Wikispore/February 2020
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Meeting minutes from the first monthly check-in
[edit]The following meeting minutes have been lightly edited to remove personally identifying information and some off-topic discussion.
Notes from User:Pharos
[edit]Welcome to the Wikispore rolling 1st Global Meeting: Feb 29, 2020
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikispore https://wikispore.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page
Attendees
[edit]Agenda
[edit]- Intro / Current status summary / update
- 2030 Strategy https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Innovate_in_Free_Knowledge
- Meta, recruitment
- Albania Hackathon
- vagrant - meza?
- Wikidata integration, Wikisprout / external front end
- Report from Don?
- CredCo grants $250 - 10k https://wikiconference.org/wiki/Submissions:WCNA_2019_Grant_Submission
- Wikispore strategy of alliances
- Current events spore and Google News-like project
- Wikinews feint https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Pharos/Timeline
- Cradle and Mbabel https://tools.wmflabs.org/cradle/#/subject/demonstration_or_protest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mbabel
- Bio spore
- Org spore
- Geo spore
- Data backups
- WING usergroup https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_Innovating_New_Genres
- Wikimania
- Future meetings - NYC meetups - Sat or Sun around noon? more Europe-friendly
Notes
[edit]- We have established processes for founding new language versions of existing projects
- Incubator for language copies of projects intended to graduate to self-sufficiency
- Multilingual wikis (e.g. Wikisource) where small language communities are viable
- However spinning up new project is has no established process, nor infrastructure
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects
- Some might never reach 'critical mass' to be a stand-alone sister project - but maybe that's ok
- Adam Shoreland (addshore): Wikibase Stack https://www.wbstack.com/ - independent MediaWiki in the cloud with a local Wikibase, has plans for Wikidata integration
- What can be learnt from Wikiversity
- WV has relatively broad scope when it comes to anything university/academia related
- Currently community relatively accepting of edge-of-scope content (for better and worse)
- e.g. v:en:Bloom_Clock Bloom Clock, v:en:HGAPS Helping Give Away Psychological Science and v:en:WikiJournals
- e.g. cold fusion and pseudocience courses (now deleted)
- Often hard to find the good projects (navigation)
- Disorganised structure (subpages? namespaces? categories? just links?)
- Currently there is no WMF location that can host & combine both structured and unstructured content
- Potentially the article mentioned about Wikinews: Research:Wikinews_original_reporting_value_as_a_measure_of_news_events
- Ideas:
- Analyze archive.org wiki crawl to see what is out there in the world of non-WMF wikis
- The Tripod as a new governance model?
- Meta-university wiki
- Other types of free licensing
- Sep 11 old wiki?
- Something we can host are primary school curriculums for different countries. DrDub participated in a hackathon by the UN Refugee Council on the topic last year: http://textualization.com/le_hackathon2019/, a non-profit from San Diego (Learning Equality) is working on the topic https://blog.learningequality.org/report-release-design-sprint-on-curriculum-alignment-in-crisis-contexts-57eb717b9e7e
industrial equipment spore - existing project on wikispore
- Add a dev onboarding page to wikispore or link to it from the homepage
- citations spore (similar to bibsonomy.org) - also relevant to wikicite
Notes from User:Koavf
[edit]- Pharos: I would like to have a diversity of mini-projects. It could be used as a springboard for other projects.
- Koavf: I see this as a springboard and also a place for indefinitely hosting small knowledge projects (e.g. indigenous knowledge)
- Pharos: Archive of group in NY that has activist primary knowledge source data but could never be at (e.g.) en.wp.
Attendees:
- Pharos: social idea of WikiSpore
- DrDub: natural language generation, working on templates--current focus is on stories, background with DBPedia and WikiCities
- Tgr: technical lead, used to be a Wikipedian, interested in data structure and how to interact with Wikidata, Wikimedia fact-checking
- Evolution and evolvability: interested in content creation in Wikipedia, works on Wikidata and Wikiversity (WikiJournal)
- koavf: interested in minority knowledge and information architecture, how to connect with existing projects
- Reify-tech: edits wp, interested in the MIT Student Guide and turning that into a wiki
- Pharos: We can host text and media from Commons.
