the universe]].
>
> BUT, it seems that the most important role of Wikipedia is not to
> cover those fields. The most important role is to cover the basic
> educational fields, where pupils may find informations for their
> classes. So, even I think that [[Ultimate fate of the universe]] is a
> very important article, much more important than the article about
> lesser known Serbian feudal ruler, like [[sr:Grgur Branković]] is, for
> one pupil who learns history from the 5th grade of primary school
> (while astronomy is a course just in some of the high schools at, I
> think, 4th grade), this Serbian feudal ruler is much more important.
>
> There is no article about the ultimate fate of the universe on sr.wp,
> while there is no article about Grgur Branković on en.wp. Conclusion
> about usefulness is obvious: for the most of pupils and their parents
> the article about Grgur Branković may be used (and it is in Serbian),
> while speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are
> comparable with watching Battlestar Galactica or Star Track (and it is
> in English).
> _______________________________________________
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> Only after a while did it become apparent that he was talking of
> the English Wikipedia. Some surprised librarian asked "are you
> now talking of the English Wikipedia?" His answer was something
> like "yes, the Swedish is almost completely useless" (for advanced
> astronomy). In the undergraduate astronomy classes he was
> teaching, all literature is in English. This seemed like an
> unknown planet to the Swedish librarians. And I guess that their
> surprise came as an equal surprise to the astronomer.
>

After eight years of teaching physics at a Dutch university and active
participation in scientific activities all over the country, I am still to
see a scientific talk given in Dutch.

Cheers
Yaroslav


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Tim Starling wrote:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> It seems obvious to people who deal with small projects that usability is
>> one of the big issue when it comes to the moribunt status of our small
>> projects. The question I put to you, what are we going to do to first agree
>> that this is an issue and then to deal with this issue. Do we care that 80%
>> of our projects are failing?
>>
>
> I don't think the metric you propose is a particularly useful one. We
> could reduce it to 0% overnight by just deleting all the wikis that, by
> your definition, are failing. Or we could increase it to 90% by relaxing
> the project creation rules. It's not demonstrably bad for small projects
> to speculatively create wikis and then wait to see if they flourish.
>
> Perhaps it would be better to evaluate our success in terms of our goals.
> We aim to bring the sum of all human knowledge to the people of the world
> in their own language. So how many words (or other unit of information) do
> we have in each language, and what do you get when you multiply that by
> the number of speakers of the language and sum over all projects? The
> result could be compared to older methods of information transfer, such as
> libraries.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>

I would emphasize this message by pointing out that for nearly a full
year of its existence, the Finnish language wikipedia would quite
easily have qualified as a failing wikipedia. And look at where we are
now. Closing in on the 200 000 article milestone. Sure, for other projects
the time of gestation will be longer.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> Geni wrote:
>>
>>>>> "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage
>>>>> people around the world " first line of the mission statement. By
>>>>> actively promoting minority languages you lock more people into them
>>>>> which is not consistent with trying to empower them.
>>>>>
>>
>> I wrote:
>>
>>>> I do not share geni's views at all.
>>>>
>>
>> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>>
>>> It doesn't seem that anyone does...
>>>
>>
>>
>> I should add at the same time that I think that it is a good thing for
>> people to try to learn a relevant global language in addition to their
>> local language, with the choice depending upon personal context.
>>
>>

I think you are really being too humble here in not mentioning
the fact that despite being a native speaker of *the* global "lingua
franca" you have yourself made an effort to "talk the extra mile"
and learn other languages.

>> In many parts of the world and for many people, English is an excellent
>> choice of a second language. In other parts of the world (Francophone
>> Africa for example), French is an excellent choice. Chinese might be
>> good for some people. Russian for others. Hindi for others. There are
>> many variables.
>>
>> And I hope that Wikipedia is helpful to people both in learning about
>> the facts of reality (usually most comfortably done in your mother
>> tongue) and in learning another language. I don't see these goals as
>> being in competition at all, but rather mutually reinforcing.
>>
>> --Jimbo
>>

At your service,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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On 12/2/08, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
> There is no article about the ultimate fate of the universe on sr.wp,
> while there is no article about Grgur Branković on en.wp. Conclusion
> about usefulness is obvious: for the most of pupils and their parents
> the article about Grgur Branković may be used (and it is in Serbian),
> while speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are
> comparable with watching Battlestar Galactica or Star Track (and it is
> in English).

Milos I would say your English fluency is good enough to write one, please do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grgur_Branković&action=edit&redlink=1

The less obvious benefit of supporting "failing projects" is that most
of them will eventually return the favor by identifying topics which
are encyclopedic despite being completely unknown to native English
speakers. This alone is a good enough reason to keep these projects
open.

Same with the other article you mentioned, would it be anything like this? :-)
http://sr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Конаčни_судбина_Свемира&action=edit&redlink=1

—C.W.
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