A fascinating example of the economic influence of #wikipedia.

"Our treatment added text and photos to the Wikipedia pages of Spanish cities in different language editions of Wikipedia. Most of the added text was translated from Spanish Wikipedia. We focused on information that was relevant to tourists, such as the city’s main sights and culture. We focused our attention on cities with rather short Wikipedia pages. The randomization was done across city and language pairs. By varying the information in different language editions of Wikipedia, we can isolate the causal impact on tourists’ choices. We find that information on Wikipedia has a sizable impact on consumption choices.

Our estimates show that adding about 2,000 characters (approximately two paragraphs) of text and one photo to a city’s Wikipedia page increased the number of nights spent in this city by about 9% during the tourist season compared to cities in the control group. The effect comes mostly from pages that were initially relatively incomplete. In particular, the treatment increases hotel stays by about 33% in cities which initially had very short pages in a particular language, while there was no effect on city-language combinations where the pages were well developed."

Also, almost all the editors' contributions to Dutch Wikipedia were immediately removed, whereas contributions to the German, French, and Italian Wikipedias persisted. I wonder what Dutch-speaking Wikipedians have against small Spanish towns?!

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3046400

Truly are we living in an age of wonders (albeit also of horrors). Trying to track down medieval retellings of the story of Joseph son of Jacob (the technicolour dreamcoat guy), I come across a mention of a thirteenth-century version by one Mahmud Qırımlı, allegedly the first work of #CrimeanTatar literature. Maybe I need to search under different spellings of his name, but so far I've found hardly anything on this guy, let alone in languages I know. But, yes, there is an entry in Tatar #Wikipedia which someone has helpfully summarised in Ukrainian Wikipedia, and Google Translate is able to have a reasonable stab at telling me what they both say. For all the angst about AI, and the entirely proper worry about globalisation killing languages, this particular combination of human voluntarism and tech-corporate smarts is a total game-changer for how we can find out about the world. If only the Internet was always this good...

https://crh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_Q%C4%B1r%C4%B1ml%C4%B1

This struck me as one of the more useful open letters that one might sign: a campaign goal that is challenging enough to require a push from activists yet is plausibly achieveable, seeking climate action that would have quite a big impact for relatively small effort.

It's a campaign for UK universities to switch to plant-based food on campuses.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10-a4nC5UdoaMbh6W3YwzBmqc3uVnWI7idyfG1JywZWI/edit?usp=sharing

I nod appreciatively as my North American interlocutor contemplates the place of #playdough in the primary-school curriculum.

It takes me a surprisingly long time to realise that she is actually talking about #Plato.

Looking around for sensible and reliable coverage of the current UK university industrial action, I thought that this looked quite promising: Joe Lewis, 'University strike action in the UK' ([London]: House of Commons Library, 23 May 2023), https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9387/.

Turns out it's largely a précis of the ridiculously sprawling #Wikipedia entry on the subject that I've maintained over the last few years (even with the same picture on the cover!).

This is a bit cheeky, because the Creative Commons license for Wikipedia entries specifies that people adapting the material should give due attribution to Wikipedia, and it doesn't. But otherwise it's nice to see my work saving a civil servant some effort and helping inform the Government...

(It would be nice to see my work actually leading to a resolution of this endless industrial action though.)

#UCUrising

Doing a bit of last-minute #Leeds City Council-election research on candidates for #Pudsey Ward? Check out my statements (alongside my competitors') at https://westleedsdispatch.com/leeds-election-candidate-profiles-2023-pudsey-ward/ or my similar statement (alongside my fellow #GreenParty candidates) at https://candoleeds.greenparty.org.uk/candidates/. It's also below :-) Don't forget to take photo ID with you to vote and thanks for looking me up!

~ ~ ~

I’ve been an active member of the Leeds community for the last fifteen years. I’ve chaired the St Luke’s Tenants and Residents Association, lobbying the council and organising community gardening, kids’ fundays, and litterpicks. I’ve volunteered to support disadvantaged children and I’m a school governor. I’d be honoured to take this work to the next level as a councillor.

Let’s be honest: the Green Party isn’t a big player in Pudsey politics (yet!). Last year the Tories got 55% of the vote, Labour had 37%, and we came third with 5%.

So why should you vote Green now? Put simply: to encourage us, and to show the ‘big two’ what their policies ought to be.

It’s crazy that key bus services in Pudsey have been at risk over the last year, when we all know that what Leeds needs is more, and better, public transport. This situation is largely caused by the Conservative national government imposing privatised buses on us and preventing Leeds enacting the policies we know we need for the city to flourish—part of their wider economic mismanagement. We can’t expect the Conservatives to do any better running Leeds City Council than they do running the UK.

But the Labour-led city council has also long missed opportunities, like promoting home-insulation that we always knew we needed – and now the energy crisis has hit and we’re hardly off the starting grid.

Leeds Green Party is starting to make waves in elsewhere in the city, and beginning to offer a powerful third option for Leeds voters seeking a sustainable alternative to business as usual. A vote for the Greens would be a vote to show that you care about living in a less polluted, more liveable city, with more control over our own future.

This syllabus is cool! I don't have any prospect of using it to teach an undergrad course on #medieval #Africa, but might use it to provide myself with a course on the subject...

An Introduction to African Kingdoms, c.400–1500
by Adam Simmons
DOI: 10.5040/9781350895676.011

https://www.bloomsburymedievalstudies.com/article?docid=b-9781350895676&tocid=b-9781350895676-011