company:wikimedia foundation

  • Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly. - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-wikimedia-foundation.html

    Unlike social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, Wikipedia relies largely on unpaid volunteers to handle reports of harassment.

    In response to complaints about pervasive harassment, the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and supports its community of volunteers, has promised new strategies to curb abuse. In recent months, the foundation has rolled out a more sophisticated blocking tool that it hopes can better control the harassment plaguing some users.

    Sydney Poore, a community health strategist with the foundation, said that when the free encyclopedia was established in 2001, it initially attracted lots of editors who were “tech-oriented” men. That led to a culture that was not always accepting of outside opinions, said Ms. Poore, who has edited Wikipedia for 13 years.

    “We’re making strong efforts to reverse that,” she said, “but it doesn’t happen overnight.”

    A few informed clicks on any Wikipedia article can reveal the lengthy discussions that shape a published narrative. According to interviews with Wikipedians around the world, those digital back rooms are where harassment often begins. A spirited debate over a detail in an article can spiral into one user spewing personal attacks against another.

    “If you out yourself as a feminist or L.G.B.T., you will tend to be more targeted,” said Natacha Rault, a Wikipedia editor who lives in Geneva and founded a project that aims to reduce the gender gap on the website.

    On French-language Wikipedia, where Ms. Rault does much of her editing, discussions about gender can often lead to vitriol. Ms. Rault said there were six months of heated debate about whether to label the article on Britain’s leader, Theresa May, with the feminine version of “prime minister” (première ministre), rather than the masculine one (premier ministre).

    Wikipedians also began to discuss the “content gender gap,” which includes an imbalance in the gender distribution of biographies on the site. The latest analysis, released this month, said about 18 percent of 1.6 million biographies on the English-language Wikipedia were of women. That is up from about 15 percent in 2014, partially because of activists trying to move the needle.

    “The idea is to provide volunteer administrators with a more targeted, more nuanced ability to respond to conflicts,” Ms. Lo said.

    Partial blocks are active on five Wikipedias, including those in Italian and Arabic, and foundation staff members expect it to be introduced to English-language Wikipedia this year. The foundation is also in the early stages of a private reporting system where users could report harassment, Ms. Lo said.

    But there are limits to how effective institutional change can be in curbing harassment on Wikipedia. In the case of Mx. Gethen, their harasser kept posting from different IP addresses, making it difficult for a blocking tool to be effective.

    Although the abuser no longer haunts their internet presence, Mx. Gethen said the sometimes hostile culture on Wikipedia had reduced their editing on the site.

    “I’m not getting paid for this,” they said. “Why should I volunteer my time to be abused?”

    #Wikipédia

  • Everipedia Culture Roundup #12: Smooth Groves and Big Moves
    https://hackernoon.com/everipedia-culture-roundup-12-smooth-groves-and-big-moves-c2cb048d0bc6?s

    Some sweet #dance moves by Big Bird and friendsThose who dance professionally can attest that when your moves are on point, it feels like you are one with the universe. It is one of many variations of being in the flow state where nothing else matters but being in the present moment, and all of your attention and focus is on the next step. The young stunna Seth Vangeldren embodies this, which is evident in his memorizing videos of him dancing. Digital artisans from across the internet have channeled their energy to create memes on behalf of the Yang Gang in a grassroots effort to support Andrew Yang’s Presidential Campaign. Erika Herzog is an information specialist whose attempts to highlight issues in Wikipedia led to her ousting from the Wikimedia Foundation. Operating out of Hong (...)

    #blockchain #technology #africa #everipedia-partnership

  • The future is here today : you can’t play Bach on Facebook because Sony says they own his compositions
    https://boingboing.net/2018/09/05/mozart-bach-sorta-mach.html

    James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Facebook account, but it didn’t go up — Facebook’s copyright filtering system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds’ worth of his personal performance of a song whose composer has been dead for 300 years. This is a glimpse of the near future. In one week, the European Parliament will vote on a proposal to force all online services to implement (...)

    #Sony #Facebook #algorithme #ContentID #Robocopyright #censure #filtrage

    • his personal performance

      On doit bien pouvoir dire que c’est bien son interprétation à lui, sur son instrument à lui, qui a été reconnue comme un plagiat d’un enregistrement de Sony.

