User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2024 February

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The "proper names" stuff

I rather belatedly saw your comment at Talk:Connecticut panhandle#Requested move 7 January 2024: The Sussex Downs are far from the only downs in Britain, and yet Kipling's "The Weald is good, the Downs are best" does not do a disservice to English by capitalising both: although, of course, our MoS would write "The Weald is good, the downs are best" because there is only one "Weald". Not actually, even aside from the fact WP wouldn't change the capitalization in a Kipling quotation.

Kinda lengthy ...

If "the Downs" were used specifically as a shorthand reference to the Sussex Downs as a named geographical feature or broad geological formation, it would remain capitalized, as a short-form proper name. (However, it appears to me that "the Downs" in the UK sense actually is usually used more broadly to collectively refer to the North Downs and South Downs, across Surrey, Kent, Hampshire, and Sussex.) Similarly, "[the] United States" remains capitalized as a conventional short form of "[the] United States of America", despite neither "united" nor "states" being proper names, and despite the fact that there are actually other countries with "United States" in their long/formal names). In both the Downs and United States cases, they would remain capitalized when having the specific referents, because these are demonstrably conventionalized as proper names in the source material, both as to their long and short forms. (Though I suspect that "the Downs" might only take this capitalization, outside of a quote, in the broader regional sense.) There are many cases of such capitalization. E.g. the Scottish Highlands and the people of them are still "the Highlands" and "the Highlanders" (and "Highland[s]" and "Highlander" as modifiers) in short form, despite the fact that there are many highlands in the world. In the Scottish context, it's a proper name for a particular geographical and (largely former) cultural region, and much later a jurisdictional division, not just a vague description of elevation range, despite originating as one. Various well-defined national regions also take capitalization, despite having descriptive names and not exactly corresponding to legal jurisdictions: the East Coast of the US, despite various countries having a coast that is eastern; Northern England, despite every country having a north; the Pacific Northwest in the US, despite Mexico, Canada, etc., also having northwestern parts with Pacific Ocean coasts, and so on. How these get determined as things to capitalize is entirely and only about whether they are overwhelmingly capitalized across all the source material, never by what sort of notion they are (official or not, current or historical, with a clear boundary or not, descriptive in their form or not, etc., etc.). E.g., there are lots of bridges across bays, and some of them are locally called simply "the Bay Bridge", and in these cases WP usually capitalizes those short-form names despite being not unique (see San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge as probably the best-known example). "The Bay Area" (meaning the SF one) is capitalized here, despite lots of areas with bays, since it is almost uniformly capitalized in sources. By contrast, the local-journalism habit of referring to SF, NYC, London, etc. as "the City" in contrast to suburbs is not mirrored on WP, because sources not local to those places nearly never capitalize that word in reference to them (except in very specific circumstances, usually in reference to municipal government bodies like the City and County of San Francisco, or in an odd case, the historical City of London, now the central business district of London, and by extension, of Greater London, which is notably not "greater London" despite the term being essentially descriptive – the tiresome notion that "if it's descriptive, it's not a proper name, if it's not descriptive it is one" has no applicability on WP beyond the fact of a statistical trend one way or another with regard to capitalization, a trend with frequent exceptions). The difference: If one were writing about the ecology of highland regions in multiple environments around the world, it would be "highland[s]". If one were writing about downs as a feature across the British countryside, it would be "downs". If one wrote that someone took a walk about the downs, meaning the local hills, it would be "the downs", even if they coincidentally happened to be Sussex or broader regional ones (because the referent is the hills themselves as a local terrain feature, not the Sussex Downs or all of the Downs region as a distinct geographical or geological or historical area). If writing about the area around some bay, it would be a "bay area", and a bridge (not named in long or short form, officially or by convention, "the Bay Bridge") could be called "the bay bridge" as a descriptor. "The university" is, conceptually speaking, an edge case, but WP is doing what is recommended in all modern major style guides. Same goes for "association", "corporation", "society", "church", etc., etc. The former practice was commonly to capitalize these as shorthands for longer proper names when they were serving such a role ("Jones became President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades in 1954, but left the Union in 1963"); the modern practice is to not do this (nor capitalize job titles and similar things when not attached to names), because the terms are generically descriptive, and they are not conventionally used outside internal publications to mean any particular referent. Even edge cases are dubious; e.g. "[the] Church" is fairly often used as a shorthand for "the Roman Catholic Church" in some contexts, but WP generally should not because it often means "Christianity in general", sometimes a more specific national church (in England and Wales it more often means the Church of England), and can even mean "religion in general" (e.g. in "separation of church and state" which is sometimes written in off-site materials with signfication capitals as "Separation of Church and State" in the same bombastic style as "Truth and Justice", etc.). In the WP context, what's important here is that sources nearly universally capitalize "Highlands" in the Scottish-region sense. The sources do not near-universally capitalize "panhandle" in reference to any US state sub-region; the capitalization is mainly confined to local publications (and was more common in pre-modern ones). They're arguably edge cases from a philosophy-of-proper-naming perspective, since the terms are descriptive appellations, about the shape of the area on a map, but have taken on something of a "proper name-ish" character, at least regionally. This is very common. E.g. what is technically called the Middle Rio Grande bosque (an ecological zone of riverine shrub forest) in New Mexico is routinely just called "the Bosque" and usually capitalized by regional writers, but WP does not treat it that way, because non-local writers generally don't capitalize it. Bays and the like are routinely called just "the Bay" in local writing, but not in ours (at least not after cleanup; I had to do some at San Francisco Bay, because someone[s] had gone through and capitalized about 20% of the occurrences to satisfy their local-pride urges, and I say that as someone who lives there). The fact that some of these things are edge cases from a philosophy-of-names perspective is ultimately completely irrelevant at Wikipedia, which has no interest in the centuries of conflicting conceptions of "proper name" in philosophy (except as an article subject of course). WP, for style and titles matters, only has any interest in the linguistic definition, and even that only peripherally, because we have short-circuited most of the tedious and circular debate about what "is" or "isn't" "really" a "proper name" by instituting a very simple rule: Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. (Emphasis in original.) It is almost always unhelpful to inject philosophy-of-names arguments into WP titling and writing discussions, as in: I think that in this area between names which present themselves to us as proper nouns (though they are generally derived from common nouns even if at some remove), and names which seem to be common nouns we have to give some consideration to usage. The Northern Panhandle is not the same as the village green, the park, the church, the lake, it is certainly more proper. I've covered in detail why this is problematic at Wikipedia:Proper names and proper nouns (an analytical more than advisory essay). In short, the only "consideration to usage" we give is "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources", and for WP purposes there is no such wiggle room as "more proper": either something passes the test or does not. Various individual editors periodically try to "challenge" this principle of doing what is done across English-language sources generally instead of what specialist, local, or primary sourcing prefers, and this is uniformly a waste of volunteers' time, of community human resources, and too often of editorial goodwill. No new issue is ever raised in these discussions; they are invariably attempts to apply a magically special "anti-rule" against site-wide practice to over-capitalize in a particular topic to agree with certain topic-specific sources and ignore broader usage.

