LZia (WMF)

Welcome to Meta!

Hello, LZia (WMF). Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum if you need help with something (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

-- Meta-Wiki Welcome (talk) 00:10, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Orphans

Hello, thanks for creating new pages on Meta-Wiki! It's generally useful not only to categorise them but also to link them from at least one other page, otherwise they're so-called "orphans". I just de-orphaned your creation. ;-) --Nemo 10:04, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

IRC cloak request

Hello LZia,

you or somebody claiming to be you filed a request for a Wikimedia IRC cloak some time ago. However, this request did not contain a valid diff (the diff provided did not come from the production cluster. If you still need a Wikimedia cloak, could you please file a new request with a new diff? If there are any issues, please let me know on my meta talk page or on IRC (I am user QueenOfFrance). Kind regards, Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 07:19, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

@Snowolf:, thanks for your message. I needed the cloak to access #wikimedia-staff channnel but is resolved now. I will submit a new clock request if needed.

Data retention

As to be seen in Research talk:Increasing article coverage, e-mail addresses of users who have disabled their e-mail function (as Andreas Werle) or changed their settings (as Chricho) have obviously been retained and even given to external persons. However, the page Data retention guidelines says that "personal information" like "account settings" (as an example "e-mail address" is given) is only retained "until user deletes/changes the account setting". This is a clear violation of this guideline. What do you intend to do about that?--Mautpreller (talk) 19:08, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Hi Mautpreller. No email addresses were given to external persons. Bob, who is a researcher on this project is a research fellow at the Foundation and has signed an NDA, Ellery and myself are WMF employees. Jure does not have access to non-public data. All email addresses were kept on WMF servers.

We have queried user table. Do you think that it is reasonable to exclude all users that have indicated they do not want to be contacted by other users via their preferences? Which other groups do you recommend we exclude? --LZia (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

It is good that no email addresses were given to external persones. But you don't address the central point of what I said. At least two of the said e-mail addresses simply should not have been retained by WMF! They should have been deleted! Nobody should have these e-mail addresses! I am afraid there is an ongoing violation of data protection rules on the side of WMF. - I'd recommend that you use talk pages for a first contact if you are really determined to push on with the project. If people say: Okay, I'd like to participate in such a project, there is no problem to send an e-mail. I'd rather wish that you stop the project altogether as I think it will rather cause harm than benefit, but that's only my opinion. That there is a breach of privacy and data retention rules is, however, not only an opinion. --Mautpreller (talk) 20:36, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

I answered one question/comment and I asked another question. Let's follow up on the corresponding threads in the Talk page. I'd like to keep all the discussions in that page for future references. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 21:17, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Greetings

Greetings. I saw your comment here. You seem very smart but technically inexperienced (I mean that as a compliment). Usually, it's the other way round. It's refreshing to see two staff members in the same department disagreeing openly - I know it happens in every office but usually people just pile on, depending on their affiliation instead of using their judgement. Your concerns about making this discussion about technical merit instead of ideological ones is also an excellent suggestion. I can probably take an educated guess and say the answer is, no to your first question in the above edit. Yes/no to your second one. I believe someone more familiar with Flow can elaborate further. Please don't hesitate to ask me any questions or for help with anything around meta. Kind regards. Theo10011 (talk) 00:38, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi Theo10011. Thank you for your note. I'm not going to argue with your compliment. Thanks!

Re staff opinions on this specific RfC: The way I see it is that staff members who have expressed their opinions have done it independently, obviously people talk about these issues and learn from each other, but eventually, the majority will decide independently. It's probably harder to see this from outside of the Foundation (and this on itself should be fixed imo). Of course, being colleagues with the great people who worked on Flow puts us (the staff members) in a difficult position to make comments post the wikimedia-l announcement because there are confusions about the announcement and our responses can be interpreted as "colleagues just supporting each other". For someone like me, it's important that I can express my opinion on this RfC at my staff capacity because EpochFail has convinced me to document all my work in research meta and now if something changes at this scale, it can have impact on my staff time performance (whether positive or not). I need to understand the impact and how much control I will have over it before making a decision. And I'm with you, more of these discussions should happen in the open. It will help all of us gain more trust towards each other.

Re help: Thanks for offering it, I'll take you up on that. You do the same: please ping if I can be of help. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 01:49, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Your research activity on NLP and Knowledge Graphs

Hi @LZia,

First, I'd like to thank you for the endorsement on the StrepHit IEG proposal.

I had a look at the research project you linked in your endorsement message: at a first glimpse, I think I have carried out closely related work with the DBpedia fact extractor.
It would be great to collaborate, so let's definitely keep in touch.

Cheers, --Hjfocs (talk) 08:25, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Sounds good. Just ping when you want to chat more, Hjfocs, and best of luck with your IEG proposal. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

F2F meeting in SF headquarters

Hello @LZia,

Following up our conversation at the DBpedia meeting in Stanford: what about a meeting on Monday 9th in the afternoon? I'll be in town, so just let me know when that works best for you. Tuesday at lunch is also fine. Looking forward to seeing you! Cheers,

Marco Hjfocs (talk) 23:03, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi Marco Hjfocs. Tuesday lunch works well. I'll send you an invitation to your email.

