Thanks for your welcome message, it looks like the Wikipedia page on me has been vandalised a couple of times, but strangely I can’t find any editing history that points to which user did it. Any idea as to how to check?
Wikidata weekly summary #408
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Wikidata Lexeme Forms allows quickly generating a new lexeme with all its forms in selected languages; you can also use the tool to add forms to an existing lexeme, or bulk upload many lexemes and forms at once.
Hi, thought you might be interested in helping work out a policy for notability in piping at
Wikipedia:WikiProject_Bagpipes#Notability_guidelines? It seems that there can be quite different understandings of what constitutes notability, especially as a lot of piping coverage is well outside of mainstream media. There are quite a few articles that exist that I suspect are not notable -
User:Ostrichyearning3/nn - and many many more notable articles that do not exist yet. But would be useful if there was a clear distinction! best,
Ostrichyearning3 (
talk)
12:00, 27 March 2020 (UTC)reply
Upcoming: The
Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference will take place fully remotely in July 2020. Call for submissions with remote formats is open until April 30th.
Upcoming: the
Wikidata Wochenende (previously in Ulm) will take place fully remote on June 12-14
Thank you for messaging me but i found this NON-LOGIN user
Special:Contributions/139.192.224.172 keep spreading not-accurate data and low quality picture and information without references, as you can check (
Check here!) all of his/her editing is very weird and not left any actual and legitimate references uses?
and she/he already got mentioned before for vandalizing so many pages. so that's why im reverting the page to the previous one before he/she edit it without legitimate sources.
Ok I move the section already at this very bottom one. But I think I will stop contributing and editing on those pages prevent to stop edit war, I let you to fix this. I also don't know how to stop her/him spreading fake informations, the way she/he reverting another users edits also seems very rude, changing so many informations not based on legitimate references, thats should be fixed as soon as possible. You can check all of his editing not only on the Pages of Provinces in Indonesia but also another subject pages like Foods, she/he changes so many informations without any references that might be HOAX. I hope you can check and fix this... -->>> (
Check here!)
From now, My every edit will have a summary. (
Jkrn111 (
talk) 12:57, 1 April 2020 (UTC)).
i am sorry, you felt extraordinarily frustrated. It must not happen again. I will try. My friend, have a nice day. (
Jkrn111 (
talk)
18:47, 1 April 2020 (UTC)).reply
A year of the Tree of Life Newsletter: Thank you to all the subscribers who have been with us from the beginning or have joined along the way, and to those who have contributed their time to producing this newsletter. I've really valued your ideas, copyediting, and willingness to be interviewed. Onwards and upwards!
April marks the start of the
GAN Backlog Drive, which continues through the end of May. The goal of this backlog elimination drive is to cut the number of outstanding GANs, in particular those which have been in the queue 90 days or more. All hands welcome, new and old.
The finalists of the US Wiki Science Competition have
been announced. Illustrating Wikipedia articles can be challenging, so these new images represent a chance to find suitable media for our articles. For all images uploaded in the Wiki Science Competition, see
here and click "all images" in the upper right corner.
Fly's mouth and tongue (Microscopy)
Killer whales hunting a crabeater seal (Wildlife)
Fossilized tooth of a Squalicorax shark (Microscopy)
This interview has been edited for length. Find the full interview
here.
Number of participants of WikiProject Covid-19
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on
Phabricator and on
MediaWiki.org.
Please describe how you went about creating WikiProject COVID-19. What made you think a project was needed?
I've been following the outbreak and editing related Wikipedia articles since January. I'm not particularly interested in infectious diseases or viruses, but I've been to China a few times and wanted to monitor the outbreak's impact on society as well as the government's response. For a while, I was casually tracking updates to the first couple pages about the outbreak. Then a pattern began to emerge as February saw the creation of separate articles about outbreaks in
Iran,
Italy, and
South Korea. New Wikipedia articles continued being created in early March, and the outbreak was recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11. Knowing there would many more articles, lists, templates, illustrations, and other pages on Wikipedia, I created WikiProject COVID-19 on March 15. My goal was simply to create a temporary or permanent space for editors to collaborate, communicate, and focus specifically on content related to this ongoing pandemic. I'm a member of many WikiProjects and have created several before, but this one definitely felt more necessary and urgent. Most WikiProjects unite editors with similar interests, which is fine and serves a purpose, but I felt this project could have a much bigger real life impact. I don't think I was alone in my thinking; the project had
80 members by March 20 and 100 members by March 26.
Who or what was invaluable to getting off the ground?
If I'm being honest, getting this project off the ground required little work on my part. All I did was create the space and post invitations to existing talk pages related to the outbreak. Editors joined the project very quickly; 30 members joined on the same day I started the project, and there were more than 50 participants one day later. I've been a daily Wikipedia editor for more than 12 years, and I've never seen so much interest in a project or content added to Wikipedia about a specific topic in such a short period of time. WikiProject members worked expeditiously to build a framework and hang a
barnstar, tagging related pages, assessing content, and starting
talk page discussions about the project's goals and scope. I'm thankful to the many editors who pitched in to get the project established, and I look forward to seeing how editors collaborate in this space as we move forward.
What are the short-term goals of the project?
No specific goals have been posted to the project page yet, but I'd like to think members share a collective desire to ensure Wikipedia has accurate and reliable information about the disease and pandemic. Disinformation and misinformation seem rampant these days, so we're working to give readers around the globe access to accurate, objective, and possibly even life-saving information. Unlike some WikiProjects which may take a more historical approach to documenting certain topics, WikiProject COVID-19 members have the ability to mitigate the disease's spread in real time by arming communities with facts about outbreaks in their region as well as information about prevention, testing, vaccine research, societal impact, etc.
What are the long-term goals? English Wikipedia has many of 'lumpers' who think there are too many projects already. The project has also inspired the creation of two portals, which I imagine caused some raised eyebrows in this trend of portal deletionism. What will come of the WP after the current outbreak subsides?
After creating WikiProject COVID-19, a couple editors said I should have created a task force instead of a standalone WikiProject. I wasn't bothered. The number of 'thank you' notifications I received for creating the page vastly outweighed these critical comments. I knew the page I created was much needed, and I would be fine if editors decide to call the page by another name. I understand some editors think there are too many WikiProjects. No one's required to join WikiProject COVID-19, but the 100+ of us who have already joined invite you to help with our efforts, if you're interested. As for the project's future, I would be fine if editors decided to convert the WikiProject into a task force, or even put the project into retirement if the time comes. Given the level of interest and impact the pandemic has already had on a global scale, I have a feeling the WikiProject will be active for a long time.
Another criticism of the project is its narrow focus. It is focused on only one
strain of virus, and the disease it causes. Even
WikiProject AIDS is about
two species of virus. Is the scope of the project too small? What would an expanded scope look like? Why would including another virus strain in the same species,
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus which causes
SARS, not be wanted? or is it wanted?
Narrow focus? I disagree. The project may focus on a single virus and disease, but the pandemic has resulted in the creation of hundreds of Wikipedia articles documenting outbreaks in most countries and territories. There are pages covering the pandemic's impact on
aviation,
cinema,
education,
politics,
religion,
sports, and
television, not to mention others related to the
resulting economic turmoil. Additionally, there are hundreds of templates, charts, and other graphics. Who knows how many thousands of images and other media will be uploaded at Wikimedia Commons by the time this pandemic subsides? There's also
COVID-19 WikiProject COVID-19 at Wikidata, and I wouldn't be surprised if similar spaces are created for other Wikimedia projects soon. Even if the focus is narrow, there's plenty of content for Wikimedians to improve and protect.
In your opinion, what should be the guidelines for creating a new project, as opposed to creating a task force or working under an existing WikiProject?
I don't feel strongly about new project creation guidelines, or the differences between WikiProjects and task forces. Project members should decide what structure works for them and call themselves whatever name they prefer. I understand project construction requires maintenance and can come at an administrative cost, but we should be careful about discouraging editors from proposing new projects.
Ideally, editors would only create a new WikiProject if at least a few others were committed to joining. I created WikiProject COVID-19 without conferring with others because I assumed the interest would be there. I encourage people to be bold and create project pages, but maybe ask a few other editors for feedback first. I'll let other editors worry about the guidelines.
What tools (templates, bots, etc.) are essential, or even just really helpful, for organizing and maintaining a successful project? What is something every WP should do, that maybe isn't doing now?
I don't have any sort of medical background, and I'm more interested in the pandemic's impact than details about the disease or virus. Most surprising to me has been the lack of preparedness for combating outbreaks by governments around the world, including here in the United States. I don't know how COVID-19's spread compares to other infectious diseases, but as I've watched the outbreak develop I've continually wondered why governments did not start preparing earlier. What was happening in China, Iran, Italy, and South Korea should have prompted action sooner.
What important things about
2019–20 coronavirus pandemic do you think folks should know and maybe have missed in the deluge of information coming at people?
1. Know the most common symptoms: cough, fever, and difficulty breathing.
2. Learn what behavioral adjustments you should make to protect yourself and reduce transmission, and remember to wash your hands.
3. Get your information from reputable sources. I'd like to think Wikipedia editors are pretty good at this last bit of advice.
I would like your expert opinion on something; What LGA does Rottnest Island belong to? It seems to be the
City of Cockburn, according to Wikipedia. I can't find confirmation for this on either the City of Cockburn website nor the Rottnest Island one. I'm asking because I'm wondering what area the
22 State Register of Heritage Places fall under. Inherit lists the LGA as just Rottnest.
Calistemon (
talk)
23:20, 4 April 2020 (UTC)reply
Ongoing:
covid-19 virtual biohackathon until April 11th. Information on how to
participate. Instructions to participate are on the
github wiki and join #wikidata room. Several Wikidata-related topics are currently presented, such as: COVID-19 Global Dashboard, sync the ICTV Virus classification and Nomenclature with Wikidata, federate between Wikidata and NextProt, use wikibase to align between (bio)schema.org and Wikidata.
Scholia highlights the scholarly data in Wikidata, including scholarly works, projects, topics, and individual researchers, including their relationships and statistics. It encourages further enrichment of Wikidata through links on the "missing" pages.
Job opportunity: Science Museum, London.
Research Developer, "using computational techniques to create links between the SMG collection and Wikidata at scale" (deadline: 19 April).
