The Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team plans to introduce Content Translation—a tool that makes it easier to translate Wikipedia articles into different languages—as a beta feature on the English Wikipedia.
Reader demand for some topics (e.g. LGBT topics or pages about countries) is poorly satisfied, whereas there is over-abundance of quality on topics of comparatively little interest, such as military history.
One editor faces likely ban for work on Wikipedia; Jimmy Wales awarded $1 million: Also: GLAM-Wiki Conference; Ombudsman Commission announced; Slovak Wikipedia now has 200,000 articles
Shifting values in the paid content debate: Kim Osman has performed a fascinating study on the three 2013 failed proposals to ban paid advocacy editing in the English language Wikipedia. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach, Osman analyzed 573 posts from the three main votes on paid editing conducted in the community in November 2013.
With the promotion to featured article of Grus (constellation) on 17 May, Casliber became Wikipedia's second featured-article centurion, following Wehwalt's groundbreaking achievement last December. Cas's first FA, Banksia integrifolia, a group effort, was promoted on 16 November 2006. His first solo project, Diplodocus, followed in January 2007; he has rarely been off the FAC since. In a second story, Ward Cunningham, an American computer programmer who invented the wiki, was interviewed by the WMF.
"I remember laughing and talking and laughing and talking at Wikimania 2012. I took this picture of her that she used for a long while as a profile pic. Someone on Facebook said it looked 'skepchickal', which she loved."
Wikipedians' "encyclopedic identity" dominates even in Kosovo debates: Have you wondered about differences in the articles on Crimea in the Russian, Ukrainian, and English versions of Wikipedia? A newly published article entitled "Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia" doesn't address Crimea, but nonetheless offers insight into the editing of contentious articles in multiple language editions through a heavy qualitative examination of Wikipedia articles about the Kosovo in the Serbian, Croatian, and English editions.
About a week ago, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed to modify the Wikimedia projects' terms of use to specifically ban paid editing, by adding a new clause titled "Paid contributions without disclosure". We have asked two users, one in favor of the measure (Smallbones) and one opposed (Pete Forsyth), to contribute their opinions on the matter.
As mentioned in "In the news" on Wikipedia's main page, the Library of Birmingham in the United Kingdom has opened. This interior photo was taken a week before opening. The article reports that the library "has been described as the largest public library in the United Kingdom, the largest public cultural space in Europe, and the largest regional library in Europe."
A new post in the WMF blog describes Assistant Professor Amy E. Hughes' experience in the Wikimedia Education Program with a two term graduate class on Western theater history.
On 26 April 2013, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation published an article reviewing Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik's edits to the English Wikipedia.
On Monday, the English Wikipedia became the 12th wiki to be able to pull data from the central Wikidata.org repository, with other wikis scheduled to receive the update on Wednesday.
Testing week: The deployment of phase 2 of Wikidata to the English Wikipedia, originally scheduled for 8 April but delayed due to technical problems, may be rescheduled again as the result of community resistance.
Following the deployment of the Wikidata client to the Hungarian Wikipedia last month, the client was also deployed to the Italian and Hebrew Wikipedias on Wednesday. The next target for the client, which automatically provides phase 1 functionality, is the English Wikipedia, with a deployment date of 11 February already set.
The movement, now in its second decade, is growing apace in its international reach, cultural and linguistic diversity, technical development, and financial complexity.
An open-access preprint presents the results from a study attempting to predict early box office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box office revenue for highly successful movies.
A paper to appear in a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist describes how "several changes that the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have led to a more restrictive environment for newcomers" and points to three factors contributing to the increasingly "restrictive environment" they face.
In its September issue, the peer-reviewed journal First Monday published The readability of Wikipedia, reporting research which shows that the English Wikipedia is struggling to meet Flesch reading ease test criteria, while the Simple English Wikipedia has "lost its focus".