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Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?). Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making. Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness. There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources. Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help? Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen. Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
The article Central Highlands Water has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:
The coverage (references, external links, etc.) does not seem sufficient to justify this article passing Wikipedia:General notability guideline and the more detailed Wikipedia:Notability (companies) requirement. If you disagree and deprod this, please explain how it meets them on the talk page here in the form of "This article meets criteria A and B because..." and ping me back through WP:ECHO or by leaving a note at User talk:Piotrus. Thank you.
While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the ((proposed deletion/dated))
notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.
Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing ((proposed deletion/dated))
will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:09, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Central Highlands Water is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Central Highlands Water until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:46, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
you havent seen the whole sad story - its there [1] [2] it is like watching a repetitive gif of a car accident - JarrahTree 10:38, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook. The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API. APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web. Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
You're the only one complaining here. I've seen plenty of pages here on Wikipedia.. like for example (See this) it is even worse than his edit — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.196.42.71 (talk) 12:19, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Hello, can you please advise on how to request removal of an item from MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist which was originally added after a dispute which involved me and two now-disgraced very active users?
Users on Talk:Zenodo pointed out that it's difficult to edit the article due to the blacklist. Whatever "emergency" there was back then has since expired: in particular, I'm currently barred from adding links to zenodo.org (and I'm sorry that other users are harmed, but I may be considered involved).
Is it appropriate for me to de-archive or reiterate the request for removal from blacklist which other users made? Nemo 09:26, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Talk of cloud computing draws a veil over hardware, but also, less obviously but more importantly, obscures such intellectual distinction as matters most in its use. Wikidata begins to allow tasks to be undertaken that were out of easy reach. The facility should not be taken as the real point. Coming in from another angle, the "executive decision" is more glamorous; but the "administrative decision" should be admired for its command of facts. Think of the attitudes ad fontes, so prevalent here on Wikipedia as "can you give me a source for that?", and being prepared to deal with complicated analyses into specified subcases. Impatience expressed as a disdain for such pedantry is quite understandable, but neither dirty data nor false dichotomies are at all good to have around. Issue 13 and Issue 21, respectively on WP:MEDRS and systematic reviews, talk about biomedical literature and computing tasks that would be of higher quality if they could be made more "administrative". For example, it is desirable that the decisions involved be consistent, explicable, and reproducible by non-experts from specified inputs. What gets clouded out is not impossibly hard to understand. You do need to put together the insights of functional programming, which is a doctrinaire and purist but clearcut approach, with the practicality of office software. Loopless computation can be conceived of as a seamless forward march of spreadsheet columns, each determined by the content of previous ones. Very well: to do a backward audit, when now we are talking about Wikidata, we rely on integrity of data and its scrupulous sourcing: and clearcut case analyses. The MEDRS example forces attention on purge attempts such as Beall's list.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
Administrators must secure their accounts
The Arbitration Committee may require a new RfA if your account is compromised.
|
This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:47, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.
Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are required to "have strong passwords and follow appropriate personal security practices." We have updated our procedures to ensure that we enforce these policies more strictly in the future. The policies themselves have not changed. In particular, two-factor authentication remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.
We are sorry for the wording of our previous message, which did not accurately convey this, and deeply regret the tone in which it was delivered.
For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:03, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Two dozen issues, and this may be the last, a valediction at least for a while. It's time for a two-year summation of ContentMine projects involving TDM (text and data mining). Wikidata and now Structured Data on Commons represent the overlap of Wikimedia with the Semantic Web. This common ground is helping to convert an engineering concept into a movement. TDM generally has little enough connection with the Semantic Web, being instead in the orbit of machine learning which is no respecter of the semantic. Don't break a taboo by asking bots "and what do you mean by that?" The ScienceSource project innovates in TDM, by storing its text mining results in a Wikibase site. It strives for compliance of its fact mining, on drug treatments of diseases, with an automated form of the relevant Wikipedia referencing guideline MEDRS. Where WikiFactMine set up an API for reuse of its results, ScienceSource has a SPARQL query service, with look-and-feel exactly that of Wikidata's at query.wikidata.org. It also now has a custom front end, and its content can be federated, in other words used in data mashups: it is one of over 50 sites that can federate with Wikidata. The human factor comes to bear through the front end, which combines a link to the HTML version of a paper, text mining results organised in drug and disease columns, and a SPARQL display of nearby drug and disease terms. Much software to develop and explain, so little time! Rather than telling the tale, Facto Post brings you ScienceSource links, starting from the how-to video, lower right.
The review tool requires a log in on sciencesource.wmflabs.org, and an OAuth permission (bottom of a review page) to operate. It can be used in simple and more advanced workflows. Examples of queries for the latter are at d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource project/Queries#SS_disease_list and d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource_project/Queries#NDF-RT issue. Please be aware that this is a research project in development, and may have outages for planned maintenance. That will apply for the next few days, at least. The ScienceSource wiki main page carries information on practical matters. Email is not enabled on the wiki: use site mail here to Charles Matthews in case of difficulty, or if you need support. Further explanatory videos will be put into commons:Category:ContentMine videos. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
disambiguation | |
---|---|
... you were recipient no. 1982 of Precious, a prize of QAI! |
--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:34, 22 July 2019 (UTC)
lol Praxidicae (talk) 12:10, 21 August 2019 (UTC)
I am the author of ANS coding and have noticed that you have removed the list of resources ( https://encode.su/threads/2078-List-of-Asymmetric-Numeral-Systems-implementations ) I am maintaining from its Wikipedia article Asymmetric numeral systems.