New tool:
Wikidata Complete uses machine learning algorithms to read Wikipedia, identify facts and import them into Wikidata after manual check (
blog post)
schema.org announced an extension to allow for special announcements with regards to COVID-19. The way to identify the topic as per the example? By using the Wikidata Q-Identifier,
Q81068910:
Structured data for special announcements
Interactive map showing the spread of COVID-19, updated daily with data from Wikidata.
I'm surprised how many State Registered places have an article! Over 300! Time to break the category down into LGAs, like at commons? What do you think?
Calistemon (
talk)
10:05, 8 April 2020 (UTC)reply
No, I'm here in Perth, got back after two weeks up in the Pilbara this morning on what, if things go bad, be one of the last Virgin Australia flights going!
Calistemon (
talk)
11:21, 14 April 2020 (UTC)reply
Indonesia report: Volunteers' meet-up; Wiki Cinta Budaya 2020 structured data edit-a-thon
Ireland report: Video tutorials; Celtic Knot Conference 2020
Kosovo report: WoALUG and NGO Germin call Albanian Diaspora to contribute to Wikipedia
Netherlands report: Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen contributes to Wikimedia Commons again; Student research on GLAM-Wiki at Erasmus University Rotterdam
Serbia report: March Highlights - Everything is postponed
Sweden report: FindingGLAMs; Wikipedia in libraries; Art from the Thiel Gallery Collections; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete
COVID19 Dashboard is a Wikidata-powered one-stop information/visualization service for COVID19-related topics such as COVID19's outbreak map, deaths, symptoms, taxonomy, and publications.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A
database breakage, also affecting connected sister projects such as Wikipedia, on April 6, 11pm UTC. A fix has been deployed and no data has been lost. However, issues related to sitelinks and bots creating duplicates can still occur.
A call to action directed at the audience of the Weekly Debrief to edit Wikidata
YouTube
Propose new identifiers on Wikidata (in Italian)
YouTube
The Map of Libraries on Wikidata (in Spanish)
YouTube
Tool of the week
Ordia generates statistics from Wikidata lexeme information, and through the "Text to Lexemes" feature allows linking a document to the associated lexemes, and highlighting missing lexemes that can be added.
Prototyping week: the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Germany spent one week working on some quick experiements. The projects developed during this week are not necessarily going to be added to the maintained codebase. Among those projects:
try to use GraphQL for the API providing access to Wikibase/Wikidata data
allow to programmatically access different configuration variables of a Wikibase instance to make it easier for tools to built on top of it
investigate ranking for Items to order them by their relevance in a query result
com up with a workflows for editing statements linking to other Items in the Wikidata Bridge
identify how to improve Wikidata's accessibility
create design system components to continue improving consistency
It appears that someone has been vandalising the Wikipedia page on me, but the edit history doesn’t show the trolling. Any idea how to identify the offender?
Adrian Vickers (
talk)
08:27, 22 April 2020 (UTC)reply
Wikidata weekly summary #413
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Editing food items and querying glaciers:
YouTube and
Facebook
Interactions between VIAF and Wikidata (in Italian)
YouTube
Tool of the week
zotkat's exporter for Zotero (a software to manage bibliographic data) allows you to export bibliographies to the QuickStatements format. It is helpful to easily create bibliographical entries, especially as Zotero can read metadata about works from dozens of other websites, and can thus be used as intermediary.
Thanks for noting one of the things I love - where people get excited about whether a space, a thin space or a hair space should be used, and the related riveting question of whether it should be character, code or template, to the point that its quicker & easier to run a script than it is to discuss the matter or fix the corrections. Maybe the next level is edit summary haiku --
Find bruce (
talk)
23:02, 30 April 2020 (UTC)reply
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: João Alexandre Peschanski on Wikidata + Education projects he has worked on in Brazil, 19 May.
Agenda
How to use the Wikidata Query Service (in Italian):
YouTube
Introduction to Wikidata and data modeling:
YouTube
Tool of the week
WikidataTrust.jsP updates the interface with the contributors to each statement, label, description and sitelink. It is similar to the “blame” tool on text-based wikis.
Read-only time for Wikidata on Tuesday 19th May at 05:00 AM UTC for 15 minutes due to upgrade and restart of services. Services targeting Wikidata may not work during the meantime.
Whats the process if I disagree with an assessment of B-class that you've done to the new
1915 Victorian soccer season using
Wikipedia:RATER? Just "be bold" and change? I have been looking at a lot of the Australian football (soccer) articles over the past week as part of a
Destubbing Challenge, and similar quality articles would only rate Start at best. One can argue that as nearly all of the references are taken from essentially the same source whether this article is still close to only being a Stub. However, it is a ways off being B-class in my opinion.
Matilda Maniac (
talk)
00:07, 20 May 2020 (UTC)reply
Past: WikidataLab XXXIII: Wiki-Education and Data Literacy with Shani Evenstein on May 21st. The training in English was organized by Wiki Movement Brazil User Group. (
replay)
Past: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #6 (
YouTube)
Upcoming:
Wikidata Wochenende, event dedicated to the German-speaking Wikidata community, will take place fully remote on June 12-14. If you're interested, don't forget to register. We're looking for speakers to give introductions to Wikidata & tools.
Upcoming
#vBIB20 (Q94495218) the first fully remote German library conference: May 26-28. Metadata about all presentations are already stored in Wikidata:
Query. Some sessions and presentations are related to Wikidata or other Wikiprojects:
Video: Editing Wikidata: File Candidates tool and World heritage of Visby -
Youtube,
Facebook
Tool of the week
If you're looking for even more tools, the
Tools Directory indexes over 130 Wikidata tools.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
New tool:
Structured Search, a tool allowing you to search through Wikimedia Commons using structured data, is now live. This tool by
Hay Kranen was demoed at Wikimedia Hackathon 2020.
New tool:
script by Tohaomg to easily rearrange the order of values for statements in Wikidata (to be added to your common.js page)
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by
visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with
Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. LizRead!Talk!14:30, 27 May 2020 (UTC)reply
Wikidata weekly summary #418
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Discussion of our Wikidata priorities and needs as we plan for the group's future, 02 June.
Agenda
The
WikiCite annual report 2019-20 has been published. Describing the "satellite event grants" program that was run (and details of the nine successful proposals); the changes that resulted from the COVID-19 shutdown of all in-person events; and a summary of WikiCite-related news from across the movement. For more details see
Meta:WikiCite/Administration. For more information, contact
LWyatt (WMF)
Past video: Querying Wikidata with a glimpse of SPARQL - Thorsten Butz - PSCONFEU 2020.
YouTube
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network Live Wikidata editing scheduled for 1st June at 7:00 PM UTC:
YouTube,
Facebook
Upcoming video (in Spanish): Wikidata Online Workshop: "Connecting Authority Resources with the Knowledge Graph" scheduled for 2nd June at 3:00 PM UTC:
YouTube
Tool of the week
wdumps allows you to create a limited RDF dump from Wikidata, for those times when your SPARQL queries keep timing out. It is not particularly user-friendly, and it typically takes several hours to get a complete dump, but it is the best way to for example get a list of all English names of humans in Wikidata, or a list of every scientific article with its title and DOI.
As part of a thesis project, the search engine "Lister" has been developed to make it easier for the general public to access data on the Semantic Web in general, and WikiData specifically. It's in a usability test-phase right now, and if you'd like to try it out and help improve it, you can do so at this
link. The test should at most 15 minutes.
Follow the
discussion about restricting editing of properties to autoconfirmed users.
New domain toolforge.org to be
adopted by our Toolforge community. New domain/scheme for Toolforge-hosted webservices will change from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org with the aim to introduce permanent redirects for the legacy URLs on 2020-06-15.
Wikidata development team is currently running a survey until June 9th to understand better how people access and reuse Wikidata’s data from the code of their applications and tools (for example through APIs), and how we can improve the tools to make your workflows easier. If you would like to participate, please use
this link (Google Forms, estimated fill-in time 5min).
This month saw two Tree of Life editors
gain the mop: CaptainEek (WikiProjects Birds and Plants) and Cwmhiraeth (familiar name at DYK, WikiProjects Plants, Animals, and Insects)
The April – May
GAN backlog drive finished up, clearing the queue from nearly 700 outstanding nominations to about 350.
Interview with Jts1882
This month we're joined by Jts1882, who is active in depicting evolutionary relationship of taxa via
cladograms. Part of this includes responding to
cladogram requests, where interested editors can have cladograms made without using the templates themselves.
How did you come to be interested in systematics? Are you interested in systematics broadly, or is there a particular group you're most fond of?
As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in nature, starting with the animals and plants in the garden, school grounds, and local wood, and then more general wildlife worldwide. An interest in how things are classified grew from this. I like things to be organised and understanding the relationships between things and systems (not just living things) is a big part of that. Biology was always my favourite subject in school and took up a disproportionate part of my time. My interest in systematics is broad as I’d like to comprehend the whole tree of life, but the cat family is my favourite group.
What's the background behind cladogram requests? I see that it isn't a very old part of the Tree of Life
Well I can’t take any credit for the cladogram requests page, although I help out there sometimes. It was created by IJReid and there are several people who have helped there more than me. I think the motivation is that creating cladograms requires a knowledge of the templates that is daunting for many editors. It was one way of helping people who want to focus on content creation.
My main contribution to the cladograms is converting the {{clade}} template to use a Lua module. The template code was extremely difficult to follow and had to be repetitive (I can only admire the efforts of those who got the thing to work in the first place). The conversion to Lua made it more efficient, allowed larger and deeper cladograms, plus facilitating the introduction of new features. The cladogram request page was recently the venue for discussion on making time calibrated cladograms, which is now possible, if not particularly user friendly.
What advice do you have for an editor who wants to learn how to make cladograms?
The same advice I would give to someone facing any computer problem, just try it out. Start by taking existing code for a cladogram and make changes yourself. The main advice would be to format it properly so indents match the brackets vertically. Of course, not everyone wants to learn and if someone prefers to focus on article content there is the cladogram request page.
Examples of cladograms Jts1882 has created, showing different proposed clades for
Neoaves
Do you have any personal projects or goals you're working towards on Wikipedia?
As I said I like organisation and systems. So I find efforts like the
automated taxobox system and {{taxonbar}} appealing. I would like to see more reuse of the major phylogenetic trees on Wikipedia with more use of consensus trees on the higher taxa. Too often they get edited based on one recent report and/or without proper citation.
Animals and
bilateria are examples where this is a problem.