- Evolution and evolvability: Many wikis are transient and hard to find.
- Koavf: I'd like to rehost the 9/11 wiki and NC/ND projects. Why couldn't Wikiversity host things?
- Pharos: It's transient and maybe wouldn't fit into the textbook model of Wikiversity.
- Evolution and evolvability: Wv is an odd one and 99% of my knowledge is WikiJournal. There are a couple of things I think of as strengths and weakness--e.g. something straying too far from an academic theme may be too far afield. A problem would be a lack of specialized extensions. Something like WikiObjectswiki would be out of wv scope or a non-free wiki.
- Pharos: Be familiar with the 2030 WMF Strategy. One point is innovating free knowledge. We have ongoing discussions on m for making an official project and including it as a shortcut on the interwiki map.
- Pharos: Hackathon in Albania in May.
- Pharos: Servers need to be integrated for Wikidata. Maybe have a viewer that combines wd data and spore text.
- Tgr: Adam Sherland is working on Wikidata integration.
- Pharos: Possible grants for Wikispore. Could be used for current events--Wikinews is not a great success.
- Pharos: Credibility Coalition is willing to offer $250/10K for credibility information in the wiki universe.
- Tgr: What could be done with $1/10K? I wouldn't expect anything interesting-sounding like Wikidata integration (that would cost more). Small problems only.
- Pharos: If we got money, who would we pay?
- Tgr: There are plenty of MediaWiki consultants.
- Pharos: I proposed adding a complementary aspect to Wikinews called Wikinews Timeline. News on Wikispore would be more Wikipedia-like than Wikinews. Could support small local events.
- Pharos: I've had some success linking out to Wikispore.
- Pharos: One of our editors (Don Osborne) wrote: he contributes to several spores. Bios on selected people e.g. culture, women in history, geneaology. Need help on the geneaology template.
- Pharos: Don: on org spore, he is asking about categories and structure.
- Pharos: S. J. Kline (user SJ): has been working on geneaology wiki. Wants to import biographies from WikiTree and Rodovid, possibly prioritizing those who are notable bios.
- Pharos: We have a proposal for a user group for new wikis in general. Wikimedians Innovating New Genres (WING). Also WikiJournal and WikiDocumentaries based in Finland.
- Evolution and evolvability: I was reminded of something out of scope for wv: A proposal for industrial equipment. A problem is that it's hard to have unique object identifiers, so using Wikidata. However, wd doesn't have text, only structured data.
- Tgr: We will probably stay close to baseline MediaWiki for the future. No niche extensions soon like mw:Extension:Wikibase or mw:Extension:ProofreadPage, etc. Its main technical need is integration with other projects and having access to Wikidata.
- Pharos: Currently using MediaWiki Vagrant.
- Pharos: There's a Phabricator board for tech stuff.
- Evolution and evolvability: Check MediaWiki Stakeholders User Group. Bryan Hildebrand helps companies with internal wikis.
- Tgr: Semantic MediaWiki was a sort of pre-Wikidata. It has scaling issues. There may be a grant for integrating SMW into Wikidata.
- Tgr: Some Wikispore wikis may be able to use SMW. For generating regular human knowledge, Wikidata is interesting.
- Pharos: More ambitious idea: a Google News-like thing that analyzes top news stories and make a way to make data items and post news stories in a useful way. Could be useful and integrated into Wikipedia.
- Tgr: Crawling websites for news are controlled to avoid that kind of thing. It would be hard.
- Evolution and evolvability: [compare to Wikinews and WikiTribune]
- Pharos: Wikipedida is good for news events but some events are too small. Linking from Wikipedia would provide a useful service.
- Tgr: The problem is timing-based: articles on Wikipedia can slowly be written but news isn't news after a time. Plus, they made choices on content.
- Pharos: We would choose perennial content.
- Tgr: There are some experiments with original reporting.
Action items
[edit]- Copy these notes to metawiki (location?)