      Et là, c’est une des références du texte : le chercheur publie des enregistrements antérieurs dans le domaine public, reconnus simplement par la signature musicale...

      Les contrôleurs vont faire valoir que c’est un risque à courir afin de défendre les bases de notre civilisation... et que l’intelligence artificielle va s’améliorer... et qu’il y a une procédure d’appel.

      Can Beethoven send takedown requests ? A first-hand account of one German professor’s experience with overly broad upload filters – Wikimedia Foundation
      https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/08/27/can-beethoven-send-takedown-requests-a-first-hand-account-of-on

      I decided to open a different YouTube account “Labeltest” to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain. I appealed each of these decisions, explaining that 1) the composers of these works had been dead for more than 70 years, 2) the recordings were first published before 1963, and 3) these takedown request did not provide justification in their property rights under the German Copyright Act.

      I only received more notices, this time about a recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5, which was accompanied by the message: “Copyrighted content was found in your video. The claimant allows its content to be used in your YouTube video. However, advertisements may be displayed.” Once again, this was a mistaken notification. The recording was one by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Lorin Maazel, which was released in 1961 and is therefore in the public domain. Seeking help, I emailed YouTube, but their reply, “[…] thank you for contacting Google Inc. Please note that due to the large number of enquiries, e-mails received at this e-mail address support-de@google.com cannot be read and acknowledged” was less than reassuring.

  • #Wikipedia4Refugees

    Hanno tradotto voci di Wikipedia nella loro lingua d’origine. Protagonisti sono stati richiedenti asilo/rifugiati accolti in Trentino attivati grazie a un progetto partito “dal basso” e intitolato “Wikipedia4Refugees”. Alcuni fra i partecipanti alla prima esperienza (hanno ricevuto gli attestati nel dicembre 2017) parteciperanno il 14 aprile 2018 all’evento “#Wikilab” nell’ambito di Trento Smart City Week 2018, dando seguito all’ampliamento dell’enciclopedia libera:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=cm9ycB2e2Zg


    #wikipedia #réfugiés #langue_maternelle #traductions #Digital_literacy #langues

    Wikipedia : #Wikipedia_4_Refugees

    Wikipedia 4 Refugees è un progetto che vuole coinvolgere un piccolo gruppo di richiedenti asilo/rifugiati accolti in Trentino nel processo di traduzione di voci Wikipedia dall’italiano alle lingue dei partecipanti. Sono previste 10 lezioni tenute da volontari e con il supporto di alcuni mediatori linguistici. Il progetto è iniziato il 16 ottobre a Trento.


    https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_4_Refugees

    • Wikipedia 4 Refugees – a digital experimental project for asylum seekers

      At the end of the summer in 2017, in Trento, a city in Northern Italy, a group of teachers, digital right activists and members of the local Wikipedia community came together to organize a course dedicated to teaching to recently arrived asylum seekers how to contribute to Wikipedia in their own languages. The initiative, called Wikipedia4Refugees, was born after a two years long experience in teaching digital literacy classes to groups of migrants, in which the teachers noticed the enthusiasm the students – mostly from western Africa and southern Asia and with no or little formal education – showed when they learned they could read the encyclopaedia not only in Italian, French of English, but also in their own native languages.

      Thanks to a small grant from the Wikimedia Foundation – an organization that supports grassroots initiatives in and around the community of Wikipedia contributors – and the logistic support of the local university, the course started in October 2017. The students were first shown the functioning of Wikipedia and of its system of open contributions, in which everybody, after creating an account, can modify an existing article or add one anew, provided that it respects the rules that the community gave itself. Then, they were guided in the process of selecting one article from the Italian version of the online encyclopaedia. Articles could be about refugees rights, the organization of Italian civic society, or local cultural heritage. After making sure these articles had no counterpart in the Wikipedia edition of the students’ native languages (Fula, Bambarà, Pashto, and Urdu), the translation work began. After a few weeks, the students were ready to publish their articles.