Towards this I have been working on a system of phylogeny templates that can be reused flexibly. The {{Clade transclude}} template allows selective transclusion, so the phylogenetic trees on one page can be reused with modifications, i.e. can be pruned and grafted, used with or without images, with or without collapsible elements, etc. I have an example for the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification (see {{Phylogeny/APG IV}}) and one for squamates that also includes collapsible elements (see {{Phylogeny/Squamata}}).
A second project is to have a modular reference system for taxonomic resources. I have made some progress along this lines with the {{BioRef}} template. This started off simply as a way of hardlinking to
Catalog of Fishes pages and I’ve gradually expanded it to cover other groups (e..g.
FishBase,
AmphibiaWeb and
Amphibian Species of the World,
Reptile Database, the Mammalian Diversity Database). The modular nature is still rudimentary and needs a rewrite before it is ready for wider use.
What would surprise your fellow editors to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?
I don’t think there is anything particularly surprising or interesting about my life. I’ve had an academic career as a research scientist but I don't think anyone could guess the area from my Wikipedia edits. I prefer to work on areas where I am learning at the same time. This why I spend more time with neglected topics (e.g. mosses at the moment). I start reading and then find that I’m not getting the information I want.
Anything else you'd like us to know?
My interest in the classification of things goes beyond biology. I am fascinated by mediaeval attempts to classify knowledge, such as
Bacon in his The Advancement of Learning and
Diderot and
d’Alembert in their Encyclopédie. They were trying to come up with a universal scheme of knowledge just as the printing press was allowing greater dissemination of knowledge.
With the internet we are seeing a new revolution in knowledge dissemination. Just look at how we could read research papers on the COVID virus within weeks of its discovery. With an open internet, everyone has access, not just those with the luxury of books at home or good libraries. Sites like the
Biodiversity Heritage Library allow you to read old scientific works without having to visit dusty university library stack rooms, while the taxonomic and checklist databases provide instant information on millions of living species. In principle, the whole world can now find out about anything, even if
Douglas Adams warned we might be disinclined to do so.
This is why I like Wikipedia, with all its warts, it’s a means of organising the knowledge on the internet. In just two decades it’s become a first stop for knowledge and hopefully a gateway to more specialised sources. Perhaps developing this latter aspect, beyond providing good sources for what we say, is the next challenge for Wikipedia.
... that Tetraponera penzigi is one of several species of ant that protect
whistling thorn trees in East Africa from grazing giraffes and rhinoceroses? (3 May)
... that the Vietnam mouse-deer, which had been feared to have gone extinct nearly 30 years ago, was sighted again in 2019? (4 May)
... that most branchiobdellids use
crayfish as hosts, living on their heads,
carapaces, or
claws, but in some instances inside their gill cavities? (5 May)
... that the northern plains gray langur monkey (example pictured) is killed in India for food and to prevent crop raiding, despite being considered sacred by Hindus? (12 May)
... that the leech Limnatis nilotica can affect humans and livestock, entering hosts through the mouth, nose, or other orifices? (12 May)
... that the tree Barteria fistulosa is associated with Tetraponera aethiops, an aggressive species of ant that lives in its hollow branches and twigs? (15 May)
... that Miller's langur, one of the rarest primates in
Borneo, was feared to be extinct until a 2012 study rediscovered it in an area where it was previously unknown? (16 May)
... that most of the known Gigantopithecus fossils are of teeth because the other bones are likely to have been eaten by
porcupines? (17 May)
... that Tetraponera tessmanni, a very aggressive ant, is able to establish dominance over the whole of the liana in which it lives, which may be 50 m (164 ft) long? (17 May)
... that the Arizona dampwood termite exclusively colonizes dead parts of standing trees? (22 May)
... that Megaceroides algericus is one of only two deer species known to have been native to Africa, alongside the
Barbary stag? (23 May)
... that besides eating ants and termites, the waved woodpecker feeds on fruits, berries, and seeds? (24 May)
... that populations of the Canada lynx(pictured) undergo cyclic rises and falls in line with those of the
snowshoe hare? (25 May)
... that despite being known as the Mexican hydrangea, Clerodendrum bungei is neither from Mexico nor a species of
hydrangea? (25 May)
... that meerkats(examples pictured) use
alarm calls that can identify the type of predator posing the risk, the level of danger, and the caller itself? (27 May)
... that the frog Boophis fayi can be identified by its unusual green-and-turquoise eyes? (30 May)
... that members of the fly family Apystomyiidae(example depicted) have been found in Late Jurassic sediments in
Kazakhstan? (30 May)
... that the sun bear(pictured) is the smallest of all
bear species? (31 May)
Upcoming:
Wikidata Wochenende, June 12-14: online Wikidata workshop and hackathon in German. Don't forget to register to get access to attendees information.
Upcoming: Video: Live Wikidata editing #9:
Youtube,
Facebook
Part 2 - The residency at the Bodleian Libraries -
YouTube
Part 3 - The Astrolabe Explorer & other datasets -
YouTube
Tool of the week
QuickStatements lets you edit thousands of Wikidata items at a time. Add labels and descriptions, or statements with sources and qualifiers, add sitelinks, create or merge items, or remove statements that were created in error. Batches can be discussed and, if necessary, reverted in full through the
EditGroups tool.
New page
Subsetting under
WikiProject Schemas for documenting how to define, construct, manage and maintain subsets of Wikidata.
MyCroft, the open digital personal assistant now has a
Wikidata skill to answer questions about current and historic facts & information about a person.
Do you know a Wikidata/Wikibase community member who has accomplished something new or has been inspiring in the last year? If so, please take a few minutes and
nominate someone in the
2020 Community Spotlight survey.
Wikidata Bridge: Made a number of technical improvements to wrap up the work in the first version.
Reference Hunt: Making final technical improvements and are now running the process to find references on the whole of Wikidata (as opposed to the initial small subset for testing). Once that's done we'll release them as a dump.
Easier access to data for programmers: Researching and interviewing ways to improve the APIs in preparation for working on them.
Query builder: Working on defining the first version and creating mockups based on the feedback we received.
Use modern TypeScript syntax (3.2 -> 3.9) (
phab:T253211)
More technical documentation for Federated Properties (
phab:T252991) & preparing for the next steps
Convert some properties to external identifiers (
phab:T253722)
Netherlands report: Analysis of Dutch GLAM-Wiki projects in relation to the Dutch Digital Heritage Reference Architecture, Content donation from Utrecht Archives, Detecting Wikipedia articles strongly based on single library collections and Collection highlights of the KB
Sweden report: Free music on Wikipedia; NHB webinars; Wikipedia in libraries – Projekt HBTQI
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Program for Cooperative Cataloging's upcoming Wikidata pilot, June 16.
Agenda
Part 1 - Meet Ewan, WiR at the Uni' of Edinburgh -
YouTube
Part 2 - the Witch Hunts projects & Wikidata -
YouTube
Part 3 - Why Wikidata is important for education -
YouTube
Tool of the week
Mix'n'match lets you match lists of external identifiers to Wikidata items, or create new items if necessary. Thousands of catalogs already exist, in dozens of different topic areas, and it's easy to import new ones.
Collecting a lot of feedback and doing research around how to improve our APIs to start making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Finalized the initial feature list for the query builder and working on designs and prototypes for testing
Doing user research on the Merge gadget to prepare for making it part of the proper code-base so that other Wikibase instances also benefit from easier merging
Federated Properties: continued working on the first version of Federation that will make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation
Start of a new project (Wikibase Decoupling & Extension Registration) in order to clean up our codebase a bit and make it easier to extend with new features in the future
More work on the design system to have a set of unified components for Wikidata that will make it easier to develop new features in the future because we don't have to rewrite components that are used in a lot of places
Some MediaWiki skin changes meant broken edit links on Wikipedia and co. Fixed now. (
phabricator:T252800)
Hey there, JarrahTree! I'm Windyshadow32, a new member of the sadly inactive
Wikiproject Shopping Centers. I saw your comment on the talk page and it inspired me to revive the project. I am trying to revive the project to highlight the unique stories of malls across the country and the world especially as we lose more and more of them. Undoubtedly, we will lose shopping malls due to the challenges we face at this moment. I would like to know if you would like to help revive the project with me! I could really use some help assessing the quality of each article and how important they are! I can't take on this massive project without you. Please let me know if you'd be willing to help; I really appreciate it!
Hi JarrahTree, thank you for taking the time to independently review
Australian Antarctic Medal and to upgrade its quality rating to B-class. It is still very much a work in progress, but I intend to bring it up to GA status by the time I finish this project. Kangaresearch 11:47, 16 June 2020 (UTC)reply
New Page Reviewer newsletter June 2020
Hello JarrahTree,
Your help can make a difference
NPP Sorting can be a great way to find pages needing new page patrolling that match your strengths and interests. Using ORES, it divides articles into topics such as Literature or Chemistry and on Geography. Take a look and see if you can find time to patrol a couple pages a day. With over 10,000 pages in the queue, the highest it's been since
ACPERM, your help could really make a difference.
Google Adds New Languages to Google Translate
In late February, Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate: Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur. This expands our ability to find and evaluate sources in those languages.
Discussions and Resources
A
discussion on handling new article creation by paid editors is ongoing at the Village Pump.
Also at the Village Pump is a
discussion about limiting participation at Articles for Deletion discussion.
Sure, mythology can be important to people's sense of history. Maybe it should be included somehow. But cleary presented as mythology. --
Merbabu (
talk)
11:51, 18 June 2020 (UTC)reply
On clearing 655k - very many very good and important edits - thank you for your persistent effort !!
JarrahTree 11:08, 18 June 2020 (UTC) I am not sure what 655k refers to
Hugo999 (
talk)
11:12, 18 June 2020 (UTC)reply
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by
visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with
Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.
UnitedStatesian (
talk)
02:06, 19 June 2020 (UTC)reply
Wikidata weekly summary #421
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Upcoming domain name migration on the Wikimedia Toolforge implies that OpenRefine users need to update their Wikidata reconciliation service to the new
endpoint which will be available by default in the upcoming release of OpenRefine (3.4).
phab:T254172
Wikirecords - proposal for a Wikibase-based sister-project
Apologies for both of the problematic queries ("MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship" in Weekly Summary #419 and "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in Weekly Summary #420). The "MWAPI searches in wikidata about people described as slave traders by citizenship” in #419 lists any people with the word "slave" in a label, description or alias, among them several people who are not slave traders. The "Monuments named after/commemorating/depicting slave traders” in #420 incorrectly linked
this query for enslaved people instead of
this query for slavetraders.
