Jump to content

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-09-30/News and notes

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Signpost
← Back to Contents
View Latest Issue


News and notes

Board vote results, bot's big GET, crat chat gives new mop, WMF seeks "sound logo" and "organizer lab"

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Andreas Kolbe, Bri, Helloheart, and WereSpielChequers
Could it be the next Wikimedia sound logo?

Wikimedia Foundation: "Join the Organizer Lab beta! Join the first cohort of training for Topics for Impact campaigns"

Climate change and sustainability is the first "topic for impact" selected for an "Organizer lab" designed to teach people to recruit volunteers to address related content gaps in various languages

The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the role of WMF-supported organizers recruiting volunteers to work on the projects is of critical importance to growing content and retaining contributors. To date, it says:

the path to organizing has been very organic, loosely supported by grant-making and the work of our affiliate network. But the Movement Strategy asks us to focus on Investing in Skills and Leadership Development and Identifying Topics for Impact. We need to get more deliberate about asking questions like:

  • How are we inviting the next generation of editors and volunteers to our movement to help us address a universe of knowledge gaps?
  • Are we creating clear pathways for organizers to gain all the skills or knowledge they need to champion the Wikimedia Movement well?

By mentoring and working with organizers over the last three years to understand campaigns around the world, the Campaigns Team at the Wikimedia Foundation has learned how to help organizers design campaigns that bring in the next generation of contributors. We are going to share those lessons and experiences in an Organizer Lab (beta) focused on campaigns and organizing around “Topics for Impact”. Though we hope to expand to support other topics and themes in the coming years, the first cohort will be themed around a topic of rising interest across the movement: Climate Change and Sustainability.

The Organizer lab will be a 9-week online course running from late October to mid-December. For further details, see the Wikimedia blog post. – AK

Wikimedia sound logo contest launched

The Wikimedia Foundation has launched a sound logo contest.

Take a note – from 13 September to 10 October 2022, everyone, everywhere is invited to help create a sound logo for the Wikimedia projects.

A sound logo is a brief collection of sounds, often between 2 and 4 seconds long. Sound logos have gained popularity with the rise of audio technology globally; the number of active voice assistant users has grown from 544.1 million in 2015 to 2.6 billion in 2021. Wikimedia projects increasingly power other websites, search engines, and general knowledge queries on voice-assisted devices, but many listeners are not aware because the source of the information is not consistently identified. A sound logo is needed to help listeners identify when they are accessing trusted, verifiable knowledge from Wikimedia projects. In harmony with our values and as always curious to experiment and learn, we will have an open contest for the sound of all human knowledge and invite the world to participate.

– AK

Mike Peel, Shani Sigalov elected to WMF board seats

Two seats were open in the Wikimedia Foundation's board, and there were six candidates. With a total of 5,922 votes in the election, the two candidates selected were Mike Peel (Mike Peel) and Shani Evenstein Sigalov (Esh77). During the end in round 5, Mike Peel had been elected with 1,995 votes. The second seat was decided in the final round, when Shani Evenstein Sigalov had gotten approximately 1,835 votes. – H

WikiCleanerBot rolls decs

Check 'em – congratulations to NicoV, whose bot has achieved Wikipedia's 1,111,111,111 GET. An anonymous server kitty is claimed to have said "that's an awful lot of 1s in the same place, hopefully nothing similar will happen for about fifteen years when we expect to need the same number of 2s". The Mayor of Vayres, Gironde is probably unaware of the special status his commune has just acquired in the English speaking world. – W

Community safety and comfort

The results for the English Wikipedia on the safety survey.

In June and July of 2022, the Wikimedia movement released a community safety survey. This was to find out whether or not a user felt safe and comfortable contributing to Wikipedia. The question asked was:

In the last 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia?

