Archive for the ‘Wikipedia’ Category

Wikipedia article traffic statistics are hypnotics

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

I am trying to get offline, to the vacation mood, to read some good books in a hammock.

Wikipedia editor's rules

I took some notes in the WikiSym / Wikimania.

I take notes in rather unstructured way. I carry several paper notebooks with me: often an A5 size and a small A6 sketchbooks. Then I always have with me a laptop and a phone which I use for note taking, too. Sometimes I also write notes to some random Post IT notes, which I often have in the case.

My logics with this kind of note taking is that if something is not really important I may and will lose it. Also if I really need something later I should be willing to take the effort to search it.

So, what is there, couple of days after the Wikisym/Wikimania, in the top of my pile of notes? There are many things, such as:

From all these I have some random notes in here and there. I may write blog posts about them later.

The most hypnotic new thing I found during the WikiSym/Wikimania is probably the Wikipedia article traffic statistics. Actually it is not even new and I think it was not even presented in the conference, but with some free browsing on wiki-related things I happen to found it now.

With the service you can check the popularity of any Wikipedia article from more than 70 language versions. The latest statistics are from December 2009, but it is still la lot of fun. I have been playing with it now for several days.

For instance, I have been comparing the top 1000 articles of the Finnish, Swedish and Russian Wikipedias.

Here are the top-10 articles in the Finnish, Swedish and Russian Wikipedias in December 2009:

Finnish Wikipedia

  1. Suomi (Finland)
  2. Wiki
  3. Talvisota (Winter War 1939)
  4. Brittany Murphy (Hollywood celebrity)
  5. Irwin Goodman (a Finnish protest singer, rock and folk singer)
  6. Suomen itsenäisyyspäivä (The Finnish Independent Day)
  7. Joulu (Christmas)
  8. Twilight – Houkutus (Hollywood movie)
  9. Lady Gaga (American celebrity)
  10. Yhdysvallat (United States of America)

Swedish Wikipedia

  1. Sverige (Sweden)
  2. Brittany Murphy (Hollywood celebrity)
  3. Wiki
  4. Lucia (Saint Lucy’s Day)
  5. Anna Anka (Swedish Hollywood celebrity)
  6. Julkalendern i Sveriges Television (Christmas calendar in a Swedish Television)
  7. Kurt Wallander (character in Henning Mankell’s novels)
  8. Jul (Christmas)
  9. Wikipedia
  10. USA (United States of America)

Russian Wikipedia

  1. В Контакте (Russian social network service)
  2. Турчинский, Владимир Евгеньевич (Vladimir Turchinsky; Russian celebrity, bodybuilder, TV/radio, actor)
  3. Википедия (Wikipedia)
  4. Россия (Russia)
  5. Порнография (Porno)
  6. Мой Мир@mail.ru (free e-mail service)
  7. Аватара (Avatar concept of Hinduism)
  8. Москва (Moscow)
  9. BitTorrent
  10. Новый год (New Year)

Looking the top lists of English (I love The Beatles, too) German (and adore Elisabeth von Österreich-Ungarn) and French (and listen to Johnny Hallyday) Wikipedia’s and comparing them is also interesting and fun.

From the top 1000 lists we may already conclude some hypothesis / theories. All the lists show the actuality of using Wikipedias. For Finnish and Swedish people Christmas is important, whereas in Russia New Year is the Christmas (Orthodox Calendar). The Finnish Independent day is in December. In December 2009 it was 50 years from the Winter War.

Also the celebrities in the list were actual in December 2009. In Finland and Sweden people seems to follow Hollywood. In Russia they have their own stars. Brittany Murphy in the Finnish and Swedish WIkipedia and Vladimir Turchinsky in the Russian Wikipedia represent the celebrities who died in December 2009.

It looks that the Russian Wikipedia in December 2009 was still dominated by technology / internet people. The general public was not yet the main user of the Russian Wikipedia as it obviously was the case in the Finnish and the Swedish Wikipedias.

The high position of Irwin Goodman, a Finnish protest singer, rock and folk singer, in the Finnish Wikipedia could be a result of some new research about him that was published in December 2009, but why is the Hindu concept Avatar so high in the Russian Wikipedia? Could it be that people were looking for information about the movie Avatar but end-up to this page?

Then you may ask why the Twilight movie and Lady Gaga are in top ten in the Finnish Wikipedia but in the Swedish Wikipedia only in the places 43 and 36. In the Russian Wikipedia these great cultural products are in the places 60 (Twilight) and 352 (Lady Gaga).

I already started to copy paste the data to spreadsheet to do more analyses, but gave up. I know that there are people who really can do statistics. I am not very good with them, but I would love to do some cultural-historical analyses of the Wikipedias with someone with solid skill in statistics. Let’s do some hypothesis and see what the data tells us.

Posted in Open Source, Sharing economy, Uncategorized, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, educational tool | No Comments »

How to do the learning revolution?

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Not long time ago I wrote a post about a real learning revolution. I decided to elaborated it now a bit in light of Sir Ken Robinson’s latest TED talk Bring on the learning revolution!, even though, I actually agree with what Stephen Downes already said about the talk.

Anyway. Here is my advice for local and national decision makers to do the “learning revolution”, caused by the digital revolution. I am sure my “reforms” would payoff, exactly the way learning does: educated people are able to provide higher output, economically and culturally.

Public Libraries
Invest on public neighborhood libraries with (1) wide collection of different kind of reading materials (books, newspapers, magazines, electronic materials) and (2) public access to Internet: Wi-Fi and laptops. Do a marketing campaign about the libraries. Let people to know about the services of the libraries.

