User talk:Zazpot/Archive 10

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Wikidata weekly summary #349

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Everything flows (and certainly data does)

Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?).

Amazon Echo device using the Amazon Alexa service in voice search showdown with the Google rival on an Android phone

Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making.

Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness.

There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 4

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Wikidata weekly summary #350

Better template

Hello Zazpot. I notice that you have been adding a "stub|section" template to articles. Here is an example. You should know that it applies the stub designation to the whole article. Part of the reason is that there is not an actual "section" designation for that template - see Template:Stub. The proper template for this situation is Template:Expand section (you can see that I did this here) Now this is not a big problem but for the editors who patrol the Category:All articles to be expanded they won't see the article listed unless the expand secton template is used. Thanks for all your work here at the 'pedia and best regards. MarnetteD|Talk 01:42, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

@MarnetteD: mea culpa. I meant to use {{sect-stub}}, not {{stub|section}}. Thank you for catching those mistakes, fixing them, and alerting me!
Thank you, too, for your tireless efforts on here. I am exceedingly grateful to you for filling out my bare URL citations, especially. Without the assistance that I receive with that from you and others, I might struggle to contribute. Zazpot (talk) 01:54, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply Z and for your kind words. I am happy to be of help where and when I can. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 02:00, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #351

Deletion discussion about Willie McCoy (rapper)

Hello, Zazpot,

Welcome to Wikipedia! I edit here too, under the username Meatsgains and it's nice to meet you :-)

I wanted to let you know that I've started a discussion about whether an article that you created, Willie McCoy (rapper) should be deleted. Your comments are welcome over Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Willie McCoy (rapper) .

You might like to note that such discussions usually run for seven days and are not ballot-polls. And, our guide about effectively contributing to such discussions is worth a read. Last but not least, you are highly encouraged to continue improving the article; just be sure not to remove the tag about the deletion nomination from the top.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment here and prepend it with {{Re|Meatsgains}}. And, don't forget to sign your reply with ~~~~ . Thanks!

Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.

Meatsgains(talk) 02:24, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

@Meatsgains: nice to meet you, too! Thank you for your courtesy in letting me know about the discussion. I have posted a response there. Zazpot (talk) 02:35, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Robinson

I suspect that the confusion may arise because of wp:ENGVAR. In the UK, as I understand it, when a person is "charged" it means that the Crown Prosecution Service believes that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that the person may be guilty of a crime and that there is thus a legal basis for him being "remanded in custody" or released on bail. A non-trivial proportion of charges are dropped; another proportion go to court but a "not guilty" verdict is returned, Only the fraction of charges attract a guilty verdict and thus a conviction. Thus in English law, the fact of being charged with a crime is not notable (although tabloids like to pretend otherwise). It seems to me that the problem is an artefact of the infobox wording. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:25, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

CTE American football copyedit

Hi there! No rush on this as I see you're on a deadline/busy, but I saw that you were the user who added the copyedit needed template to the American football section of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. When you're freed up, will you take a look at that section and tell me what you think about the copyedit status? I tried to combine/reorganize, as well as the typical wikignoming, and another user moved individual cases of CTE to another page. I think it might be closer to passing muster now, but I'd like another opinion. Let me know what you think. Amphytrite (talk) 03:50, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

@Amphytrite: thank you for the improvements you made to that section - good work! - and also for letting me know that it is now in better shape. I have now removed the template. Have a great day! Zazpot (talk) 12:53, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
Fantastic. On to the next. Have a good one! Amphytrite (talk) 02:21, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #352

Shooting of Willie McCoy

I just wanted to point out that you missed the point of the "Sources" tag at Shooting of Willie McCoy. Sources exist but they are not being USED in the article to SHOW notability. Nine sources are propping up two sentences, and all of those sources have information that could easily be used to expand the article beyond the pathetic stub that it is now. As written now, the article makes no statement about the shooting being notable, just that it simply happened. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (Talk|Contribs) 13:10, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

I am grateful for your taking the time to leave me a note explaining your reason for using that template.
Unfortunately, I don't agree with your reason. The best I can do here is to explain why. Specifically, WP:GNG states that,

"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list."

Shooting of Willie McCoy meets those criteria. As such, it meets WP:GNG and is therefore not deserving of a {{Sources exist}} tag. (Moreover, it meets those criteria verifiably, because several such sources are cited within the article.) Even so, thank you for your good intentions, and thanks again for stopping by to explain them to me. Zazpot (talk) 13:45, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #353

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

What is a systematic review?

Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources.

 
PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help?

