1,261 karma · joined November 1, 2012
In the rest of the West (CA, OR, WA, ID, MT) there have been basically zero wolf reintroductions recently. Wolf packs are spreading naturally back to their historical range, and agencies are instead focused on tracking populations and working with local communities to regulate hunting, protect the livelihoods of ranchers, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil_regulation_and_adult...
If you want to go deep on the topic, this is a great read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10955085-extra-virginity
Ultimately, he doesn't have the power to physically prevent people from going to the beach, and if enough people ignored his buffoonery the state would probably not consider it a useful expenditure of policing resources to enforce it.
Also, this is a minor quibble, but Pinterest does not have a Like system any longer. I know because I worked on deprecating it.
TL;DR: the largest chunk of the budget goes to the two departments that do engineering/design/PM/data science.
On your last point ("for all we know most of their staff time is off building stuff like Wiktionary") it's actually a big gripe in the smaller communities that probably 90% of the time and attention goes to Wikipedia.
The author of the op-ed is a devoted editor but seems almost totally ignorant of how development is conducted. The Foundation has been doing transparent quarterly/yearly roadmap planning alongside their annual plan / budget cycle (which is shared all publicly). On a shorter timeframe, they are pretty serious about Agile/Scrum. You can see on https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors that today they even have a team of half a dozen full time Scrum masters. If what he thinks is missing is serious, detailed planning, he's sorely wrong.
The platform (MediaWiki) is still a FOSS community so you can find project requirements docs/roadmaps all over mediawiki.org, all the bugs on Phabricator, follow along on mailing lists, and even see commits on their Gerrit instance.
Agile isn't my cup of tea personally and I could grok criticisms of the organization's software output (ignoring the fact that they're buried under 10+ years of technical debt...), but it takes minimal digging to find all their plans and timelines. I would venture that the author chose not to dig into this because he, like a lot of entrenched old school editors, viscerally hates some of the past attempts to make MediaWiki a modern collaboration platform, such as building a WYSIWYG editor and a threaded discussion system to replace wiki talk pages.
Wikipedia admin here. This is the right way to go about it, though I would add "making it notable" doesn't just include product work, but includes generating press about your startup. Especially if you can get something more mainstream than tech press like TechCrunch, The Verge, etc.
Feedback like this should be taken with a grain of salt, since these people are testers, not necessarily like your users in all respects. But it's still really valuable. I've caught numerous errors that test data would not help me understand easily.
Combine remote usability testing through something like usertesting.com with prototyping, and you've got a really rapid way to get feedback on the cheap, even if you don't have enough site visitors to get statistical significance on a reasonable time frame.
I'm originally from Portland, which is a cyclist's heaven for a major city, but there's still too much competition with cars. I've also spent time in small towns like Davis, which is probably the cycling capital of the States. The only solution I can see for really safe cycling is to create cycling-only lanes that don't compete with cars and pedestrians.
People who want and need access to Wikipedia Zero are like these South African high school students, living in a slum: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/19/movement-for-free-acce...
It seems to me that one of things this app might enforce is the idea that your work isn't really done until you've documented it and/or shared it. Pushing for measurement of using tools like Dropbox, Gmail, Basecamp, Google Drive, etc. might enforce this ethos. Yes, it's definitely not perfect: it's not tracking that time when you lean over and ask the designer next to you for feedback, and so on. But it seems worth an experimental try.
I know many very productive people who seem less productive than they are, because they hate going to some project management tool and documenting what they accomplished. If we could semi-automate documentation of work being done, such as by hooking in to Github, that might make their progress more visible with little to no effort.
Right now, some of our most popular articles in English are perpetually semi-protected, meaning anonymous or brand new contributors can't edit. That means millions of pageviews are on articles that don't even have an edit button visible. :(
Some Wikipedias, like German, Polish, Russian and others already use a system called "Flagged Revisions", which is an obtuse name for software that instead of protecting a page, delays edits and makes them subject to approval from someone experienced. Unfortunately the workflow for this software is clunky and it doesn't seem to be helping German and other Wikipedias stay vibrant.
I'd really like to A/B test a very easy "suggest an edit" as an alternative. I think it could work, because Wikipedians are already pretty good at staying on top of the request queue, if you manage to make a request on the Talk page. One thing we'd need to be careful of is not garnering suggestions by cannibalizing the people who would otherwise have just edited.
Hey, I'm the product manager for that work (also quoted in the article). I thought I might mention that we've A/B tested our task suggestion workflow extensively, and the answer is definitively that Wikipedians want to do both things. I can share links to all our research, which is public, if you want.