      The project was highly experimental, as it combined innovative teaching methods (based on the active participation of the students and on the use of activities offline to convey principles related to the online), an alternative use of the Internet (based on active, high-quality participation) and contamination between very different cultures for what concerns the way information is created, received, and interpreted (using Wikipedia as a reliable media source and working to improve it.) The objective was primarily to make the students aware of their power as creators of information and involve them in a collaborative effort of knowledge-building – one in which everyone has the same voice and there is no distinction between being a migrant or a local, speaking Italian or an African language. An added challenge was the degree of technical knowledge required to be able to contribute to Wikipedia: the students knew how to use a computer, but had to learn the special language in which Wikipedia pages are built.

      One of the most interesting moments of the course was to compare the different ways authority plays a role in the creation of information. During an in-class discussion on the way consensus is reached regarding what can and cannot live on Wikipedia – especially in case of controversial articles –, many students were surprised to learn that there is no central authority deciding on these matters, but that decisions are reached through the continuous interaction among the members of the community. After an expert Wikipedia user was struggling to describe the process to the class, one of the students stood up and asked, sincerely baffled: “All this is all good and right, but in the end: who has the Truth”? We, the teachers, had no answer. But it reminded us that it is the questions we keep on asking ourselves, beyond any cultural, political or territorial barrier that make us all fundamentally human.

      https://www.getclosetoopera.eu/wikipedia-4-refugees-a-digital-experimental-project-for-asylum-seeke

  • One Woman’s Brilliant “Fuck You” to #Wikipedia #Trolls
    https://backchannel.com/one-womans-brilliant-fuck-you-to-wikipedia-trolls-aab4107d374b

    [Emily Temple-Wood started] the Women Scientists WikiProject, to improve the quality and coverage of biographies of notable achievers in this field. “Unfortunately, part of Wikipedia’s systemic bias is that women in science are woefully underrepresented. Let’s change that!” reads a note at the top of the project page. The community now includes 90 editors.

    She’s not the only person leading an effort to increase diversity on Wikipedia — public gatherings to promote inspirational women, African American artists and LGBT-related content, known as edit-a-thons, pop up sporadically. But Aaron Halfaker, a principal research scientist at Wikimedia Foundation, noticed that starting in mid-2013 — about six months after Temple-Wood kicked off the WikiProject—articles about women scientists began to grow much faster than the rest of Wikipedia.

    #femmes #recherche #sexisme #portrait via @maliciarogue

  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps

    The maps project aims to build cartography technologies for all #Wikimedia projects, at a scale sufficient for their widespread usage.

    The production maps cluster (See also on Wikitech) is in development by the WMF Discovery team. The implementation has various components including:

    #Kartotherian Github (primary) / Gerrit (mirror) - a server capable of providing #map #tiles in #vector (pbf) or raster (png) formats, as well as #static_map snapshots of any size for a given location.
    – Tilerator Github (primary) / Gerrit (mirror) – a distributed backend tile generation service with a jobque
    – A flexible sources system to set up the needed storage and processing pipeline

    A version of the tile server is now in operation at maps.wikimedia.org.

    – It serves tiles at URLs such as

    (bitmap) or …/791.json (OSM data – waterways, roads, place labels, etc.).
    – It can scale images for the high-DPI devices – e.g. 1.5x, 2x, etc …/791@1.3x.png
    – It can provide static maps with a given size and scaling, e.g.

    Kartotherian - OpenStreetMap Wiki

    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kartotherian

    Kartotherian is a vector tile server based on open-source Mapbox stack, developed by Wikimedia Foundation for use on Wikipedia. It is horizontally scalable and designed for high loads.

    Architecture

    Kartotherian is a set of 3 services:

    – Kartotherian - tile server itself.
    – Tilerator - tile rendering queue.
    – Tilerator-UI (optional) - UI for issuing commands to Tilerator.

    While Kartotherian can be configured to generate tiles on the fly straight from PostgreSQL, this is intended for development use only and the main mode of operation is to convert vector tiles generated by Tilerator into whatever user-requested format. An HTTP cache such as Varnish is recommended for reducing load on Kartotherian.

    https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian

    #mapserver

  • Le gouvernement russe a annoncé son intention de bloquer tout #Wikipédia en #Russie, sur un prétexte de drogue.

