Please don't add or restore poorly sourced material on living people that is sourced only to tabloids. Per WP:BLPSOURCES this is not permitted. As regards your edit summary, the RfC is about a blanket ban on the Daily Mail as a source on Wikipedia. There is an existing consensus that it should not be used on BLPs, which this is. In addition to the Mail, the Daily Record is also a poor source. Thanks for your understanding. --John (talk) 19:55, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
Newsletter Nr 1 for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
Participation: This is the very first newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, see below) Progress report: Since the Projects very first edit 9 december 2002 by User:Dan Koehl, which eventually became the WikiProject Genealogy, different templates were developed, and the portal Portal:Genealogy was founded by User:Michael A. White in 2008. Over the years a number of articles has been written, with more or less association to genealogy. And, very exciting, there is a proposal made on Meta by User:Another Believer to found a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, read more at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project where you also can support the creation with your vote, in case you havnt done so already. Future: The future of the Genealogy project on the English Wikipedia, and a potential creation of a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, is something where you can make a an input. You can
Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy founder and coordinator Dan Koehl To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery Dan Koehl (talk) 22:28, 6 February 2017 (UTC) |
Hi, thank you for updating the BBC Your Paintings links to the new ArtUK format on so many artist pages. Obviously this is a welcome improvement, but are you aware that for a handful of articles this seems to have generated an error message, which is displayed before the link ? Even with the error message the link still works, so this is a matter of article appearance rather than functionality. The pages affected, from my Watchlist, are
Apologies if this has nothing to do with your edits, but I thought it best to contact you as a first step to finding a solution to this.14GTR (talk) 14:04, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
Newsletter Nr 2 for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
Participation: This is the second newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below) Progress report: In order to improve communication between genealogy interested wikipedians, as well talking in chat mode about the potential new wiki, a new irc channel has been setup, and you are welcome to visit and try it out at: #wikimedia-genealogy connect (In case you are not familiar with IRC, or would prefer some info and intro, please see Wikipedias IRC tutorial) At m:Talk:Wikimedia_genealogy_project#Wikimedia_user_group is discussed the possibility of creating a genealogy-related Wikimedia user group: please submit comments and suggestions, and whether you would like to be a member in such a group. Prime goal for the group is the creation of a new, free, genealogy wiki, but there is also a discussion weather we should propose a new project or support the adoption of an existing project? Read more at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project where you also can support the creation with your vote, in case you haven't done so already. Future: The future of the Genealogy project, and creation of a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, is something where you can make a an input. You can
Don't want newsletters? If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page. Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl. To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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Hi Jheald, I noticed your question at Module talk:Wikidata#Qualifiers. You might want to try out ((Wikidata)) as well. Cheers! thayts💬 14:00, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
Newsletter Nr 3 for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
Participation: This is the third newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below) Request: In order to improve communication between genealogy interested wikipedians, as well as taking new, important steps towards a creation of a new project site, we need to make communication between the users easier and more effective. At Mail list on meta is discussed the possibility of creating a genealogy-related Wikimedia email list. In order to request the creation of such a list, we need your voice and your vote. In order to create a new list, we need to put a request it in Phabricator, and add a link to reasoning/explanation of purpose, and link to community consensus. Therefore we need your vote for this now, so we can request the creation of the mail list. Read more about this email list at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project mail list where you can support the creation of the mail list with your vote, in case you haven't done so already. Future:
Don't want newsletters? If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page. Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl. To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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Newsletter Nr 4, 2017-03-24, for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
Participation: This is the fourth newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below) Mail list is created: The project email list is now created and ready to use! Please feel free to subscribe at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-genealogy Future:
Don't want newsletters? If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page. Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl. To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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Are you sure that the part of the original Woughton parish left behind when Old Woughton left is really called "Woughton on the Green"? The councils websites [BC and PC] both still say "Woughton" or "Woughton Community Council" - see http://www.woughtoncommunitycouncil.gov.uk/council-information/who-are-we/ for example. The name you give is hard to believe, since WotG itself is in Old Woughton. Citation please. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:44, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for uploading File:The Changes closing titles.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).
Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. Neil S. Walker (t@lk) 15:19, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
Reading your comments in a couple of places, it looks as though your feeling on Wikidata is that it could be a boon to the project but is currently too hard to use. Where exactly on the spectrum are you between thinking it's far too hard to use, and thinking it's almost ready? I ask because I think this will be a key point in any RfC that will come up. I could see some people arguing that they shouldn't have to leave the wikitext editing window to modify Wikidata items; that seems too insular to me -- we don't think that way about Commons, after all. However, at the other end of the spectrum, Alsee's reaction to Cite_Q that he describes here seems like the reaction most editors would have; it's hard to imagine many editors finding that a natural way to handle citations, though many of the computer people among us would applaud the goal of centralizing the data. Do you think an RfC that asks something like "Before edits to Wikidata are allowed to modify an article, how easy must it be for en-wiki editors to observe and modify those Wikidata items" is the right way to address this point? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:31, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
Hi Jheald, thanks for your responses to my comment about Wikidata. I hope it did not come across that I was dismissive of what Wikidata is trying to do, because I understand its potential quite well; I've even contributed a few hundred edits to the project myself. I believe the mistrust on en.wikipedia towards Wikidata has two causes, one solvable & the other not easily solvable. The solvable one should be obvious: people at the Foundation are trying to force Wikidata on other projects like en.wikipedia, without any regard to the opinions of volunteers here. (That is a recurring theme with WMF employees, sad to admit.) Were there a Wikidata advocate visibly working Wikipedia to explain how Wikidata can make their editing easier, that would help things along. (And for all I know, you may be doing that this very moment.) The less solvable one is based on mentalities: contributors at Wikipedia tend to be people taking facts & combining them into an intelligible narrative, while contributors at Wikipedia are taking narratives & systematically extracting facts from them. These goals are obviously at cross-purposes, & it's no surprise that members of one group are frustrated at how the other organizes content. Not to mention after one has finished their work, their results reveal much of value that do not easily migrate to the other's domain.
But to my primary topic, about consuls & Wikidata. I mentioned this more as an example of how a non-Wikidata person comes to that project with a problem to solve or a goal to achieve, that person is easily baffled, & decides to just walk away. Wikidata could provide a lot of insights on Roman social history, for example, if one knew how to enter the data -- let alone query & present it correctly. But to do that, one would need to sift through the vocabulary of Wikidata & hopefully find it before boredom or distraction blocked further progress. The more baffling a project, the more likely only nerds with a specific interest in the subject will take it on. To return to my post in the Village Pump, I mentioned Open Stack for a reason: in over 20 years of working with computers, it is the most complex software I have encountered, yet the worst explained. I spent a month learning how to install it so it works, & might have learned sooner had I the benefit of even a screen shot to see the result of a successful install. While I had help with it, the tendency with computer people is to fix the problem without taking the time to explain how they did it. And I have much the same feeling with Wikidata: beyond a few simple things, it remains a dark forest full of grues.
(Yeah, I know, ask more questions. That works when I'm confident I'll be answered -- or I'll understand the answer.)
What I have been thinking of doing is to write up a use case for Roman consuls & present it. Start with a description of what the object would include, such as the need to indicate a colleague. And include the known exceptions to that rule -- some had more than one colleague, while some were sole consuls. Then the nature of dates: while a consul held office between fixed dates of a given year -- which changed thru history, another complication -- a large number do not have definite dates: see List of undated Roman consuls. This means there must be support for "fuzzy" dates. (Actually, if one could plot out all of these "fuzzy" dates, then overlay them with a grid of known dates of consuls, the result might make a decent amount of progress towards defining the dates of some of these undated consuls. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.) And that a given assertion in the object may not be reliable: many parent-child relationships are not attested in a primary source, but are deduced, inferred, or a speculative guess. Of course, this would need to be presented so that the experts in the Wikidata thesaurus & data tables would be encouraged to help.
And then, there's the matter of providing a source for this data. It exists in the Wikipedia, but I haven't figured out how to translate it over to Wikidata. Cite_Q, which you mention to Mike Christie above, might have the answer.
Until I draft a use case, I am keeping Wikidata in mind: I'm trying to write navigation boxes for the consuls of imperial Rome in a predictable format, & explain things in astandardized manner so a script could scrape the articles & populate the relevant fields correctly in Wikidata's objects. (It's amazing how many stock sentences one can accumulate in writing dozens of similar articles.)