@LZia (WMF): perfect! Just let me know where exactly I should be at that time.

WMF tracking users?

Hi, LZia,
I'm not sure where to direct this question but I saw your name as a contact for a research project so I thought it might as well be you! If this isn't your area, please ping whomever would know about this.

In this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the author Elizabeth Farrelly states, "Wiki tracks the age, gender, language, education level, ethnicity and family situation of its editors: mostly childless, often single, about half of them university educated and almost 90 per cent male."

While I think this kind of information about editors would be useful to the organization, I was not aware there was tracking going on. Can you direct me to the research study that details this kind of information, especially the results of any study? I'd also like to know if this tracking is ongoing or was a one time effort and if it was just done for the English Wikipedia or for all WMF projects. I was surprised to read this sentence because I've never provided my demographic information so I guess I'm not one of the tracked editors. But, of course, the media is known for making mistakes so that is why I'm checking with you. Thanks for any information you can provide. Liz (talk) 19:51, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi Liz. I did not read the article but I can tell you more about what kind of information the Wikimedia Foundation has access to from the list of "age, gender, language, education level, ethnicity and family situation" based on my experience as a researcher in the Foundation.

First, there is no systematic tracking happening. All the variables you mentioned may be collected as part of surveys sent to editors. Participation in such surveys is always voluntary, and these surveys are not very frequent. @EGalvez (WMF): may be able to expand more here.

Second, some information is shared by editors publicly, such as their reported gender, the languages they speak and their proficiency in those languages (through Babel templates). That information is available to the WMF as well as the community.

Given that you have read the piece in an article, I'm pinging @Katherine (WMF): who may be able to expand more.

I hope this helps. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 15:23, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

It does help and I look forward to any additional information @EGalvez (WMF): and @Katherine (WMF): can provide. I had a feeling that the reporter was overstating the situation but I wanted to check because if this information is available, I'd be interested in looking it over. Liz (talk) 14:16, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi Hi Liz, I think you’re right in that this seems to be an issue of wording. As Leila mentioned, the WMF does not systematically track users in accordance with our privacy policy. We do publish studies, but all user data we use for research is available publicly, or offered voluntarily. The sentence should have said something like, “studies user activity such as age, gender...” The Communications team will reach out to the publication to clarify as well. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

For reference, I believe our latest editor survey was in 2012 and a broader user survey in the Global South in 2014. Katherine (WMF) (talk) 01:43, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

I thought editors were surveyed in 2013 but I must be mistaken. If the last time a general study was done was in 2012, it might be time for another in 2016. ;-) Thank you for the information and links, Katherine. Liz (talk) 20:23, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Harassment workshop

Greetings! You are receiving this message because, at some point in the past, you have participated in a discussion around the topic of harassment. The Support and Safety team is holding a series of consultations gathering feedback on the best potential solutions to the problem. The next stage is a workshop where we hope to narrow the focus to individual actionable ideas and explore how to bring some of these ideas to life.

• Please join us at the Harassment workshop!

Best regards, the Support and Safety team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:35, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Happy holidays

I am currently doing end of year accounting, and it occurred to me that I believe that I owe you $2 from 2014 for misspelling your name. Please consider these your Christmas present, along with an additional $1 for the interest. (If you have a non-WMF account where you would prefer these to go please feel free to move this entire section there.)

Happy holidays, --Pine^✉ 07:43, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

• File:Civil Rights Act of 1964 2014 Silver Dollar reverse.jpg
• 
• 

hahaha! :D Thanks a lot, Pine, for being proactive about this. Paying them here is completely fine, given that the contract applies when people interact with me at my role as a WMF employee. Outside of that role, I'm more open to name variations. ;)

I hope you enjoy the holidays, and happy holidays to you as well. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 06:06, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Retroactive ping

No, it won't. Cheers, Nemo 19:24, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, Nemo, for keeping an eye on me! :) I will add the pings as a reply to my message, hopefully this time not forgetting to sign. ;)

Translation of the blog post "Why the world reads Wikipedia"

Hi there,

I stumbled on your collaboration to the blog post "Why the world reads Wikipedia" thanks to the French Wikipedia hosted newspost RAW. I have done a translation of it here. I just thought it would be nice to inform the authors of the blog post.

Best regards,

Assassas77 (talk) 00:17, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

@Assassas77: This is very nice! Thank you very much for letting me know about it, and of course for doing this. :) --LZia (WMF) (talk) 14:10, 8 May 2018 (UTC)

Use of VisualEditor vs. toolbar

Hi, in this discussion User:Guy Macon asked whether there are statistics regarding what percentage of users use VisualEditor and what percentage use the MediaWiki toolbar. Do you know where that information might be available? My guess is that some editors use both. It would also be interesting to know what percentage of editors use the New Wikitext Editor. Thanks, --Pine^✉ 21:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi Leila, I'm checking to see whether you have been able to find information regarding the topics that I mentioned. User:Guy Macon is waiting patiently. Thanks, --Pine✉ 21:53, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

