🕑 1 hour 28 minutes Dr. Moritz Schubotz (developer username Physikerwelt) is head of research at the mathematics department at FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. He is the author or co-author of the MediaWiki extensions Math and MathSearch, and the Mathoid application, among others. Links for some of the topics discus…

🕑 1 hour 43 minutes Megan Cutrofello, better known as River, returns to the podcast. She is a freelance wiki developer who has worked with Gamepedia, Fandom and wiki.gg, among others. Links for some of the topics discussed: wiki.gg "What's going on with gaming communities moving from Fandom to Wiki.gg?" (2023 Reddit thread) River Writes blog The Se…

🕑 21 minutes It's a BTB Digest episode! Hear clips from five recent episodes. Steve Schneider describes his remarkably AI-centered approach to teaching, Birgit Müller boasts about her team's success in improving code review, Srishti Sethi considers the usefulness of developer outreach programs, Alan Ang lists the steps in getting a knowledge base o…

In which Noah Smith & Brad DeLong wish Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson had written a very different book than their "Power & Progress" is... Key Insights: * Acemoglu & Johnson should have written a very different book—one about how some technologies complement and others substitute for labor, and it is very important to maximize the first. * Neither…

🕑 38 minutes Taavi Väänänen is a site reliability engineer in the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2022, when he was still just a volunteer contributor, he was named Tech Contributor of the Year by Jimmy Wales. Links for some of the topics discussed: Taavi Väänänen homepage Wikimedia Toolforge CentralAuth MediaWiki exte…

🕑 1 hour 28 minutes Jeffrey Wang returns to the podcast to talk about his new-ish job at Microsoft, his much older job as head of MyWikis, the upcoming MediaWiki conference, AI, and various other things. Some of the topics discussed: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference 2024 MyWikis MyWikis Europe "Why People Don't Like Fandom Wikis" (2022 blo…

🕑 1 hour 9 minutes Guillaume Coulombe is the head of Procédurable, a process consulting company with a focus on open source software and open data, and an even more specific focus on MediaWiki. Links for some of the topics discussed: Procédurable Arbre-Évolution Coop "Understanding wiki collaboration in Quebec healthcare organizations" (2012 paper …

Producer Confidence & Consumer Confidence (in the Economy), & Our Confidence (in Our Analyses): Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week); Aspirationally an hour... Key Insights: * The disjunction between all the economic data having been very good and ver…

🕑 1 hour 13 minutes Alan Ang and Kris Litson (pictured, left to right) are both employees at Wikimedia Deutschland, the German Wikimedia chapter: Alan is a partner manager for Wikidata, while Kris is head of software communications. The two are both involved in evangelism for both Wikidata and its backend software, Wikibase. Links for some of the t…

& a start-of-the-semester academic-email-addresses-only paid-subscription sale: Key Insights: * Young whippersnappers Oks and Williams are to be commended for being young, and whippersnapperish—but we disagree with them. * Contrary to what Brad thought, the fertility transition in Africa really has resumed. * The problem of how you provide mass emp…

🕑 52 minutes Srishti Sethi (also known as SrishAkaTux) is a developer advocate in the Language Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Prior to the mass reorganization at the Wikimedia Foundation in summer 2023, she was part of the Technical Engagement team. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikimedia outreach programs Outreach programs success sto…

🕑 23 minutes It's another BTB Digest! Highlights from five recent episodes. Bryan Hilderbrand considers the future of scientific publishing, Jan Ainali thinks about solutions for Wikidata's messiness, Tricia Burmeister recounts the challenges of changing a wiki's front page, Ilias Sarantopoulos praises the new Lift Wing software, Alissa Stern expla…

🕑 1 hour 8 minutes It's not quite a holiday episode, but it is an end-of-year wrapup, featuring William Beutler, strategic marketing consultant and author of the blog The Wikipedian, which went on hiatus in 2020 and is now thankfully back. William shares some of the stories that he's working on for his "Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2023" feature (hi…

🕑 55 minutes Birgit Müller is the Director of Product for MediaWiki and Developer Experiences at the Wikimedia Foundation. Before that, she was Director of Technical Engagement. From 2014 to 2019, she worked at Wikimedia Deutschland. Links for some of the topics discussed: Birgit's user page on mediawiki.org MediaWiki Product Insights Monthly Media…

Key Insights: * Finally, at long last, over the next two generations the tide is likely to be flowing strongly toward near-universal global development... * The fear was that dehyperglobalization would rob poorer countries of their ability to develop the export comparative advantages to support the manufacturing engineering clusters they need for l…