Hi JarrahTree, as a respected editor I wondered if you had a few moments to contribute to a second RfC on the retention of an image of the Reverse of the Australian Antarctic Medal. It's been re-nominated for deletion by one editor at
Wikipedia:Files for discussion/2020 June 25, following consensus on its retention previously. As the original RfC was only comprised of 4 views, I think it might help the other editor involved if there was a wider input. It's all fairly short, so takes no more than a minute or two of reading, and you are welcome to express any opinion you think is appropriate. Thanks in advance if you can spare the time. Kangaresearch 04:21, 25 June 2020 (UTC)reply
This user is busy in
real life and may not respond swiftly to queries.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Merrilee Proffitt, Chris Cyr, and Rob Fernandez on a project to surface library holdings to indicate possible notability for persons, June 30th.
Agenda
It is now possible to search for
EntitySchema pages using a shortcut “E:”, similar to “P:” for Properties and “L:” for Lexemes. For example:
E:E10 or
E:kakapo.
T245529
Continued working on the first version of Federation, which will allow other Wikibase installations to use Wikidata's Properties - getting closer to a first testable version
More work on consistency of user interface components
Finalizing the click-dummy for the first version of the Query Builder so we can start testing it with some editors soon and get feedback.
Continuing to investigate how to improve our APIs and other ways to improve access to the data in Wikidata for programmers
Discussed the future of the Wikidata Query Service and ideas for next steps we can take to make it scale better. Guillaume will join the next office hour to talk about it.
More work on clearer separation of Wikibase repository and Wikibase client code in order to improve maintainability
Ptable displays the periodic table automatically extracted from information provided by Wikidata; it also provides a check that all the elements are there with some basic properties. Additional pages provide charts of the nuclides under different criteria such as half-life. Each element or nuclide is linked to its Wikidata item for more information or to edit if necessary.
Polishing the first step of Federation (using Wikidata's Properties in another Wikibase installation) (incl. preventing users from selecting a federated property with a non-supported data type (
phab:T252012) and preventing users from accessing Special:NewProperty when federation is enabled (
phab:T255576) and viewing a list of all properties when federation is enabled (
phab:T246339))
Continuing research and interviews around the topic of making it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers
Doing first testing of mockups and prototypes of the first version of the Query Builder - coding can start soon
Convert a few properties from string to external identifier: Linguasphere code (P1396), KOATUU identifier (P1077) and ISIN (P946)
Greetings! I'm not a wikidata aficionado and therefore cannot handle the quandary which has arisen
here. Any chance you could lend a hand, pls? Cheers,
Bjenks (
talk)
01:54, 10 July 2020 (UTC)reply
Continued building out documentation for Federated Properties (
phabricator:T255651) and making interface improvements to the first stage of the feature (incl.
phabricator:T246886, changes to special pages that interact with both Items/Properties, and
phabricator:T255581, changes to Special:ListDataTypes when federation is enabled)
More work on the consistent design system
More work on decoupling the different Wikibase extensions from each other to make development easier
Finalizing research and interviews to better understand what could be improved in the way developers access Wikidata's data (APIs, SPARQL)
Testing the first prototype of the
Simple Query Builder with some editors to get final input before coding starts
Sorting of language links on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects was broken (presumably by a change in MediaWiki core). A fix is being worked on. (
phabricator:T257625)
..."transcript of speeches at the blessing and official opening of St. John of God Hospital, Subiaco, Western Australia, 1st May, 1981 ..."
Just quietly, I was the PR who published that and other stuff and (with Don Franks) planned the whole official opening (even wrote the Archbishop's speech--not bad for an atheist!) However, I'm not guilty of any
soap in the article. I can't recall ever making an edit or even reading the article (but will do soon). The following year I accepted an invitation to organise the Charlie Gairdner G Block opening. That's another story! Cheers
Bjenks (
talk)
08:44, 20 July 2020 (UTC)reply
Wikidata weekly summary #425
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Upcoming: next Wikidata office hour, July 21st at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) in the
Wikidata Telegram group. Query Service special with guests from WMF Search Team.
Upcoming:
Wikidata Lab XXIV: Posicionamento digital relativo with
Ederporto - July 23 17:00 UTC (14:00 BRT). In this technical training, we'll study the possibilities and functionalities of relative digital positioning in images and do practical activities on this topic using historical photographs of the city of São Paulo. The event will be held in Portuguese. Join us!
Upcoming video: July 21 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx)
FacebookYouTube
Upcoming video: July 25 - Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13
FacebookYouTube
Upcoming:
Kidok-Workshop, online workshop about church building data. In German, non-native users welcome. Currently looking for a date in the upcoming week and people to help!
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Liam Wyatt on WikiCite and its future plans, ways to get involved, and discussions that are happening in the community, 28 July.
Agenda
Past: Wikidata and Wikibase office hour with a focus on the Query Service, July 21st.
Notes of the discussions
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #14, August 1
FacebookYouTube
Library’s linked-data project gets new grant. "Known as Linked Data for Production, the project is part of a long-term collaboration among Cornell University Library, Stanford Libraries and the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. Through linked data, information about books and other items in library records will be enhanced by related information from external online sources". By Jose Beduya
Wikidata Training Workshop 1, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association
Part 1 - Introduction to Wikidata - YouTube (
En,
Fr)
Part 3 - Components of a Wikidata item - YouTube (
En,
Fr)
Video: Wikidata Lab XXIV on relative digital positioning (in Portuguese).
YouTube
Video: Women Writers in Review: Integrating special collections into Wikidata.
YouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - Entity Schemas and Shape Expressions (ShEx)
FacebookYouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #13
FacebookYouTube
Tool of the week
We would love suggestions for tools to include in this section of the weekly summary. Please add your suggestions directly under
Status updates/Next#Backlog after checking that the tool isn't already listed.
Changed the size of image previews to 1024 in the gallery view of the query service to avoid some images not loading sometimes (
phabricator:T258241)
Added an actual space between the entity title and the name of the fallback language (if any), so that the fallback language isn't selected anymore when double-clicking the entity title for copying (
phabricator:T256857)
Fixed the directionality of text pieces in placeholders that mix LTR and RTL (
phabricator:T253812)
Continued work on first pieces of design system to make coding new features easier in the future
Continued untangling the code of Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repo to make it easier to develop on them
Finished first piece of research on how to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers - more work to be done
Preparing to start coding on the Query Builder to make it easier to create queries without having to know SPARQL
Finished running the scraper that gets potential new references for unreferenced statements and preparing it for publishing
Yeah, I remember the 1996 overflow very well indeed ... I was only eight then! You might find
this page interesting ... I don't think it's really classed as a reliable source for Wikipedia's purposes though. Graham8714:28, 31 July 2020 (UTC)reply
This issue is a double issue, but the plan is to return to monthly henceforth.
A
discussion at
WikiProject Palaeontology about internal peer review processes led to the creation of
a peer review space. In contrast to the more formal
Peer Review, PalaeoPR focuses on short "fact checks", emphasizing content over style. Reviews are meant to be low commitment, with "drive-by reviews" encouraged. Since its inception on 8 July, seven articles have been submitted to PalaeoPR.
After a highly competitive third round, two Tree of Life editors advanced to the fourth round of the
WikiCup: Dunkleosteus77 and Sainsf
A
February 2020 paper published in PLOS noted that Mammalian Species is one of the most over-cited journals on Wikipedia relative to how frequently it is cited in other academic works.
Categorizing life with DexDor
DexDor is a WikiGnome with a particular interest in article categorization, including how organisms are categorized.
How did you become interested in editing biodiversity topics on Wikipedia?
I'm a wikignome who tries to remove unnecessary complexity and confusion in Wikipedia. I specialise in categorization. I've worked on categorization of several topic areas (e.g. military equipment) - anywhere where I see things like category tags on articles that the category text doesn't support. Categorization of organisms is one area I'm currently looking at (
my essay on this).
You seem to be particularly interested in geographic categorization of organisms. What are some issues in this area?
One issue is that there are several possible relationships between an organism and a region (i.e. what the "of" in a "Xs of Y" means) - the organism may be found throughout the region, somewhere in the region, only in the region (i.e. endemic to that region) - there are categories for each of these (and others) and some categories have been unclear about their exact meaning. Then there's introductions by man, locally extinct species, occasional visitors...
Another issue is that some editors have thought it's appropriate to create categories for very small areas ("Spiders of Vatican City" is only a slight exaggeration) and put a few articles in them, thus creating a category that is both massively incomplete and non-defining for the articles in it.
There have been several (now blocked) editors who have been disruptive in this area, but a confusing and sprawling categorization scheme is also partly due to editors from a particular background categorizing a particular article in a way that appears to make sense, but doesn't really make sense in the wider categorization scheme - for example, if an article mentions the countries at the extremes of an animal's distribution, the animal is categorized just for those countries.
What potential solutions do you see for categorizing organisms by geography? How can other editors help address this issue, or at least, not make it worse?
We should have some guidelines that tell editors how to categorize any article about an organism (including any geographical categorization). I've started drafting guidelines at
User:DexDor/BioCat. The guidelines are also a good way to ensure that the categorization of articles about organisms is aligned with categorization of other articles and may help us to identify where there are problems, inconsistencies etc in the categorization. I welcome suggestions for improvement of the guidelines (which should at some point be moved into WP:TOL).
Regarding geographical categorization of animals the main advice for editors would be to not create categories for any new areas and to only create a new category if you intend to populate it.
What have you learned from being a Wikipedia editor?
That lots of people (from varied backgrounds) each making (mostly) small improvements (like ants in an ants nest?) and only understanding some parts of Wikipedia can produce such a wonderful resource. But also, how that tends to result in ever-increasing complexity which negatively affects editors and readers.
Is there anything about your life outside Wikipedia that would surprise us?