PS: This came out much longer than intended; I'm chock full o' coffee and typing fast. The point wasn't to browbeat you, but to assuage your concerns that WP would lowercase as much as you seem to think it would, and to dissuade a well-meaning urge to philosophize about proper naming – especially since it can only ever represent a sliver of the philosophy debaters on that subject anyway; they've never agreed and never will, and WP editors who even understand any of those arguments are going to disagree on them regardless, and mire WP discussions in extraneous and OR-laden arguments that simply aren't ultimately relevant to how we write here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:12, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

That coffee must be good stuff :)) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:04, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

I must apologise for letting part of a half-formed essay on the subject of proper nouns leak into a naming debate, and thank you for your comments above as they lay down matters that to a very large extent agree with what I have thinking about.

WP style guidelines claim to be of descriptive origin, and by and large this is true. Certainly there is longstanding consensus that, in effect, we should have "as much stylistic uniformity as can reasonably be achieved", and that we should by and large use English as it is widely used by the literate mainstream. I think the individual decisions on what has gone into MoS are based on several factors, including incredibly persistent editors, what we've "always done", argument from consistency, common usage, and vast collections of style guides. The birds issue, for example, went with consistency across the encyclopaedia for common names of species, together with the usage of other non-specific sources. And I think this is, on the whole, an admirable approach. It avoids egregious decisions, and does not let the perfect be the enemy of the merely very good, achieving a (generally) across-wiki style that is self-reinforcing, non-obtrusive and highly readable. However I do think that making individual decisions is inevitably going to throw up difficult cases, as it does in pretty much every field of human endeavour. And moreover I am fully convinced that no person or group of people will always reach the correct decision. I prefer, particularly on Wikipedia, a down style, though someone reading what you wrote would probably assume the contrary. Yet in this case I gave lukewarm support to two particular instances of capitalisation. Funnily enough one reason was a Google search which returned, on page one at least, either all or almost all, caps. And indeed a few moments is enough to show that Google ngrams (books) shows a slight majority capped version "Northern Panhandle of West Virginia" most recently, and a significant majority over time, whereas with the eastern version the capped version is in a slight minority most recently, while being in the majority over time. Given this I still don't see this as an easy decision, even with an "acid test" which, to be fair, is primarily (and sensibly) designed to make difficulties go away. I would still come down on the side of capitalisation here. And I would also say that it isn't that critical one way or another which way these edge cases fall. Again I still think this is an edge case, and you may still think it's clearly not. I don't have a problem with that either.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 20:53, 16 February 2024 (UTC).