It, among others, provides list of links (verifiable by archive.org) to confirm "used in data compression since 2014" statement with the only stated placement in time for ANS. This list is placed in the only open discussion forum gathering authors of data compressors currently in use.
Now this article is missing referral to placement in time and more complete list of resources - what alternative to link you have removed do you propose? --Jarek Duda (talk) 03:48, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
What didn't help is that the sentence structure is pretty clunky so uncertain on what it is particularly citing. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:26, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
... I have responded on my talk page. KillerChihuahua 12:05, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
Hi, Billinghurst! Why do you revert my edits with links referring to actual CEP data back to obsolete but "official" links to deleted pages. Do you think irrelevant and dead links (to 404) are better? BTW in your message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Bilhanuk you refer to dead link too. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bilhanuk (talk • contribs) 10:15, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
Then, why do you keep other spam-like references? E.g. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vila_Norma_(Mesquita) I mean DDD-codes site that is obviously not official but MFA site. Is it yours? That reference does not prove that 21 is correct DDD code for given location, but it's still in place. Also I must mention that you reverted not to "no references", that, I can agree, may be better than spam-like references, but you reverted to reference that 1) does not prove data, 2) leads to deleted page, so it undermines trust to wiki.Bilhanuk (talk) 10:48, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
Dude, why did you blank my sandbox? The whole purpose is to make edits into it, right? Slavicanimefan2005 (talk) 22:27, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
Plus it is not as I deleted the thing, you still have access to the whole thing, and can pull back the page, play with it, manipulate it, do your tests, and when finished you can blank it again. Pretty easy. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:00, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
Do you have access to the full text of any of these biographical sources: wikisource:Author talk:Annie Eliot Trumbull? (Also where did you get this printout? Very helpful for someone who is so invisible online) czar 20:52, 29 December 2019 (UTC)
I will usually use primary data for WS identification, and then populating WD, though less so here due to our restriction of publication of reliable sources, maybe a date of birth or death that is needed then I might sneak them in. Typically what I see in records is more genealogical and records based, and less biographical, though there are exceptions. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:57, 29 December 2019 (UTC)
That was a 2015 search, I can see more records available
- The Miami News; Publication Date: 23/ Dec/ 1949; Publication Place: Miami, Florida, USA; URL: https://www.newspapers.com/image/302904403/?article=d61c6330-cb8d-4a3a-82f1-089107a729ba&focus=0.6039511,0.91541153,0.7214522,0.96472204&xid=2378
Name: Annie Eliot Trumbull
Gender: Female
Death Age: 92
Obituary Date: 23 Dec 1949
Obituary Place: Miami, Florida, United States of America
- No access to the detail, though I can see that a number of newspapers seemed to have had obits.
- The Philadelphia Inquirer; Publication Date: 24/ Dec/ 1949; Publication Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; URL: https://www.newspapers.com/image/173771539/?article=4d97ff03-85bd-498d-960b-2c716239c17d&focus=0.26797542,0.14352465,0.38529763,0.27729255&xid=2378
- Tampa Bay Times; Publication Date: 24/ Dec/ 1949; Publication Place: St. Petersburg, Florida, USA; URL: https://www.newspapers.com/image/314857052/?article=fbdb2d9b-f4a2-4e4a-bb65-94b93959b7c4&focus=0.1531009,0.2649149,0.26966304,0.28014702&xid=2378
- The Birmingham News; Publication Date: 23/ Dec/ 1949; Publication Place: Birmingham, Alabama, United States of America; URL: https://www.newspapers.com/image/573968541/?article=254ecc8d-2f46-40a7-80dc-b07d84ec26df&focus=0.025834825,0.5288442,0.15454902,0.59340847&xid=2378
- The Palm Beach Post; Publication Date: 24/ Dec/ 1949; Publication Place: West Palm Beach, Florida, United States of America; URL: https://www.newspapers.com/image/130134958/?article=318c25e3-b131-41ea-afb4-62135bb03d85&focus=0.25251776,0.39645544,0.37158936,0.47285748&xid=2378
- find a grave
- Plenty of published city directory data from 1890s to 1920s for Hartford
- archive.org
- https://archive.org/details/americanauthorsb00burk/page/750
- https://archive.org/details/womanswhoswhoam00leongoog/page/n823
— billinghurst sDrewth 21:57, 29 December 2019 (UTC)
Excellent. Thank you! I had a feeling I had seen that format before—I have BGMI access through the NYPL so will start there. I've sent you an email so you have my address. I'm waiting for my TWL newspapers.com account to re-up so I can check out your links. In the meantime, feel free to send anything good my way or add it directly to the article, Annie Eliot Trumbull. Thanks again, czar 03:57, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
The Bibliographer Barnstar | ||
Also I wanted to thank you for compiling that BGMI bibliography at Wikisource. I probably would have moved on to another topic had I not found that paywalled list. (I add a lot of bibliographies myself so it's nice to be on the receiving end.) Much appreciated and pretty good results! czar 05:54, 30 December 2019 (UTC) |