... that despite being a member of the
cat family, the jaguarundi has several features in common with
mustelids such as otters and weasels? (2 June)
... that scientists were unsure whether the blue calamintha bee(pictured) still existed until it was observed again in March 2020? (2 June)
... that many of the animals regarded as pests have co-evolved with humans, adapting to the warm, sheltered conditions that a building provides? (3 June)
... that the banteng is the second
endangered species to be successfully
cloned, and the first clone to survive beyond infancy? (5 June)
... that cattle and deer sometimes stand under trees where southern plains gray langurs are feeding in order to consume the edible pieces that the monkeys drop? (10 June)
... that when boiled in milk, black coral(example pictured) emits a faint scent of
myrrh? (21 June)
... that one of the factors affecting the future of the Huanchaca mouse is the increased cultivation of
biofuels? (22 June)
... that the Strawberries and Cream Tree(pictured) is noted for producing pink blossoms on one side of the tree and white on the other, when it blooms every spring? (23 June)
... that the Chilean seaside cinclodes bobs its tail while it walks and flares its wings while it sings? (24 June)
... that Boie's frog(pictured) and the Banhado frog both resemble dead leaves on the floor of the forest? (25 June)
... that Markham's storm petrel, which nests in Peru and northern Chile, has been described as "one of the least known seabirds in the world"? (7 July)
... that the frog Corythomantis greeningi retreats into a hole, blocks the entrance with its spiny head, and injects venom into anything that tries to dislodge it? (18 July)
... that the reef box crab uses its powerful pincers to break open the shells of snails? (21 July)
... that the genus Pterodactylus(species depicted), the scientific name for a pterodactyl, had been considered a "
wastebasket taxon" as many species were assigned to it and later reassigned? (23 July)
... that the sea urchin Abatus cordatus broods its young for nine months in pockets on its upper surface? (24 July)
... that Harold Clyde Bingham trailed a troop of gorillas for 100 hours in 1929? (25 July)
SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.
a
graph of MPs and parties in the Swedish Parliament and with whom they worked together with to create motions 2018
SPOILER: >95% is just with people in the same party
The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.
You seem to have reverted about 9 of my edits with no explanation. So far as I can tells, the edits were valid. Looking at two of your reverts as examples:
[1] - is there some reason why
WP:SUBCAT should not apply here?
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, a project to present bibliographic information and scholarly profiles of authors and institutions, 11 August. [
Agenda
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - QuickStatements and Distributed Wikidata games
Facebook,
YouTube
Video: Collaboration, contribution and use of Wikidata and Wikipedia by academic libraries (in Greek).
YouTube
Librarians work to broaden Vanderbilt’s research reputation with Wikidata tools. "To speed up the creation of metadata about faculty and their publications, Steven Baskauf, data science and data curation specialist for libraries, developed “
VanderBot,” a set of scripts that can read and write to Wikidata, greatly improving the efficiency by which Vanderbilt’s faculty are discoverable through Wikidata".
Video: Editing Wikidata with information from Son jarocho (in Spanish).
YouTube
Tool of the week
Entity Explosion: a new multilingual Chrome browser extension. "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!". Uses API calls to the Wikidata Query Service to match the URL you are browsing on to a Wikidata item, and then displays data and links to other sites about the same entity. (
Video)
Fixed a bug where a length limit for strings seems to have reverted itself back from 1500 to its default 400 (
phabricator:T259440)
Fixed a bug that Wikibase is not always adding &redirect=no in situations when MediaWiki usually does (
phabricator:T255387)
Wrapping up the initial work on the design system so it is ready for use in the first new feature (Query Builder)
Fixed the serialization of statements on Forms and Senses not containing the datatype (
phabricator:T249206)
Wrapping up work on the first version of Federated Properties so that other Wikibase installations can use Wikidata's Properties instead of having to maintain their own
Worked on ensuring the data from the linked data interface at Special:EntityData is always up to date after an edit has been made (
phabricator:T128486)
Enabling clients to use Lua to request labels, descriptions and aliases in some (often minority) languages even when they are not content languages (
phabricator:T259340,
phabricator:T260118)
Rhythm Is It! - I expanded that stub on my dad's birthday because we saw the film together back then, and were impressed. As a ref said: every educator should see it. Don't miss the trailer, for a starter. - A welcome chance to present yet another article by Brian on the Main page,
Le Sacre du printemps. --
Gerda Arendt (
talk)
13:33, 31 August 2020 (UTC)reply
Wikidata weekly summary #430
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Sarasua, Cristina, & Mietchen, Daniel. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Community Perspective. Zenodo.
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994272
Mietchen, Daniel, & Sarasua, Cristina. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Data Perspective. Zenodo.
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994266 (also
on YouTube)
Video: How to add missing descriptions to Wikidata using QuickStatments tool (in Arabic) -
YouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #16
Facebook,
YouTube
Video: Introduction to Wikidata (in Malayalam) -
YouTube
Video: Wikidata editing basics (in Chinese) -
YouTube
Tool of the week
Sophox allows for SPARQL querying of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap in a single query
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Two new grant programs from
WikiCite, in support of open citations and linked bibliographic data.
Full documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles, and contacts at the links. Apply by 1 October.
e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]
Finished working on ensuring Labels of Items in some unusual, often minority, languages are still available on Wikipedia and other clients (
phabricator: T259340)
Fixed error messages for API modules that will not work with the first version of Federated Properties (
phabricator:T258558)
Working on improving how ORES judges the quality of an Item to make it more accurate
Started coding on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well
Upcoming:
live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 1 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, September 2nd at 17:00 CEST (15:00 GMT).
Etherpad,
Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #18
Facebook,
YouTube, September 5 at 19.00 UTC
Upcoming:
Onam label-a-thon (September 1st and 2nd): Online label-a-thon to improve Wikidata items related to Kerala and Malayalam on this Onam holidays.
Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension that displays Wikidata items while browsing the web, adds missing IDs and extracts information from websites to Wikidata.
On August 7,
WikiProject Palaeontology member Rextron discovered a suspicious taxon article, Mustelodon, which was created in November 2005. The article lacked references and the subsequent discussion on
WikiProject Palaeontology found that the alleged type locality (where the fossil was first discovered) of Lago Nandarajo "near the northern border of Panama" was nonexistent. In fact, Panama does not even really have a northern border, as it is bounded along the north by the Caribbean Sea. No other publications or databases mentioned Mustelodon, save a fleeting mention in a 2019 book that presumably followed Wikipedia, Felines of the World.
The article also appeared in four other languages, Catalan, Spanish, Dutch, and Serbian. In Serbian Wikipedia, a note at the bottom of the page warned: "It is important to note here that there is no data on this genus in the official scientific literature, and all attached data on the genus Mustelodon on this page are taken from the English Wikipedia and are the only known data on this genus of mammals, so the validity of this genus is questionable."
Editors took action to alert our counterparts on other projects, and these versions were removed also. As the editor who reached out to Spanish and Catalan Wikipedia, it was somewhat challenging to navigate these mostly foreign languages (I have a limited grasp of Spanish). I doubted that the article had very many watchers, so I knew I had to find some WikiProjects where I could post a machine translation advising of the hoax, and asking that users follow local protocols to remove the article. I was surprised to find, however, that Catalan Wikipedia does not tag articles for WikiProjects on talk pages, meaning I had to fumble around to find what I needed (turns out that WikiProjects are Viquiprojectes in Catalan!) Mustelodon remains
on Wikidata, where its "instance of" property was swapped from "taxon" to "fictional taxon".
How did this article have such a long lifespan? Early intervention is critical for removing hoaxes. A 2016 report found that a hoax article that survives its first day has an 18% chance of lasting a year.[1] Additionally, hoax articles tend to have longer lifespans if they are in inconspicuous parts of Wikipedia, where they do not receive many views. Mustelodon was only viewed a couple times a day, on average.
Mustelodon survived a brush with death three years into its lifespan. The article was proposed for deletion in September 2008, with a deletion rationale of "No references given; cannot find any evidence in peer-reviewed journals that this alleged genus actually exists". Unfortunately, the proposed deletion was contested and the template removed, though the declining editor did not give a rationale. Upon its rediscovery in August 2020, Mustelodon was tagged for speedy deletion under
CSD G3 as a "blatant hoax". This was challenged, and an
Articles for Deletion discussion followed. On 12 August, the AfD was closed as a SNOW delete. WikiProject Palaeontology members ensured that any trace of it was scrubbed from legitimate articles. The fictional mammal was finally, truly extinct.
At the ripe old age of 14 years, 9 months, this is the longest-lived documented hoax on Wikipedia, topping the previous documented record of 14 years, 5 months, set by
The Gates of Saturn, a fictitious television show, which was incidentally also discovered in August 2020. How do we discover other hoax taxa? Could we use Wikidata to discover taxa are not linked to databases like ITIS, Fossilworks, and others?
This month's spotlight is with Mattximus, author of two Featured Articles and 29 Featured Lists at current count.
How did you become involved with editing biodiversity articles?
I think I have a compulsion to make lists, it doesn't show up in my real life, but online I secretly get a lot of satisfaction making orderly lists and tables. It's a bit of a secret of mine, because it doesn't manifest in any other part of my life. My background is in biology, so this was a natural (haha) fit.
You have an impressive number of FAs under your belt. Two of your more recent ones, Apororhynchus and Gigantorhynchus, are part of what you referred to as an "experiment". How did you choose these articles, and what's next for you in this experiment?
This experiment was just to see if I could get any random article to FA status, so I picked the very first alphabetical animal species according to the taxonomy and made that attempt. Technically, there isn't enough information for a species page so I just merged the species into a genus and went from there. It was a fun exercise, but doing it alone is not the most fun so it's probably on pause for the foreseeable future.
Note: Aporhynchus is the first alphabetical taxon as follows: Animalia, Acanthocephala, Archiacanthocephala, Apororhynchida, Apororhynchidae, Apororhynchus
What advice would you give to someone who wants to nominate their first FAC?
I would recommend getting a good article nominated, then a featured list up before tackling the FA. Lists are a bit more forgiving but give you a taste of what standards to expect from FA. The most time consuming thing is proper citations so make sure that is in order before starting either.
Is there anything that would surprise us to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?
My personality in real life does not match my wikipedia persona. I'm not a very organized, or orderly in real life, but the wikipedia pages I brought to FL or FA are all very organized. Maybe it's my outlet for a more free-flowing life as a scientist/teacher.
Anything else you'd like us to know?
The fact that wikipedia exists free of profit motive and free for everyone really is something special and I encourage everyone to donate a few dollars to the cause.