@Pine: I don't have a direct answer to your question. You may want to ask the question in IRC via #mediawiki-visualeditor^connect. I'm not sure if that is the correct place, but the folks there should be able to direct you to the right place if it's not. I hope this helps. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 22:28, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. @Guy Macon: can you access the IRC channel above? If you get a response from the people who are there, would you please ask them to copy the response into the place where we discussing this topic on the grant talk page? Thanks, --Pine✉ 22:35, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

I have a philosophical objection to IRC. See Eating your own dog food. I want everyone to be able to see an unalterable history of everything I do, and I want the ability to strike out old statements that turn out to be wrong and append corrections inline. In other words, I want a wiki. (Private messages are a different story; you can email me, send an RFD, snail mail a clay tablet, etc. for private conversations where for whatever reason you don't want a record of what you wrote.) In my opinion, every public IRC channel that that is used for making WMF or Wikipedia decisions should have a wiki that mirrors the IRC. So if anyone wants to ask the above question on IRC. feel free. If this is answered on IRC, please cut and paste a copy of the answer here or on my talk page. -Guy Macon (talk) 08:05, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

No longer working at WMNL

Hi Leila,

I just got a ping on your message on research on WPNL. As I recently started a new job as information specialist at RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History I'm no longer the right person to forward these messages to. I suggest you ping @SRientjes: instead in the future.

Best, --AWossink - WMNL (talk) 10:18, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Research:Detox

The Detox tool has been deleted. The page Research:Detox contains out of date details of team members. There are outstanding concerns about the tool, and the uses to which it has been put, at Research talk:Detox. I would also note that the page Wikimedia Research on Mediawiki is also outdated. Please could you look into all of this? Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 09:56, 26 June 2019 (UTC) Please see also this discussion on en-wiki about the tool and the unacceptable results it was producing. DuncanHill (talk) 10:21, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

• LZia, please could you respond? I have some serious concerns about the use of the tool, for example in the Community Health Initiative. If you refuse to respond, please say so. If you will respond but need some time to do so, then say so. DuncanHill (talk) 11:32, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Hi DuncanHill. I will update the status of the research project at Research:Detox. Note that I will not change the team members as my understanding is that this specific project is concluded with the team that is listed there. Since your message, we have also updated Wikimedia Research. That page will go through further updates in the coming months as we will work on making the Research team's presence more consistent across wikis, sites, tools, etc. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 19:20, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. Should the Detox page include details of the unacceptable results, which were known about two years ago? I would hate for anyone to read the page and come away with the impression that Detox was any use to anybody. DuncanHill (talk) 10:34, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Category and Reader Navigation

Hi, I am interested to find out whether Readers actually use Categories, and I was hoping your research could help me. My thoughts are

1. 99 % are mostly unused (except by web crawlers or bots)
2. Hardly any readers navigate up and downs categories
3. It is rare for a category to be used on an article page
4. The more categories (such as wikipedia:Albert Einstein ) on a page the less likely they are to be used, and the more likely there is to be conflict (exception treaties) because of nationalism

If though of the using the page views on individual categories, but I think it includes page counts include web crawlersWakelamp (talk) 14:45, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

• Hi, Wakelamp. Leila pointed me to this question since I have been doing some of the research on readers in the Research Team. Your question and hypothesis are very interesting. Unfortunately, I am not in a position to provide a good answer. The reason is that we have been restricting our analysis of readers' navigation mainly to the main namespace in order to simplify the complexity of the problem (see, for example, our recent paper A Large-Scale Characterization of How Readers Browse Wikipedia). I have started some exploratory analysis on if and how readers navigate to the talk-page of an article in order to understand how readers might be critically evaluating the information they find in an articles (Research:Understanding Curious and Critical Readers/Reader interactions with talk-pages and version-history). As an additional resource to explore navigation of readers I want to point out the WikiNav-tool. At the moment, this also only captures navigation within the main namespace but there have been requests to add other namespaces to the underlying clickstream-dataset (see phab:T296359, and feel free to add your request about categories to that ticket).

But you might be able to get a partial answer to your question by looking at the number of pageviews the category-pages receive (without navigation). For example, using the pageviews-tool you can query the number of pageviews of individual articles including categories (example). You can select Agent=User which should filter (most of the) automated traffic from crawlers etc. MGerlach (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank-you for your reply, and for adding my comment to the phab :-)

With the readers navigating to the talk page.

This is about editors, but I thought it might be of interest. It's just a draft from my off WP stuff, so forgive any sp. Wakelamp (talk) 11:00, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

We need your feedback on a tool from the Wikimedia Summit

Reminder: the guide to using Baserow, presented during the Wikimedia Summit.

Hi! I'm contacting you as one of the participants in the Wikimedia Summit 2022, to kindly ask for your feedback through a 5-10 minute survey to evaluate 'Baserow' (note: the survey is on a Google form).

Baserow was a tool through which participants in the Summit co-created a database of Movement Strategy activities. We hope to learn from you how useful it may be to keep using it in the future to help document and connect on Movement Strategy work.

You are welcome and encouraged to fill out the survey in any language. Your feedback would be very appreciated --Abbad (WMF) (talk) 15:38, 16 February 2023 (UTC).