    Aujourd’hui, cela ne semble pas vraiment fait. Si on demande aux (environ) 400 sondes RIPE Atlas qui opèrent en Russie, la grande majorité semble pouvoir résoudre le nom ru.wikipedia.org :

    % python resolve-name.py -c RU ru.wikipedia.org
    Measurement #2347461 for ru.wikipedia.org/A uses 439 probes
    [91.198.174.192] : 405 occurrences
    [10.10.128.2] : 1 occurrences
    [208.80.154.224] : 6 occurrences
    [94.231.114.190] : 1 occurrences
    [212.67.0.36] : 1 occurrences
    Test done at 2015-08-25T08:22:07Z

    Les quelques sondes qui voient une autre adresse que la bonne (91.198.174.192) voient des adresses IP localisées en Russie (détournement #DNS).

    Il ne semble pas non plus y avoir de blocage IP : les sondes peuvent se connecter et récupèrent apparemment un certificat correct (je n’ai pas validé les certificats obtenus, juste regardé les champs) :

    % python cert-name.py -c RU -r 500 91.198.174.192
    427 probes reported
    [FAILED TO GET A CERT: timeout reading hello] : 2 occurrences
    [FAILED TO GET A CERT: connect: timeout] : 3 occurrences
    [<X509Name object '/C=US/ST=California/L=San Francisco/O=Wikimedia Foundation, Inc./CN=*.wikipedia.org'>] : 422 occurrences
    Test done at 2015-08-25T08:43:39Z

    Sinon, quelques liens intéressants, surtout dus à https://twitter.com/MaliciaRogue qu’on remercie bien fort :

    La décision de justice en Russie https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/ru/5/51/2-290-2015.pdf

    Le communiqué de l’agence TASS (oui, comme du temps de la guerre froide) http://tass.ru/en/russia/816153

    L’article de Meduza qui a été le premier à l’annoncer https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/08/24/russia-bans-wikipedia

    L’annonce du gouvernement russe http://rkn.gov.ru/news/rsoc/news34253.htm

    Une synthèse des Izvestia http://izvestia.ru/news/590259

    Une synthèse en anglais http://www.rt.com/politics/313243-russia-watchdog-decides-to-block

    Et, en français : http://www.numerama.com/magazine/33991-la-russie-ordonne-aux-fai-de-bloquer-la-version-russe-de-wikipedia.h

  • Stop Spying on #Wikipedia Users, by Jimmy Wales (NYTimes)
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/opinion/stop-spying-on-wikipedia-users.html?_r=0

    TODAY, we’re filing a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (#NSA)

    (...) On our servers, run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, those volunteers discuss their work on everything from Tiananmen Square to gay rights in Uganda. Many of them prefer to work anonymously, especially those who work on controversial issues or who live in countries with repressive governments.

    These volunteers should be able to do their work without having to worry that the United States government is monitoring what they read and write.

    #surveillance #procès

  • The Decline of #Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It | MIT Technology Review
    http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/?curator=MediaREDEF

    The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing #bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

    (...) In response, the Wikimedia Foundation (...) is staging a kind of rescue mission. The foundation can’t order the volunteer community to change the way it operates. But by tweaking Wikipedia’s website and software, it hopes to steer the encyclopedia onto a more sustainable path.

    #logiciel

  • Wikipedia : 250 comptes fermés car payés pour des articles de commande
    http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/wikipedia-250-comptes-fermes-car-payes-pour-des-articles-de-commande-39794973.

    Tous les contributeurs de Wikipedia ont-il à cœur de contribuer de manière neutre et sans chercher à retirer un bénéfice financier des articles qu’ils intègrent dans l’encyclopédie en ligne ? Pas tous non et c’est pourquoi d’ailleurs Wikipedia vient de fermer plus de 250 comptes éditeurs.

    « Il semble qu’un certain nombre de comptes utilisateurs – peut-être même plusieurs centaines – auraient été rémunérés pour écrire des articles sur Wikipedia faisant la promotion d’organisations ou de produits » a expliqué dans un billet de blog la directrice exécutive de la fondation Wikimedia Foundation, Sue Gardner.

    Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner’s response to paid advocacy editing and sockpuppetry
    http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/21/sue-gardner-response-paid-advocacy-editing

    Editors on the English Wikipedia are currently investigating allegations of suspicious edits and sockpuppetry (i.e. using online identities for purposes of deception). At this point, as reported, it looks like a number of user accounts — perhaps as many as several hundred — may have been paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products, and have been violating numerous site policies and guidelines, including prohibitions against sockpuppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest. As a result, Wikipedians aiming to protect the projects against non-neutral editing have blocked or banned more than 250 user accounts.