There are basically two kinds of people who sign up for Wikipedia: those with something to do in mind, and those who want a suggestion of where to start. The evidence we've gathered so far shows that many new contributors like being able to get started and learn the ropes doing something that's easy and not intimidating. They have a positive first experience editing, and then they typically move on to other tasks, having gained more confidence. We are giving people options, not requiring anyone to do N number of grammatical fixes in order to earn badges, privileges or anything of the sort.
I should also note that among more advanced editors, there is actually a popular Guild of Copyeditors that does highly-coordinated copyediting drives on Wikipedia. Not to mention all the peer review for quality that happens in other places. Never underestimate the interest of grammar nazis in fixing your comma usage. ;)
One related piece of infrastructure is the automated tagging of edits. There are already several tags automatically applied to edits with a suspected conflict of interest regarding linking or autobiographies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Tags).
So in other words, deliberate falsehoods or manipulation by PR people or paid agents that hide their affiliation with a company is already a ToU violation.
Citation needed.
According to recent traffic reports,[1] some of the most popular biographies of living people recently are as follows:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorde (449,871 views) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai (362,657 views) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus (342,994 views)
Other popular bios include Barack Obama and Ted Cruz. Obviously popularity of these swings heavily toward recent news items in most cases.
Now, I wouldn't argue against the assertion that fans of these celebrities have written in some amazing fluff in these articles. But you'd really claim that these articles have been spun by PR people? Looking at the history and the content, I seriously doubt it.
Now, if you don't care for how Wikipedia's reliance on third party sources bends content... well, there's not much anyone can do to help you. That's a problem of the media environment Wikipedia exists in, and you haven't really proposed a viable alternative to relying on secondary source material. The way we correct for bias in sources is to use more sources, and be selective about ones we use, taking in to account the fact that some are highly unreliable.
In the end, if you have a problem with how Wikipedia relies on certain sources or what it says on certain articles, there's an easy solution: edit the damn thing. I don't particularly care about the Miley Cyrus article, but if I did, I'd be doing something about it. Wikipedia's best defense against fluff, spin, and PR influence is for smart people (like Hacker News denizens) to participate.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Most registered Wikipedians today (59%) say they edited anonymously before registering. That doesn't mean they all necessarily did, but it suggests it's being used in this "try before you buy" way. One piece of data that backs this up for us...
If you're anonymous, there is a call to action on the edit window that informs you're not logged in, and invites you to sign up. That one small link on the edit interface is 9% of all signups on English Wikipedia, and these users have a much higher first time edit rate. On some other language Wikipedias, like Spanish and Japanese, it's even higher -- between 10 and 20% of all signups. I find this somewhat boggling, because in theory it's a horrible experience to interrupt people mid-edit.
I think your tests with Workflowly and the first commenters examples are still correct by and large. Getting users to commit after they try something without signup is tricky, and you lose the ability to easily call them back via email.
For me, the larger lesson is that you need to test this rigorously and be prepared for either approach to fail. It all depends on your product and what your users are like. Turns out many successful Wikipedians are the type who love to dive right in and change things. People who declare that either approach is always going to be superior are falling prey to a bad assumption about how all products and users are alike.
Perhaps most interesting is that it's not a search engine feature or anything really built in to the software beyond Unicode support. Rather, English Wikipedians made a ton of redirects, primarily by hand. Fun use case for this is using the emoji keyboard on iOS to search Wikipedia for 💩 or similar silly things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
This is in the site navigation on mobile web and it's accessible on desktop. The official Wikipedia apps also have a nearby feature as well, but I wouldn't recommend you use them to be honest. Our mobile web view is much faster, and allows you edit, upload photos, watch pages, etc.
Also, the citation you give is about phone tapping, not the kind of NSA-style online surveillance we're talking about trying to protect against with HTTPS support.
IMO, in general you shouldn't consider your activity over HTTP private regardless of whether you trust a particular government or not. Even some random individual running Firesheep in your local cafe is a threat in such a case.
About the larger point: even with the fully craptastic information we've learned about NSA snooping, there are huge advantages for Wikipedia users to have our organization and Wikipedia data hosted in the United States. As one big one: I'm not sure Wikipedia could survive if it wasn't for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.[1]
1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/cda-230-success-cases-...
Wikimedia employee here. FYI, we're headquartered in SF, but we have no datacenter here. All traffic goes through our datacenters in FL, VA, and Amsterdam.