Basic Education
Guarantee universal (for all) high quality basic education: literacy, math, arts, music, civics, culture. Make sure you will have highly educated and motivated teachers, and seamless access to internet, Wi-Fi and laptops (in every classroom and in every space). Support the schools to have continues effort to develop their operations; pedagogy, school culture, workplace. Request all schools to publish their mission, vision and curriculum in their website and to have a blog with weekly updates about their work.

Higher Education
I think Universities are the liver of the society. Make sure that they will function. Research and higher education is there to renew things that should be renewed and protecting things that should be kept.

Network Connections
Guarantee that all the citizens will have inexpensive access (cheap and free) to Internet, network computers (mini laptops) and mobile phones. Make sure that there is competition that will work for the benefits of the consumer. The markets work only when there is true competition.

Media, Journalism and Free Speech
Guarantee public broadcasting media services (radio, TV, online) that are, as independent as possible, from the markets and the politics. Do not limit the public media to news. Politics, civics, culture, arts and music in a widest possible meaning — including cotemporary and independent pop culture — should be the core of the offering. A strong public media will help the commercial media to renew itself to meet the future challenges. This way the public media is a bit like a liver of the media field (compare to the Universities).

Online Content
Invest on free and reliable online reference and other educational content, like Open Educational Resources, Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Bring the content of museums and archives online (Wikimedia may help museums in this effort).

Online Learning
Support peer-to-peer online learning and teaching communities. The open education movement is fast moving to the direction where people are self-organizing themselves to learn together online. The P2PU is a good example of this. People learning new things is almost always good thing. Still, to avoid people to do “home chemistry”, it might be a good idea to provide people something a bit more “guided”.

Community Colleges
Support community colleges and open universities online and on campus. In addition to the online learning we also need the “traditional” community colleges. Still, one should help (and force) the community colleges to go online. In Finland, Otavan Opisto is a good example of a college that is strongly online (and on campus).

A long wish list? It is and it will cost a lot of money. A good thing is that it is not a risk investment. The economist know that these things have a high return of investment. It is true that to get the return for the investment may take some time — 10, 50 or 100 years — but it will come.

Posted in General, Sharing economy, Wikimedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikiversity, educational tool | 1 Comment »

Wikimedia – the public media of the Internet-era?

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I just met with the BBC journalist, Tim Sebastian. He was visiting us to see the results from our study project exploring new media concepts for World Health Organization (thank you M4ID’s Mari for organizing this). The main issue discussed related to humanitarian emergency communication.

How we could communicate fast and efficiently with the people who are affected or even injured with disasters? How we could help people to help each other? According to Tim Sebastian, often the last people to know what has happen are those people who are in the middle of humanitarian crises. Our students have designed a simple mobile solution to help this.

Tim Sebastian was seriously worried about the growing censorship and violation of free speech. I was quite surprised about this. My own – maybe naïve – view have been that with the Internet and the Web the situation is definitely better, than when the media landscape was managed mainly by public broadcasting companies. Those days, in tens of countries, the government was strictly controlling all the information channels, except private conversations. In some countries they use to have some pretty sophisticated systems to follow even private chats.

In a couple of years Wikipedia has become the largest and most popular reference media on the Internet. Besides an encyclopedic reference work, Wikipedia has become a popular news resource where articles about recent events are quickly and frequently updated. It is already fair to say that Wikipedia is no more *just* an online encyclopedic. All the processes and things around it are making it its own media or media network.

Wikipedia is a community and volunteer-driven project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation is funded primarily through donations by tens of thousands of individuals and several grants and gifts. Probably most of the donations come from the readers of the Wikipedia. Still, also the same volunteers who are donating their time to write articles are also donating money in it. Wikipedia is not only encyclopedic or media – it is a social movement.

In addition to Wikipedia, the Wikimedia-community has started several sister projects that are aiming to fulfill its’ mission “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content“. These are, for instance: Wiktionary -project creating a multilingual free content dictionary in every language; Wikimedia Commons –project building repository for free photographs, diagrams, maps, videos, animations, music, sounds, spoken texts, and other free media; and Wikiquote –project creating a repository of quotations taken from famous people, books, speeches, films or any intellectually interesting materials. All the projects are collaboratively developed by volunteers.

Wikimedia –project have many characteristics of a public broadcasters, though formulated from the beginning to utilize the possibilities the Internet provides for media. Just like in public broadcasting Wikimedia’s aim is to be free from vested interest and governments. There is a serious concern for community and minorities. Special interest is made on cultural heritage, and all in all the investments are made to activities with are expected to have high social benefits.

Wikimedia is a people to people media. Anyone reading or watching Wikimedia may freely edit, copy and redistribute it.

Wikimedia is still young. However, by running one of the world most popular websites, it already has a huge impact to modern life. Same time Wikimedia is facing some external and internal challenges. The traditional media industry may see Wikimedia as a “market disruptor” or “competitor”. In many ways Wikimedia –projects are disruptive innovations using disruptive technology. They are changing the game. Also the need and growth of more permanent staff in the Foundation (today around 30) causes tension between the “paid staff” and volunteer community. Will the Wikimedia movement survive this?

I hope that in a couple of years we will see an establishment of the Wikimedia movement, community and the Foundation. Establishment is good – when it is done without giving-up the original vision, mission and values. To progress the establishment the Foundation has started a project to formulate a strategy for the organization.

Being Wikimedia the strategic planning process naturally takes place on a wiki. The process in an open community process designed to serve the movement. The wiki is there for you to explore and edit.

The values of the Wikimedia Foundation are “Freedom, Accessibility and quality, Independence, Commitment to openness and diversity, Transparency, and that Our community is our biggest asset.

If these values will stand the Wikimedia movement will be fine.

Posted in Wikibooks, Wikimedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wiktionary | No Comments »