    #pr #com #washing

  • Wikipedia et sexisme, des liens signalés par wikipediocracy

    Wikipedia – Men and children first | Wikipediocracy
    http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/01/22/wikipedia-men-and-children-first

    Wikipedia – Men and children first

    By Nathalie Collida and friends

    It’s no secret that Wikipedia has a shortage of female editors. According to a survey commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2011, a mere 8.5 per cent of the people contributing to the online encyclopaedia identify as women. In a recent op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, Sue Gardner – who became the figurehead of Wikipedia when she signed up as Executive Director with the Wikimedia Foundation 5 years ago – tried to explain this by focusing on what she perceives as the “geeky, tech-centric, intellectually confident, thick-skinned and argumentative” nature of the average Wikipedian. Outside observers, among them Web2.0 expert Joseph Reagle, add another component to the mix: good old-fashioned sexism. His latest study, “’Free as in sexist’ Free culture and the gender gap” examines how the combative locker-room culture of Wikipedia’s male contributors – a good portion of whom are teens and pre-teens – makes women less likely to participate. While Reagle’s journal article relies heavily on previously published analyses and interviews with Wikipedians, we’ve decided to take a look under the bonnet of Ms Gardner’s million-dollar on-line empire, with examples taken not just from articles but also from areas of the encyclopaedia and its sister projects often overlooked by its readers: the talk pages of articles and editors as well as various discussion boards.

    A feminist’s Wikipedia biography | Wikipediocracy
    http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/01/29/a-feminists-wikipedia-biography

    A feminist’s Wikipedia biography

    By Andreas Kolbe

    Anita Sarkeesian is a media critic and video blogger whose work focuses on sexism in video games. Her video blog, Feminist Frequency, is used as reading material in numerous universities’ women’s studies courses. Last year Sarkeesian became the target of a sustained harassment campaign because of her Kickstarter project, Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. The attacks on her were coordinated from various video game forums.

    Sarkeesian was subjected to a torrent of hate on YouTube – thousands of abusive and often sexually explicit hate messages. At the same time, her Wikipedia biography was vandalised. Sarkeesian herself spoke of harassment via Wikipedia vandalism.

    Wikipedia’s culture of sexism – it’s not just for novelists. | Wikipediocracy
    http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/04/29/wikipedias-culture-of-sexism-its-not-just-for-novelists

    Wikipedia’s culture of sexism – it’s not just for novelists.

    by Nathalie Collida and Andreas Kolbe
    With research contributions from Delicious carbuncle and Eric Barbour

    Amanda Filipacchi’s New York Times article about Wikipedia’s ghettoization of female novelists finally shone the spotlight on some of the rampant sexism that pervades almost every corner of the online “encyclopaedia”. Filipacchi said she had “noticed something strange on Wikipedia”:

    It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too. The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men.

    • L’effet Streisand...

      At the beginning of 2013, the radio station attracted world-wide attention after the French intelligence agency Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (DCRI) reportedly attempted to have the article removed from the French Wikipedia. This request was denied by the Wikimedia Foundation in March 2013. After this denial, the DCRI has reportedly attempted to pressure another contributor to the French Wikipedia for removal, leading to world-wide media coverage using the Streisand effect.[4] [5]
      Notes and references
      Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute

      4"French homeland intelligence threatens a volunteer sysop to delete a Wikipedia Article" (in English). Wikimedia France. Retrieved 6 April 2013.
      5 “French Intelligence Agency Forces Removal of Wikipedia Entry” (in English). Slashdot. Retrieved 6 April 2013.

  • A Driving Force Behind Wikipedia Will Step Down - NYTimes.com

    http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/a-driving-force-behind-wikipedia-to-step-down/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130328

    Sue Gardner, who oversaw a period of rapid growth and evolution of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, said she would step down as executive director of the nonprofit foundation that runs it.

    In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Gardner, 45, said she would leave in roughly six months, after the Wikimedia Foundation board had picked a successor.

    #médias-sociaux #sites-collaboratifs #wikipedia