The survey was sent to users on five different languages of Wikipedia: the English Wikipedia, the Farsi Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia, the Spanish Wikipedia and the Portuguese Wikipedia. The answers to choose from were "Yes," "No," and "I'm not sure." The results turned out to be that the unweighted results (there were two versions of responses: weighted and unweighted) on the English Wikipedia showed that 75.3% of Wikipedians felt safe and comfortable on Wikipedia, 15.9% of Wikipedians felt unsafe or uncomfortable, and 8.8% of them were not sure. The proportions of users feeling unsafe were somewhat higher on the Spanish (24.4%) and Portuguese (26.0%) Wikipedias. – H

Call for feedback on leadership definition

In February a Call for Feedback was published by the Community Development (CD) team about a Leadership Development Working Group. The Call for Feedback was shared in 42 languages. The Call for Feedback was used to get feedback from the community on the meaning of "leader," the working group's composition, and the need for continued feedback. The Leadership Development Working Group recently published its leadership definition and invited feedback. – H

Brief notes

← Previous "News and notes"
Next "News and notes" →
+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.
Indeed. Thanks for the results link. Have now linked to m:Community_Safety/Reports (this has the other languages as well). Best, Andreas JN466 14:38, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
For 16% of editors to feel “unsafe” on Wikipedia, whatever they mean by the term, is a disgrace. I think we need admins to focus more on enforcing collegiality and shutting down trolls. Maybe also emphasize in the newbie tutorials that WP is unlike other social media which allow (and encourage) personal attacks. --ChetvornoTALK 18:15, 5 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • From the WMF's appeal for a "sound logo":

    the number of active voice assistant users has grown from 544.1 million in 2015 to 2.6 billion in 2021.

    Those are some pretty implausible numbers, unless (a) that's actually the number of active voice assistant uses per year, or (b) they're counting any person who uses any text-to-speech technology, even just a single time, during a given year as one of those yearly "users" of the technology. It's pretty hard to avoid some machine, somewhere, speaking something at you at some point, but whether that makes you an "active voice assistant user" in the eyes of anyone but the marketing department is, to say the least, debatable.
...But there's no way for me to know, because the stats they apparently draw from are locked behind an accountwall that requires a "company email address", and won't take my GMail address for registration. So I'll just call bullshit by default, on those preposterously inflated statistics. FeRDNYC (talk) 17:09, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Those figures seem somewhat odd indeed. Two striking things about the data this refers to is
1) that the study refers to consumer virtual digital assistants rather than voice digital assistants, and the source given by Statista explicitly mentions chatbots as an example, and
2) that the underlying data that is supposed to document an increase in users between 2015 and 2021 has according to Statista actually been surveyed between 2015 and 2016, with the remaining numbers being forecasts (see side panel on the Statista website)... Felix QW (talk) 15:25, 2 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Felix QW: Yeah, I think there are some more telling reports than the one WMF linked to, even right there at Statista. (Which sounds like a numbers-obsessed splinter group of the Sandinistas; are we sure they're not based out of Nicaragua?)
  • There's this one, "Number of digital voice assistants in use worldwide from 2019 to 2024 (in billions)*": In 2020, there will be 4.2 billion digital voice assistants being used in devices around the world. Forecasts suggest that by 2024, the number of digital voice assistants will reach 8.4 billion units – a number higher than the world’s population. Which strongly implies that 2.6b number WMF quoted was for the actual assistants, not assistant users.
  • Or "Number of monthly unique users of virtual digital assistants in the United States, as of December 2016, by application", the only part of which I can see is: Between June and December [2016], the number of Americans using Amazon's Alexa personal assistant more than tripled, rising from 600,000 to 2.6 million monthly unique users.
That second one sounds much more realistic. And it's also three orders of magnitude smaller than then nutso numbers from the WMF post. (Though I don't know what their 2016–2021 trending would look like. I see that in various other, more recent reports, they've adjusted post-2020 forecasts downward precipitously, #BecauseCOVID.) FeRDNYC (talk) 05:57, 3 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • re 111111111: way before 2,222,222,222 will will see 1,234,567,890. :-) And then 1313131313 ;-)).23:41, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
  • "Investing in Skills and Leadership Development" – what a weird way to phrase something. It's not clear whether it's [[Skills and Leadership] Development]] or [[Skills] and [Leadership Development]] at first glance. Nardog (talk) 01:26, 5 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The Signpost: doing it for free since 2005.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-09-30/News_and_notes&oldid=1193881151"