Anyway, such are my thoughts. When I complete my current task of cleaning up the consular list & related articles, then I'll probably turn my attention to Wikidata & populate the data over there. Hopefully Wikidata won't seem as forbidding then as it was when I poked around there a couple of years ago. -- llywrch (talk) 21:36, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Girth of the Chest. Since you had some involvement with the Girth of the Chest redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Steel1943 (talk) 05:07, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
The Barnstar of Good Humor | |
Thanks for this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:57, 8 October 2017 (UTC) |
Hello, Jheald. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
Good to get re-acquainted at the meetup yesterday. FYI, I got the tyre changed before my hands froze (Arthur Beale is recommended for arctic clothing). This morning, my garage found that there was a nail in the tyre and explained that it often happens after cars are serviced there as there are lots of building works in the nearby streets and so lots of nails too. Hmm... Andrew D. (talk) 15:14, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017
A new bibliographical landscape[edit]At the beginning of December, Wikidata items on individual scientific articles passed the 10 million mark. This figure contrasts with the state of play in early summer, when there were around half a million. In the big picture, Wikidata is now documenting the scientific literature at a rate that is about eight times as fast as papers are published. As 2017 ends, progress is quite evident. Behind this achievement are a technical advance (fatameh), and bots that do the lifting. Much more than dry migration of metadata is potentially involved, however. If paper A cites paper B, both papers having an item, a link can be created on Wikidata, and the information presented to both human readers, and machines. This cross-linking is one of the most significant aspects of the scientific literature, and now a long-sought open version is rapidly being built up. The effort for the lifting of copyright restrictions on citation data of this kind has had real momentum behind it during 2017. WikiCite and the I4OC have been pushing hard, with the result that on CrossRef over 50% of the citation data is open. Now the holdout publishers are being lobbied to release rights on citations. But all that is just the beginning. Topics of papers are identified, authors disambiguated, with significant progress on the use of the four million ORCID IDs for researchers, and proposals formulated to identify methodology in a machine-readable way. P4510 on Wikidata has been introduced so that methodology can sit comfortably on items about papers. More is on the way. OABot applies the unpaywall principle to Wikipedia referencing. It has been proposed that Wikidata could assist WorldCat in compiling the global history of book translation. Watch this space. And make promoting #1lib1ref one of your New Year's resolutions. Happy holidays, all! Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. 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) 14:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
ϢereSpielChequers is wishing you Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's Solstice or Christmas, Diwali, Hogmanay, Hanukkah, Lenaia, Festivus or even the Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!
Spread the holiday cheer by adding ((subst:User:WereSpielChequers/Dec17a))~~~~ to your friends' talk pages.
ϢereSpielChequers 20:32, 21 December 2017 (UTC)
Newsletter Nr 5, 2017-12-30, for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
Participation: This is the fifth newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below) A demo wiki is up and running! Dear members of WikiProject Genealogy, this will be the last newsletter for 2017, but maybe the most important one! You can already now try out the demo for a genealogy wiki at https://tools.wmflabs.org/genealogy/wiki/Main_Page and try out the functions. You will find parts of the 18th Pharao dynasty and other records submitted by the 7 first users, and it would be great if you would add some records. And with those great news we want to wish you a creative New Year 2018!
Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl. To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018
Metadata on the March[edit]From the days of hard-copy liner notes on music albums, metadata have stood outside a piece or file, while adding to understanding of where it comes from, and some of what needs to be appreciated about its content. In the GLAM sector, the accumulation of accurate metadata for objects is key to the mission of an institution, and its presentation in cataloguing. Today Wikipedia turns 17, with worlds still to conquer. Zooming out from the individual GLAM object to the ontology in which it is set, one such world becomes apparent: GLAMs use custom ontologies, and those introduce massive incompatibilities. From a recent article by sadads, we quote the observation that "vocabularies needed for many collections, topics and intellectual spaces defy the expectations of the larger professional communities." A job for the encyclopedist, certainly. But the data-minded Wikimedian has the advantages of Wikidata, starting with its multilingual data, and facility with aliases. The controlled vocabulary — sometimes referred to as a "thesaurus" as term of art — simplifies search: if a "spade" must be called that, rather than "shovel", it is easier to find all spade references. That control comes at a cost. Case studies in that article show what can lie ahead. The schema crosswalk, in jargon, is a potential answer to the GLAM Babel of proliferating and expanding vocabularies. Even if you have no interest in Wikidata as such, simply vocabularies V and W, if both V and W are matched to Wikidata, then a "crosswalk" arises from term v in V to w in W, whenever v and w both match to the same item d in Wikidata. For metadata mobility, match to Wikidata. It's apparently that simple: infrastructure requirements have turned out, so far, to be challenges that can be met. Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. 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) 12:38, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
Hi, I just noticed a couple of your Art UK additions on my watchlist (Henry Bone and Henry Howard (artist)). When I click on the links generated I get "database error" messages - do you know if this is a fault with the template or is the problem at the Art UK end? DuncanHill (talk) 23:07, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
On 24 January 2018, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article Ursula K. Le Guin, which you nominated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. Ad Orientem (talk) 01:24, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
Wikidata as Hub[edit]One way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites. Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8. Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL. Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. 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) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi. Just an FYI about your wikidata map of the Piccadilly Line: it's missing Terminal 5. I confess I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this map is, but I like it and shall show it to my colleagues at LU. Assuming our browsers are recent enough to run it! -mattbuck (Talk) 06:59, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi Jheald, Are you skilled with AWB or bots or similar methods for systematically producing short descriptions with fewer keystrokes? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 06:25, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
There is an RfC at Talk:Daily Mail#Request for comment: Other criticisms section. Your input would be most helpful. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:20, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
Milestone for mix'n'match[edit]Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal. Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders. These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more. For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading. Congratulations to Magnus, our data Stakhanovite! Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. 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) 12:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Regarding your question, Passover was listed on Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 31. Regards, —howcheng {chat} 01:17, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
I'll add that Jewish holy days used to be posted on the day before, as you expected for Pesach two days ago, with the notation begins at sundown, but this was changed. I don't know why this change was made nor can I suggest how you might find the discussion that preceded it. Dyspeptic skeptic (talk) 07:40, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
The 100 Skins of the Onion[edit]Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that. Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron. Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF. From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart. Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. 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) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Just a reminder, you phrased your message as a comment and note a !vote with oppose or support. --RAN (talk) 13:03, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
ScienceSource funded[edit]The Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.