... that the flower buds of the woolly thistle(pictured) can be eaten in a similar way to
artichokes? (8 August)
... that the French peanut is native to Brazil? (10 August)
... that the 800-year-old Minchenden Oak is one of the oldest trees in London? (14 August)
... that the forward-facing
incisors of the extinct dolphin Ankylorhiza(restoration pictured) may have been used for ramming their prey, similar to a hunting method used by modern
orcas? (16 August)
... that scientists accidentally created a
hybrid of two endangered fish species, called the sturddlefish? (17 August)
... that despite having the widest distribution in the United States, the arid-land subterranean termite causes less structural damage than other members of its genus? (19 August)
... that in 2021, the dwarf periodical cicada(pictured) is due to emerge in parts of eastern North America, not having been seen for 17 years? (24 August)
On August 7,
WikiProject Palaeontology member Rextron discovered a suspicious taxon article, Mustelodon, which was created in November 2005. The article lacked references and the subsequent discussion on
WikiProject Palaeontology found that the alleged type locality (where the fossil was first discovered) of Lago Nandarajo "near the northern border of Panama" was nonexistent. In fact, Panama does not even really have a northern border, as it is bounded along the north by the Caribbean Sea. No other publications or databases mentioned Mustelodon, save a fleeting mention in a 2019 book that presumably followed Wikipedia, Felines of the World.
The article also appeared in four other languages, Catalan, Spanish, Dutch, and Serbian. In Serbian Wikipedia, a note at the bottom of the page warned: "It is important to note here that there is no data on this genus in the official scientific literature, and all attached data on the genus Mustelodon on this page are taken from the English Wikipedia and are the only known data on this genus of mammals, so the validity of this genus is questionable."
Editors took action to alert our counterparts on other projects, and these versions were removed also. As the editor who reached out to Spanish and Catalan Wikipedia, it was somewhat challenging to navigate these mostly foreign languages (I have a limited grasp of Spanish). I doubted that the article had very many watchers, so I knew I had to find some WikiProjects where I could post a machine translation advising of the hoax, and asking that users follow local protocols to remove the article. I was surprised to find, however, that Catalan Wikipedia does not tag articles for WikiProjects on talk pages, meaning I had to fumble around to find what I needed (turns out that WikiProjects are Viquiprojectes in Catalan!) Mustelodon remains
on Wikidata, where its "instance of" property was swapped from "taxon" to "fictional taxon".
How did this article have such a long lifespan? Early intervention is critical for removing hoaxes. A 2016 report found that a hoax article that survives its first day has an 18% chance of lasting a year.[1] Additionally, hoax articles tend to have longer lifespans if they are in inconspicuous parts of Wikipedia, where they do not receive many views. Mustelodon was only viewed a couple times a day, on average.
Mustelodon survived a brush with death three years into its lifespan. The article was proposed for deletion in September 2008, with a deletion rationale of "No references given; cannot find any evidence in peer-reviewed journals that this alleged genus actually exists". Unfortunately, the proposed deletion was contested and the template removed, though the declining editor did not give a rationale. Upon its rediscovery in August 2020, Mustelodon was tagged for speedy deletion under
CSD G3 as a "blatant hoax". This was challenged, and an
Articles for Deletion discussion followed. On 12 August, the AfD was closed as a SNOW delete. WikiProject Palaeontology members ensured that any trace of it was scrubbed from legitimate articles. The fictional mammal was finally, truly extinct.
At the ripe old age of 14 years, 9 months, this is the longest-lived documented hoax on Wikipedia, topping the previous documented record of 14 years, 5 months, set by
The Gates of Saturn, a fictitious television show, which was incidentally also discovered in August 2020. How do we discover other hoax taxa? Could we use Wikidata to discover taxa are not linked to databases like ITIS, Fossilworks, and others?
This month's spotlight is with Mattximus, author of two Featured Articles and 29 Featured Lists at current count.
How did you become involved with editing biodiversity articles?
I think I have a compulsion to make lists, it doesn't show up in my real life, but online I secretly get a lot of satisfaction making orderly lists and tables. It's a bit of a secret of mine, because it doesn't manifest in any other part of my life. My background is in biology, so this was a natural (haha) fit.
You have an impressive number of FAs under your belt. Two of your more recent ones, Apororhynchus and Gigantorhynchus, are part of what you referred to as an "experiment". How did you choose these articles, and what's next for you in this experiment?
This experiment was just to see if I could get any random article to FA status, so I picked the very first alphabetical animal species according to the taxonomy and made that attempt. Technically, there isn't enough information for a species page so I just merged the species into a genus and went from there. It was a fun exercise, but doing it alone is not the most fun so it's probably on pause for the foreseeable future.
Note: Aporhynchus is the first alphabetical taxon as follows: Animalia, Acanthocephala, Archiacanthocephala, Apororhynchida, Apororhynchidae, Apororhynchus
What advice would you give to someone who wants to nominate their first FAC?
I would recommend getting a good article nominated, then a featured list up before tackling the FA. Lists are a bit more forgiving but give you a taste of what standards to expect from FA. The most time consuming thing is proper citations so make sure that is in order before starting either.
Is there anything that would surprise us to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?
My personality in real life does not match my wikipedia persona. I'm not a very organized, or orderly in real life, but the wikipedia pages I brought to FL or FA are all very organized. Maybe it's my outlet for a more free-flowing life as a scientist/teacher.
Anything else you'd like us to know?
The fact that wikipedia exists free of profit motive and free for everyone really is something special and I encourage everyone to donate a few dollars to the cause.
... that the flower buds of the woolly thistle(pictured) can be eaten in a similar way to
artichokes? (8 August)
... that the French peanut is native to Brazil? (10 August)
... that the 800-year-old Minchenden Oak is one of the oldest trees in London? (14 August)
... that the forward-facing
incisors of the extinct dolphin Ankylorhiza(restoration pictured) may have been used for ramming their prey, similar to a hunting method used by modern
orcas? (16 August)
... that scientists accidentally created a
hybrid of two endangered fish species, called the sturddlefish? (17 August)
... that despite having the widest distribution in the United States, the arid-land subterranean termite causes less structural damage than other members of its genus? (19 August)
... that in 2021, the dwarf periodical cicada(pictured) is due to emerge in parts of eastern North America, not having been seen for 17 years? (24 August)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September.
Agenda
Upcoming:
live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19
Facebook,
YouTube, September 10
Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage.
phab:T261451
Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item.
phab:T260869
Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders)
phab:T261285
Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the
Federated Properties project
More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties
Estonia report: Virtual exhibition about Polish-Estonian relations. Rephotography and cultural heritage
Germany report: KulTour in Swabia and 8000 documents new online
India report: Utilising Occasion for Content donation: A story
Netherlands report: WMIN & WMNL collaboration & Japanese propaganda films
Serbia report: Enriching Wiki projects in different ways
Sweden report: Free music and new recordings of songs in the public domain; Autumn in the libraries; Yes, you can hack the heritage this year – online!
Uganda report: Participating in the African Librarians Week (24-30 May 2020)
"Our admiration for Wikidata and for the people who work with it knows no bounds. Having a single source of well modelled, massively interlinked, well managed data that anyone can query at the press of a button is a real thing of wonder." -
says the UK Parliament data team
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using
this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to
Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
WikiMap, a tool by
User:DB111 that maps geocoded images from Commons and Wikipedia articles, now supports Wikidata items as well (
Q99232292)
Wikidata QID's are approaching 9 digits. Now is the time to fix any code or schemas that assume that Q numbers are smaller than 9 characters.
Fixing an error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an Item instead of just one. (
phabricator:T260869)
Development of version one of
Federated Properties has concluded! Expect an announcement with timing of the release of this feature soon. Wikibase users who want an early look at the feature are invited to reach out to participate in the pre-release testing round.
Development of the WikibaseManifest extension has continued into its second sprint; we focused on determining a
product specification for the Manifest output.
Finishing a draft documentation for a REST API to get it ready for a feedback round before implementation.
Finished improvements to the automated scoring of the quality of Items with ORES. Still need to retrain ORES and deploy the changes before the scores are actually different though.
Upcoming:
live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 21 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: A starting point for newer institutions to think through what is involved in coordinating a Wikidata project, including shared infrastructure, training, and documentation, 22 September.
Agenda
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #21 WikiDojo:
Facebook,
YouTube, September 25
Wikidata Query Service (in French) - (Parts
1,
2 &
3)
Tool of the week
copy-qid is a user script by
Abbe98 that allows you to copy the Qid with one click.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using
this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to
Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
WDQS/WCQS Status update (September 2): "We are planning to spend more time doing some
analytics on our data. (1) What are the most expensive queries, what are they trying to achieve and is that reasonable? (2) Do we have performant subgraphs that we could expose independently?"
WQS now supports
mwapi service request for Wikibooks (
phab:T261125)
The language codes lij-mc, ja-Hira, ja-Kana, ja-Hrkt, ja-Hani, ojp, ojp-Hira and ojp-Hani" have been added for use in monolingual text property values (
phab:T254968,
phab:T195816)
The language codes de-1901, eo-hsistemo and eo-xsistemo, ja-hira, ja-kana and ja-hrkt have been added for Lexemes (
phab:T262330,
phab:T257422,
phab:T250559)
P1438 has been converted from string to external ID datatype (
phab:T262198)
Worked on fixing an input issue with invisible characters (
phab:T261071)
Investigating what work would be needed to get the new termbox that's available on mobile to also work on desktop
Fixing several issues with Special:Undelete (
phab:T261747)
Fixing an error message being shown twice (
phab:T260869)
Starting the coding work on the Query Builder
Continuing to write a draft for a REST API specification
Finishing the remaining work needed to get the improved quality scoring for Items deployed to ORES
Continuing work on
WikibaseManifest: Determined the
essential metadata that will be included in the WikibaseManifest file, added some new features (mostly MediaWiki metadata) to the Manifest that were requested by the OpenRefine team (
phab:T262805 and
phab:T262804) and set up a
test system that will soon be ready for tool builders to use for testing the integration of their tools with WikibaseManifest
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions [IFLA]
have published a series of six videos "discussions with professionals in order to discuss projects, issues, progress of Wikidata, Wikibase and bibliographic data in the field of libraries." Currently available as
a playlist on YouTube under CC-By (Wikimedia Commons upload soon), with subtitles in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French (Arabic and Chinese coming soon). The production was made by the
IFLA Wikidata Working Group and funded by a WikiCite grant.
The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using
this anonymous formuntil September 30th or add feedback publically to
Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
Como is a new Android app, that uses Wikidata lexemes and senses to create a word-guessing game. It let's players create new senses and tests them on other players to finally save them in Wikidata. The app is developed as part of a BA thesis, to determine if this concept is useful to create more lexicographical data, and testers would be very welcome.
A long-standing bug has been fixed (
T217144) where Items and Lexemes created via OAuth would not be added to the user’s watchlist even if the user had the Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist setting enabled. (The Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist setting was probably likewise ineffective, but this was not tested specifically.) Affected tools include
QuickStatements,
Mix'n'Match, and
Wikidata Lexeme Forms; users of these and other tools may see more pages being added to their watchlists now. (This only applies to new edits and page creations; previously created or edited pages will not be automatically added to the watchlist retroactively.)