🕑 1 hour 52 minutes Steve Schneider is a professor of information design at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly). He currently teaches a class, Digital Media and Information in Society, whose coursework is managed via Wikiversity and Wiki Edu, and also involves the use of ChatGPT by both teacher and students. Links for…

🕑 1 hour 5 minutes Alissa Stern founded the organization BASAbali (later renamed BASAibu) in 2011, and the BASAbali Wiki in 2014. The BASAbali Wiki was originally intended to serve only as a dictionary for the Balinese language, but it has since grown to become a general communication hub for the Balinese community. Links for some of the topics dis…

🕑 1 hour 4 minutes Ilias Sarantopoulos is a Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been at the WMF since 2022. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikimedia Foundation Machine Learning team WMF machine learning modernization plan WMF machine learning model cards "Wikipedia's Moment of Truth" (The New Yor…

The SubStackLand community gains another valuable member. We welcome him to the NFL SubStackLand: Key Insights: * Bing-AI says “Brian Beutler” is pronounced “Bryan Bootler”—that is, rhymes with “lion shooter”, which shows how far political incorrectness has penetrated Silicon Valley… * Noah has figured out a solution to his problem of losing the sc…

🕑 1 hour 23 minutes Tricia Burmeister is a senior technical writer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and part of the (relatively new) WMF Technical Documentation Team. Links for some of the topics discussed: Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team Wikitech wiki main page restructuring diff Phabricator ticket that relates to this change MediaWiki Product …

Liberals vs. leftists once again, with the principal conclusion being that trying to find and join your tribe by shouting online—Schmittian picking-an-enemy as the core of your identity—is no way to go through life, son. Nor is artfully screenshotting in order to make sure your readers do not see the sentence just below the ones you quote. In which…

🕑 21 minutes Clips from five recent episodes! Danielle Batson thinks about the future of genealogy, Ike Hecht considers the effect of AI on software, Tom Harriman describes the contents of Nuclepedia, Rita Ho praises the Content Translation tool, Allan Lim talks about becoming an amateur archaelogist, and more!…

Key Insights: * The Chinese Communist Party is very like an aristocracy—or maybe it isn’t… * If it is, it will in the long run have the same strong growth-retarding effects on the economy that aristocracies traditionally have… * Or maybe it won’t: China today is not Europe in the 1600s… * We probably will not be able to get Noah to read Franklin Fo…

🕑 60 minutes Jan Ainali is a codebase steward for the Foundation for Public Code. On the side, he's an all-around Wikimedia editor, enthusiast and evangelist, with a special focus on Wikidata. He co-founded the Wikimedia Sverige chapter, co-created the Wikidata-based online resource Govdirectory, and co-hosts the (mostly Swedish-language) podcast W…

Key Insights: * Critics: Cato-style libertarians, including AEI’s Michael Strain. The last die-hard classic Milton Friedman-style economic libertarians—and starting in 1975, Milton Friedman would say, every three years, that the Swedish social democratic model was going to collapse in the next three years. * Critics: Progressives—Biden is a tool of…

🕑 1 hour 16 minutes Bryan Hilderbrand, MediaWiki consultant of TeGnosis and WikiWorks fame, is back on the podcast to talk about weighty matters like the future of science, the nature of truth, and whether periods need one or two spaces after them. Links for some of the topics discussed: SMWCon Spring 2023 Abstract Wikipedia > Google.org Fellows ev…

Key Insights: * Brad has a new microphone! * Noah has jet lag: he is just back from Japan. * Brad has jet lag: he is just back from Australia. * Perhaps inflation’s ebbing has not yet made its way into the minds of people when they answer pollsters. * We reject the hypothesis that it is because of lagging real incomes. * More difficult mortgage bor…

🕑 1 hour 14 minutes Allan Lim is the founder of the wiki Beyond Angkor, which maps the locations of temples and other sites from the Khmer Empire, in modern-day Cambodia and surrounding countries. Links for some of the topics discussed: Beyond Angkor Beyond Angkor Facebook group Khmer Empire Wikipedia article Douglas Latchford Wikipedia article "Un…

🕑 1 hour 12 minutes Rita Ho is the senior groups design manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. She was formerly a member of the Growth Team, and is still actively involved in growth-related projects. Links for some of the topics discussed: Growth team - feature summary (slideshow) Graph of active editors over time for the English-language Wikipedia S…

Key Insights: * Brad’s microphone is dying, and a new one is on order. * However, 75% of the talking on this episode is Noah: he came loaded for bear. * Although Noah has not yet read Acemoglu & Johnson’s Power & Progress, he nevertheless has OPINIONS! * Friedrich von Hayek was right when he pointed out that we could not know the shape of future te…