The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen. The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm. Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help. Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. ScienceSource pages will be announced there, and in this mass message. 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) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions. Close to home also, a template, called ((medrs)) for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter. This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
Hello! I've just created an article in Czech Wiki about Sphinx pinastri, linked it to its Wikidata item... and when I checked the Commons gallery for this species a few hours later, it showed an error. I tried to fix it, but then I noticed your bot doing something about it already, so I stopped. But the error message still stays in place. Is it just some kind of time delay before it recognizes the changes your bot has done, or did I do something wrong? I'm not very experienced here, but I've done such linking with multiple articles before, and never got this error... Do you have any explanation, please? --GeXeS (talk) 19:22, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources. Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume. If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases. A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list. From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
I'm working on adding information for a set of UK council electoral wards to Wikidata. I'm doing this work in my job as a Data Analyst at mySociety mySociety (Q10851773) and it is part of a larger project to collect information on elected representatives across all countries. I'm currently working on electoral wards in London boroughs and I can see you have done some work on these previously.
In terms of entering the data I'm currently following the model from Wikidata:WikiProject_every_politician, and for wards with changing boundaries I'm trying to follow the advice at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_British_Politicians#Constituencies. In general this means creating separate items for Wards vs the general geographical area and creating new items where the Ward boundaries change even when the name stays the same.
I've come across some situations where the Ward and a geographic area have the same name e.g. Ward of Walbrook (Q1261052), Royal Docks (Q1795188) and I'm trying to work out if I should separate these into two separate entries. I actually went ahead and did this in the case of West Barnes (Q28867685) leading to the creation of West Barnes (Q56243623) and the movement of some values from one to the other. I wondered if you had any views on the best or preferred approach in these cases? Owenpatel (talk) 16:49, 24 August 2018 (UTC)
tinyurl.com/ybyvw4ws
. In such cases, for civil parishes as at d:Q895512#P836 I have tended to set the old ID to have "deprecated rank", together with a qualifier end time (P582) and a qualifier reason for deprecated rank (P2241) = withdrawn identifier value (Q21441764). Where this has been done, there should only be one entry in the "preferred ID" column of the query. However, because the re-ranking can't be done by the most common semi-automated tool, it looks like there are quite a few where reason for deprecated rank (P2241) has been added, but the change of rank to deprecated has never actually been done. (Soz!) It looks like the same also applies for constituencies (E14...), which have been more @Andrew Gray:'s domain. Jheald (talk) 09:30, 28 August 2018 (UTC)Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings. The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web. The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Rotation group (disambiguation) 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/Rotation group (disambiguation) 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. Nowak Kowalski (talk) 16:48, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock. Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists. It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more. And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more. Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
Hello, Jheald. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California. In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point. Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.
Account creation is now open on the ScienceSource wiki, where you can see SPARQL visualisations of text mining.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
ϢereSpielChequers is wishing you Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's Solstice or Christmas, Diwali, Hogmanay, Hanukkah, Lenaia, Festivus or even the Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!
Spread the holiday cheer by adding ((subst:User:WereSpielChequers/Dec18a))~~~~ to your friends' talk pages.
ϢereSpielChequers 21:45, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
Newsletter Nr 6, 2018-12-25, for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
Participation: This is the sixth newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise. (To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below) Now 100 supporters[edit]At 3 December 2018, the list of users who support the potential Wikimedia genealogy project, reached 100! A demo wiki is up and running![edit]You can already now try out the demo for a genealogy wiki at https://tools.wmflabs.org/genealogy/wiki/Main_Page and try out the functions. You will find parts of the 18th Pharao dynasty and other records submitted by the 7 first users, and it would be great if you would add some records. And with those great news we want to wish you a creative New Year 2019!
Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl. To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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Redrose64 🌹 (talk) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!
Spread the cheer by adding ((subst:Xmas6)) to their talk page with a friendly message.
--Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:32, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Dahn Y'Israel Nokeam. Since you had some involvement with the Dahn Y'Israel Nokeam redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Catrìona (talk) 03:52, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support. Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects. There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine. Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.
Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)