Working on the basic building blocks of the Query Builder towards making it possible to create the first very simple query with it
Talking to people about comparing Wikidata's data against other databases and flagging mismatches
Fixing an issue with Item creations via the API by blocked users leading to skipped entity IDs (
phab:T232620)
Fixed an input issue with invisible characters (
phab:T261071)
Finishing the draft of the REST API spec to get it ready for feedback
WikibaseManifest: created a separate key for local entities and decided what we do about non-local entity sources based on tool-builder feedback (
phab:T263527) and specifying the API in OpenApi format (
phab:T262919)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Toby Hudson on Entity Explosion, a browser extension which allows you to get information about entities on the web page you’re visiting, 06 October.
Agenda
Video: How to create and edit items on Wikidata (in Spanish) -
YouTube
Video: Introduction to Wikidata and wikiprojects of interest to librarians (in Spanish) -
YouTube
Tool of the week
IllWill.js is a userscript that searches Wikidata for foreign-language sitelinks, to populate
Template:ill and replace plain red links on other Wikimedia projects.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
omeka-s-wikidata is a new module for the open source GLAM collection management software
Omeka, that allows cataloguers to use Wikidata as a vocabulary for persons, places, subjects, etc.
Maps of arts and humanities research grants funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council in UK between 2013-2019.
Sorted by year,
Sorted by budget (
Source)
Kia ora from Hokitika! Tomorrow I pack up the car and head to Greymouth to present to
Development West Coast our previous month's work, before heading south • Yes, Glacier Country are supplying accommodation in south Westland –
Ōkārito,
Franz Josef, and
Fox – for the next two weeks. Possibly because I
mouthed off to the media that Fox Glacier's entry is so short who would want to stay there? • So this week it's
Ōkārito (splitting the article into settlement and lagoon),
kōtuku,
spoonbills, the
West Coast Wildlife Centre (Q99767675),
rowi,
Franz Josef glacier (and NZ glacier photos in general glacier articles), historic buildings thereabouts, etc • I uploaded lots of
Stewart Nimmo photos of the Haast area, and have some Paparoa ones by
Jase Blair coming soon. •
Pakoire noticed that Fayne Robinson (Q99836010) needs an article – can we collaborate on one? He's def notable and we need more coverage of Māori from the Coast. • Also women: see the Westland women in the
WikiProject Hokitika Museum Google doc and
Hokitika Museum Google drive. • Last week I wrote or improved articles about
Hokitika Museum,
Lake Kaniere,
History House Museum,
Lake Mahinapua, and
Westland District Library. Error check, cleanup etc welcome. It's great to be able to work from folders and scrapbooks stuffed full of newspaper clippings! • Housekeeping: Thank you all for collaborating and filling in gaps, especially with historic buildings.
Paora has been doing some great work. Please keep letting me know of any photos you need taking on the spot. • Take care —
Giantflightlessbirds
The new
Wikibase/Consultants and Support Providers' directory on Meta lists people/companies that provide professional help with Wikibase -- be it technical support (installation and setup), custom development, or data modeling services.
The
2020 Coolest Tool Award is still accepting nominations until October 14th. Please use
this form to recommend tools. You can nominate as many tools as you want by filling out the form multiple times.
Working on enabling JSON dumps for Lexemes (
phab:T220883)
Finishing preventing blocked users from making us skip QIDs (
phab:T232620)
Continuing work on the Wikibase Manifest extension that allows toolbuilders to easily access configurations of a specific Wikibase instance so it is easier for them to make their tools work with not just Wikidata but also other Wikibase instances
Started analyzing what we consider a mismatch for our work around checking Wikidata's data against other databases
Continued work on the Query Builder to get it to create the first very simple query. It can do that now but not yet visualize the result.
France report: AAF training course; Workshops in Strasbourg; European Heritage Days: Rennes; Wiki Loves Monuments
Germany report: Ahoy! Wikipedians set sail to document the reality of modern seafaring
Indonesia report: New GLAM partnerships on data donation; Commons structured data edit-a-thon
Norway report: Students taking on GLAM Wiki women in red
Sweden report: Musikverket: more folk music and photos; Hack for Heritage 2020; Wiki Loves Monuments; Wikipedia in the libraries; Digital Book Fair on Wikipedia
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Other: Proposal to spin-off non-Earth coordinates from property P625 (coordinates location), currently only 7000 of 8 million values: see
Property proposal/planetary coordinates
Upcoming:
live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, October 20 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: hands-on work with Wikidata on creating items for authors of COVID 19 papers and brainstorming for future hands-on work, 20 October.
Agenda
Blocked users trying to create new Items no longer make us skip QIDs (
phab:T232620)
So far we don't have JSON dumps for Lexemes. We're working on regularly generating them as well now (
phab:T264883)
Continuing work on getting the Query Builder to generate the first query. Almost there.
Started the
feedback round for the REST API. Please provide your input if you are currently using the action API or plan to develop against Wikidata's API in the future.
Kia ora koutou from
Reefton! • We're in the last few days of the project, so time to wrap up loose ends. • Most of the last week I was based in in Fox Glacier, organising photo uploads from Fox Glacier Guiding of the
glacier itself and
Chancellor Hut, check them out • I've also photographed hiking trails and worked on articles about the
West Coast Wildlife Centre,
Lake Gault and
Lake Matheson • Here in Reefton I'm improving the article about the
town, have found info on the Inangahua County Library for DrThneed, and am writing about the
Reefton Distillery • There are photos of all of Reeftons's historic buildings (and I've added a few), but no articles about the
Reefton Courthouse or the
Reefton School of Mines, and the
Reefton Power Station article could do with work • Since I last wrote
DrThneed has been hard at work on libraries, there's a nice
Donovan's Store article from
Gertrude206, much-needed improvements to
pounamu by
Pakoire, and
Paora's been super-industrious with historic buildings but most importantly managed to produce a photo of the
giant sandfly of Pukekura • Housekeeping: I'm sending out prizes kindly donated by Development West Coast and Friends of
Waiuta to those of you who've worked hardest on the project, so if I ask for a postal address that's why. But even if you just signed up to get these postcards, that's fine too! • Thank you all for making a wonderful project work; I've never coordinated a team effort like this, and I think it's potentially a model for other edit-a-thons. Its been great fun. And I hope this has inspired you to keep chipping away, improving the coverage of New Zealand's beautiful West Coast. Ka kite ano, —
Giantflightlessbirds
Wikidata weekly summary #439
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Past: Providing sustainable data services through Wikibase and Wikidata, SEMIC Conference 2020 - (
replay)
Past: Introduction to Wikidata by
Frimelle, Software Freedom Kosova 2020 - (
replay)
Past: What's new in Wikidata? by Lea Lacroix, Lydia Pintscher and Mattia Capozzi, ItWikiCon 2020 - (
replay)
Ongoing: plenty of Wikidata birthday events, online and onsite! Here's an overview of the upcoming events, you can find the links and details
in the main calendar.
WikiCite virtual conference on October 26-28, live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter, with sessions across many timezones and languages – English, French, German, Indonesian, and Portuguese.
24-hours online meetup, on October 28-29: an open discussion with plenty of community members facilitating exchange around the topic "what makes you enthusiastic about Wikidata"
Gene Wiki: how to synchronize and curate primary sources with and in Wikidata, online, on October 29th
Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata (in French) - (Parts
1,
2,
3,
4 &
5)
Tool of the week
WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Server switch: all wikis will be in read-only on Tuesday, October 27th at 14:00 UTC for up to an hour (
more information). All services hosted by WMF (e.g. tools hosted on wmcloud.org) are also impacted. Non-essential code deployments will not happen this week.
Got the Query Builder to create the first simple queries. You can follow along the development from now on on the
test system.
Preparing regular JSON dumps for Lexemes (
phab:T264883)
Analyzed a number of queries to the query service together with the WMF search team to better understand what the queries are doing and what further optimizations we can make to the query service and which queries need different systems to answer them.
Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (
phab:T265897)
Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores
Finished investigating how to handle a restricted list of external Wikibase services. (
phab:T265118)
Removed noratelimit on bots for wikidata.org (
phab:T258354)
Published Easier Access for Programmers to Wikidata
research report
Past: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27 (
notes)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Arthur Smith and Daniel Mietchen discussing author items in Wikidata and the Author Disambiguator Tool, 3 November.
Agenda
Wikidata Spanish Tutorials Website – a brand new user-friendly (with Dublin Core Metadata!) digital collection of Wikidata slides, tutorials, and manuals in Spanish (Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas, Mexico)
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #24 -
YouTube,
Facebook, November 14, 19.00 UTC
Tool of the week
Template:Cite Q on Wikipedia makes it easier to use Wikidata items as Wikipedia references.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The
next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 12 November 2020
(Add to calendar). Come and share-out anything new or exciting that’s been happening with your Wikibase instance; what have you been doing recently, what is working well, what has been challenging for you - we would like to hear them all!
Continuing work with the WMF search team to automatically categorize WDQS queries to see how they can better be served
Query Builder work is continuing. Next step is making it possible to create a query with an arbitrary Property instead of the currently hard-coded post code.
Feedback round for the REST API is finishing this week and then we will review all the feedback and make changes to the spec accordingly.
Preparing to release 1.35 version of Wikibase docker image (
phab:T264538)
Fixed Math extension to not require JS parser which caused issues creating new Statements for mathematical formulae (
phab:T266673)
Made sure there is a meaningful edit summary when deleting a Lexeme (
phab:T263435)
Sweden report: Librarians learn about Wikidata; More Swedish literature on Wikidata; Online Edit-a-thon Dalarna; Applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Librarians and Projekt HBTQI; GLAM Statistical Tool
USA report: American Archive of Public Broadcasting; Smithsonian Women in Finance Edit-a-thon; Black Lunch Table; San Diego/October 2020; WikiWednesday Salon
Blogpost:
Introducing Mapping the Scottish Reformation: Clerics, Manuscripts, and Open Data. "Most of the individuals we have found are obviously relatively obscure and have no item entry in Wikidata...As such, we have created around one thousand new items over the last two months, all of which serve as a framework to record the key parameters of a cleric’s career".