File:Schittny, Facing East, 2011, Legacy Projects.jpg
2011 photograph by Bernard Schittny of the "Legacy Projects" group

Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen.

Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

A page you started (ROSE test) has been reviewed!

Thanks for creating ROSE test.

I have just reviewed the page, as a part of our page curation process and note that:

Nice work - just padded out the citations with additional detail. Couldn't find any other articles to link it into so the orphan tag will have to stay for now. Regards

To reply, leave a comment here and prepend it with {{Re|Hughesdarren}}. And, don't forget to sign your reply with ~~~~ .

Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.

Hughesdarren (talk) 09:06, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #354

Wikidata weekly summary #355

About the brexit deal

sup m8 i realised that potentially information in Brexit withdrawal agreement is potentially inaccurate because i believe that the vote yesterday was the third-worst defeat (after the first brexit vote and the amendment vote before the first vote i mentioned) instead of the fourth-worst defeat. Could you please check if that is true because i believe that it was the third-worst not the fourth here comes dat boi (talk) 18:49, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

i believe that it was the third-worst not the fourth What has caused you to arrive at this belief? Zazpot (talk) 00:50, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

scratch that, it is now actually the fourth-worst (third if you count the amendment vote after the vote last night, and yes now i realise that, because i forgot Ramsay's McDonald's defeat by 166 votes and i thought that the only amendment before the first vote counted. Seems like not

here comes dat boi (talk) 12:35, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Asking a favor

Hello Z. When you use the "bare url section" template those of us who work on them have to hunt though the article to find them. On a big article like this and the Brexit one it is time consuming to do that hunting. If you could simply use a "bare url" template at the top of the article it would be a help. FYI activating refill causes the whole article to be checked no matter which template is used. Of course, there is nothing wrong with what you are doing - it is just using the regular one will save me some time. Thanks for all your work here at the 'pedia and best regards. MarnetteD|Talk 22:47, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

@MarnetteD: thank you for the note. I had not properly appreciated that I was causing you this inconvenience, so I will give thought to your suggestion. What makes me hesitate to immediately agree to it are two considerations:
  1. {{bareurls}} output at the top of the article is more visually obtrusive than {{bareurls|section}} buried deeper down. I fear that using it, when the latter would do, risks the ire of other editors.
  2. I prefer to edit the smallest sufficient unit of the article, to minimise the risk of edit conflicts and to minimise the impact of any accidental error. Using {{bareurls}} instead of {{bareurls|section}} would require me to edit the article as a whole, or at least to split my usual edits into two edits: one to modify the section I am concerned with, and a subsequent edit of the article as a whole in order to add {{bareurls}} to the top of the article.
Are you aware of any way that I might sidestep those concerns without continuing to impinge upon your goodwill? Perhaps there is some "third way" that I do not know about. That would be the best option, if it exists.
Thank you again for all your assistance, and especially for having quietly borne the inconvenience mentioned above. Zazpot (talk) 23:39, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
No matter which template you use the article is added to Category:All articles with bare URLs for citations. There are several editors (of which I am one) who patrol that category regularly. We then use the tools available to format the refs and then remove the template. With a couple rare exceptions I've not seen an article stay in the cat more than a few hours - maybe a day if we are all away from editing at the same time. While there are some templates that bug other editors in my experience this is not one of them as it brings proper formatting to any refs added to an article. If anyone ever did complain you could certainly send them to me so that I can explain things. As I think about your edit conflict concerns the only suggestion I can make is for you to do all of your editing to the article - save it - and then add the bare url tag at the top with a separate edit. - Yikes I just noticed that is what you said in item two - facepalm for missing that - it is the best way of dealing with things. I've tried to cover your questions but may have missed something. If so my apologies. MarnetteD|Talk 00:40, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
@MarnetteD: I will try to remember to use the two-step process in future, unless so pushed for time that this would be impossible for me. Thanks again for your help, Zazpot (talk) 20:23, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
Thank you Z. I hope you have an enjoyable weekend. MarnetteD|Talk 21:04, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #356

Stuyvesant High School; bare URLs

Hey, thanks for your edit to the Stuyvesant High School article. I just want to let you know that in regards to your message about {{bareurls}} on your user page - the Citer webpage will fill out the citation for you, then you can just copy & paste the reference to the article. It's much better than Reflinks or any of the other automated citation tools I've encountered. epicgenius (talk) 14:39, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

@Epicgenius: that is the first such tool I have encountered that is decent enough to make me reconsider my current approach. Thank you for alerting me to it! Too early to say yet whether it will "stick" for me, but I will give it a try. Zazpot (talk) 14:48, 19 March 2019 (UTC)