Tool of the week
ALEC (A List of Everything Cool) is a tool to explore biodiversity content in Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Join the upcoming
#1Lib1Ref Wikipedia campaign from January 15th to February 5th 2021 and improve Wikidata items by adding references to statements.
Added "Random lexeme" link under dedicated section for lexicographical data in the Wikidata sidebar (
phab:T205525). Thanks to
Matěj Suchánek!
Working on language/spelling variant selector bug on Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme that makes it difficult to continue creating Items or Lexemes (
phab:T266638)
Work on the Query Builder continues. We're focusing on making it possible to query for all Items with a specific Property but any value next.
Went over all the feedback we have received for the REST API specification draft. Overall the feedback is positive and really useful. So we will move ahead after thinking more about the remaining points that were raised.
Working on making changes to descriptions show up in the RecentChanges feed and watchlists on Wikipedia and co as well even if they are not explicitly used (
phab:T191831)
Fixed a problem adding statements with Properties of datatype mathematical formula (
phab:T266496)
Kicked off our new effort to implement a predictable release cycle and release infrastructure for Wikibase suite by creating a prototype build workflow (
phab:T267553) and prototype test workflow (
phab:T267554)
ANN: A platform to annotate text with Wikidata IDs (report) "Report of the work done by the Ann team at the eLife Sprint 2020. It describes the effort pursued towards a system for universal annotation of biomedical articles using the collaborative knowledge graph of Wikidata".
How the content of Wikidata can be represented in RDF -
YouTube
Tool of the week
EntityShape.js is a script that allows you to check an Item against an EntitySchema. On the Item page, it will display various information about the Item, like the properties that should be present on the Item.
Query Builder: We're making it possible to switch between querying for specific values (e.g. all Items with a specific post code) or any value (all Items with a post code statement regardless of which one it is)
Correcting the behaviour of what automatically happens on Wikidata when a page is moved on Wikipedia and co to an excluded namespace with the "suppress redirect" option (
phab:T261275)
Making language fallback indicators not show up for language variant fallbacks in a few more places (
phab:T267502)
Adding html language attributes for statements linking to Forms and Senses (
phab:T267023)
Working on language and lexical category fields turning red on unfocus even though no changes are made after a change in ooui (
phab:T266936)
Finished building the 1.35 versions of the Wikibase base and bundle docker images and published to
dockerhub (
phab:T264538)
Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed 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
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you messaged me a few days ago about my edits and that they might be advertisement. They are not, as they primarily explain the music to the users. Please do not delete my edits, as they are for informational purposes.
What do you think should be done with
WP:PORTS? We had the 2011 merger discussion with the Maritime Transport Taskforce, which was adopted with fairly minimal discussion but never fully enacted. Unfortunately the merger did not lead to any real gain in editor numbers, and perhaps diluted the attention anyone actually paid to ports topics. And now as far as I can tell I'm the only member of WP:PORTS not to have retired from Wikipedia. :)
I particularly don't like the project being left in its current half-merged state. I reckon it needs to either be completely merged into the Maritime Transport taskforce and that taskforce then urged to get involved in the wonders of port articles; or it needs un-merging and re-promotion as an independent collaboration.
WP:YAR also seems to have died a sad death (again). If anything this is more serious, as pirate articles more quickly fill with unsourced nonsense. The project has no obvious merger target, but there's surely enough editor interest in poach to get it up and running again on its own. Or is this not worth the effort, and should it just be left in its current inactive state?
Anyway: given your own background in maritime history, I was hoping to get your views on the above, before raising it more widely. Opinions welcome on these or any other options! --
Euryalus (
talk)
09:17, 26 November 2020 (UTC)reply
Wikidata weekly summary #444
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: We will have several speakers joining us to discuss their projects in lightning talks, 1 December.
Agenda
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020. 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET.
Etherpad,
Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
Round 2 of the consultation on using Wikidata for curriculum digitization begun on November 24th, and will end on December 7th. You can participate by sharing your ideas in
this response form (Google forms)
User:Zvpunry/EntitySchemaHighlighter.js user script highlights the entities in the content of a Schema and shows information when hovering the link. (2020-12-07)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
We now have a central repository for
wikibase-cli templates, with the aim to document best practices, offer general purpose request/create/edit templates, but also offer more niche templates as examples of what's possible: contributions and template requests welcome!
Simple Query Builder development continues. We worked on combining different query conditions as well as internationalisation.
Making the precision translatable in geocoordinate and date inputs (
phab:T269102)
Changes to descriptions in a specific language now show up on watchlist and recent changes on the Wikipedia and co for that language (
phab:T191831)
Finished working on the problem of incorrectly-escaped label being included in a link to Special:NewItem if there are no search results (
phab:T263258)
Investigating why we're currently skipping a significant number of Item IDs (
phab:T268625)
Wikibase Release Strategy/Infrastructure: We have decided where to host future Docker and tarball releases of Wikibase. You can read about the details and the reasoning in the following ADRs:
Docker Image Repository,
Tarball Repository
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the
redirect whitelist.
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
NPP Technical Achievement Award
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
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Template:Notebook Given name is a new template which gives for each given name a list of useful SPARQL queries. The template can be used on the talk page of given names. See
Alexandre (Q16002466) for an example. Comments are Contributions are welcome.
The
next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 17 December 2020
(Add to calendar). We will have a few people share out about their project in the first half of the call and then continue our conversation from the last session about what will be a better platform for community discussions. Everyone is welcome to attend!
We spend the week doing some exploratory work for the next year. Among other things we looked into how to measure the number of constraint violations on an average Item and what we can learn from it.
Continuing to work on the query builder. It can now have more than one query conditions. One of the next steps is making it possible to query for Item values. You can follow along on the
demo system.
Finished working on the problem of values of Statements that link to Forms and Senses not having language attributes associated with them in the HTML code (
phab:T267023)
Fixed language selectors covering other input fields when using keyboard navigation for Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme (
phab:T266638)
Fixed language fallback indicators sometimes still shown for variant fallbacks (
phab:T267502)
Working on whitespace stripped while typing when editing lexemes (
phab:T250550)
Hello JarrahTree, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this
seasonal occasion. Spread the
WikiLove by wishing another user a
Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2021. Happy editing, Starzoner (
talk)
18:51, 23 December 2020 (UTC)reply
Ongoing:
rC3 (remote Chaos Communication Congress). Several Wikidata-related talks and meetups happening on December 27th, 28th and 29th: introduction to Wikidata, Wikidata for datajournalists, Wikidata meetups in German and English, and a Query Service workshop. (see
Wikipaka schedule for more details)
Project Grants open call for proposals in 2021. Changes in the review process for Project Grants in 2021; the open call for community organizing proposals will be from January 11 to February 10 and the open call for software and research proposals will be from February 15 to March 16.
Past: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour happened on January 21st. See notes
here (English).
Past: 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Beginner Teaching Workshop (in Chinese). Replay on YouTube
1,
2,
3,
4
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries
LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikibase, the Integrated Authority File (GND) pilot at the German National Library, and the WikiLibrary Manifesto, 26 January.
Agenda
Continued working on the Query Builder: made it possible to limit the number of results in the result set, made it possible to include results from subclasses when querying for Item values, worked on negating queries and started on sharing of queries via URL. As always you can try the current state on the
test system.
Making links in the Query Service redirect to the proper translations of their pages on-wiki by using Special:MyLanguage redirects (
phab:T267656)
Working on fixing an issue with displaying large numbers for quantity values (
phab:T268456)
Fixed a case where no error message was shown when trying to save a Lemma with an invalid language code (
phab:T265783)
Talked to a few more people about checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find potential errors
Continuing the Release Strategy project for Wikibase, with the following progress:
Created a “release pipeline” for Wikibase extension (
phab:T267627)
Created MediaWiki docker images based off release branches (
phab:T270133)
Defined format and contents of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia Germany (
phab:T271194)
When there are multiple edits that you disagree with, please use individual reverts (which are then easier to refer to), each with a meaningful comment.
Mitch Ames (
talk)
03:53, 26 January 2021 (UTC)reply
I'm sure it was an honest mistake, but it's not the first time that you have rolled back multiple edits - including clearly valid edits - with no explanation. There was no justification (according to
WP:ROLLBACK) for use of the rollback tool in this case.
Mitch Ames (
talk)
04:38, 26 January 2021 (UTC)reply
so you are perfect then mitch, and in all your 100,000 + edits havent done somethiung similar? smells of having to have the last word..
JarrahTree05:09, 26 January 2021 (UTC)reply
Continuing development on the first version of the Query Builder. It's starting to be able to do the first really meaningful queries now. Latest addition was the ability to negate conditions. Up next is the ability to connect conditions with OR instead of only AND as well as querying for quantities and ranges. You can follow along on the
test system.
Exploring possible solutions for how to compare Wikidata's data against other databases to find and highlight mismatches automatically.
Added lexicographical data codes for a few languages: rkt, ctg (
phab:T271589), and az-cyrl (
phab:T265906)
Finished working on the issue of TypeError on a diff of a Wikidata talk page
phab:T271402
Updated Wikidata unit conversion configuration (
phab:T267644)
Fixed two last places where links in the the Query Service UI were not using Special:MyLanguage yet to redirect to the documentation page in the user's language (
phab:T267656)
Pushing JSON dumps for Lexemes over the finish line (
phab:T264883)
Working on showing an error when trying to save lemmas with invalid language codes (
phab:T265783)
Wikibase Release Strategy
Investigated the release of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia (
phab:T271193)
Continued process of adding additional components to the Wikibase release, including OAuth (
phab:T272580)
Video: Wikidata as a PID community. By Simon Cobb -
YouTube
Tool of the week
Item documentation has two new features. First, it now includes two predefined SPARQL queries. The first one give the number of statements about the item by property and the second the list of statement about the properties. Second, for items of class award, it includes predefined SPARQL queries from
TP award. See
Q1624297 for an example.
Ranker lets you edit the ranks of several statements at once.
Made it possible to connect query conditions with OR (instead of only AND) in the Query Builder (
phab:T272694)
Making it possible to query only for statements with or without a reference in the Query Builder (
phab:T272699)
Continuing to work on adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to prevent people from allocating a large number of unassigned Item IDs that are then lost (
phab:T272032)
Working on the problem of Lexeme merging failing if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (
phab:T273830)
Working on showing an error when trying to save a Lemma with invalid language code on a Lexeme (
phab:T265783)
Fixing an issue in the Property selector fallback where it is not falling back from language variant to major language (
phab:T272712)
Making it possible to add Interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (
phab:T138332)