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Captain Everything! albums

A tag has been placed on Category:Captain Everything! albums indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:45, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

User:Liz I have asked you several times not to leave these notes in respect to album categories. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 02:00, 1 February 2024 (UTC).

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development - January 2024 Newsletter

This is our twenty-eighth newsletter.

User group news

• We have submitted our 2023 annual report.
• Upcoming meeting: on 9 February, we'll have a call about roles and responsibilities in the user group. This is an attempt to make more opportunities to engage more of the user groups members in its activities. If you want to help out in some way, but don't know how, this is a meeting for you to get help creating that opportunity. If you know how you would like to help, but don't know how to get started, this is also the meeting for you.

Other news

• New Wikiproject for Climate Change on Basque Wikipedia: Wikiproiektu Klima Aldaketa
• Climate Justice, Digital Rights and Indigenous Voices international Wikimedia event in Huaraz, Peru 2024: Engagement Survey (closes 2 Feb)

This message was sent with Global message delivery by Ainali (talk) 20:22, 2 February 2024 (UTC) • Contribute • Manage subscription

Question

@Rich Farmbrough Hello Rich Farmbrough! I see you had published my draft Zuru (Company) article! Thanks so much! ⚒️★MinecraftPlayer★³²¹⚒️ Let's Chat! 22:19, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

You are very welcome. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 22:46, 1 February 2024 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough I'm just wondering: how did you know and get access to my draft? How did you publish my draft? Will I be able to create an article without needing to be reviewed because some people got their article approved and got a template that they no longer need their other drafts to be reviewed, but since you did that for me, will I get it? Ask me any questions if you are confused on what I'm saying. ⚒️★MinecraftPlayer★³²¹⚒️ Let's Chat! 21:49, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Here's the template I was talking about

The article you submitted to Articles for creation has been created.
Congratulations, and thank you for helping expand the scope of Wikipedia! We hope you will continue making quality contributions.
⚒️★MinecraftPlayer★³²¹⚒️ Let's Chat! 21:54, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

This one too

The article you submitted to Articles for creation has been created.

Congratulations, and thank you for helping expand the scope of Wikipedia! We hope you will continue making quality contributions.

Since you have made at least 10 edits over more than four days, you can now create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for creation if you prefer.

If you have any questions, you are welcome to ask at the help desk. Once you have made at least 10 edits and had an account for at least four days, you will have the option to create articles yourself without posting a request to Articles for creation.

If you would like to help us improve this process, please consider .

Thanks again, and happy editing!

⚒️★MinecraftPlayer★³²¹⚒️ Let's Chat! 21:56, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

1. I saw a request about fixing a citation.
2. Drafts are not private, any one can see them and anyone can edit them.
3. You should be able to create articles now. One of the main reasons for the Draft system is that new users were getting their articles deleted, because they had no idea what to do. This system is supposed to make it easier, but in some ways it makes it harder, as you will have seen.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 01:02, 3 February 2024 (UTC).

Wikidata weekly summary #614

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.

Discussions

• New request for permissions/Bot:
  • SamoasambiaBot - Adding coordinate values from fiwiki articles, and 2.) adding location statements based on the coordinates.
  • MidleadingBot 5 - Create items for books in National Diet Library (Q477675).
• Closed request for comments:
  • Closure reason listed as "Not an RfC discussion":
    Moto GP Riders Links, Improve performance of label, description and alias retrieval, Create massive changes in one property for specific categories/properties, Auto analysis and breakdown of links (for social account reference), Separating citations from all Wikipedia articles by using Wikidata, Items for external links
  • Closure reason listed as "No Consensus":
    Remove watchlist summary, Unify GO articles and enzyme articles
  • Closure reason listed as "Stale":
    Potd, Population data model, Handling of data objects for pages in project namespace, Shouldn't there be a feature adding Qualifiers inside Qualifiers?, Auto sorting according to weight assigned, Should we create new properties for beaches, Should previously linked Wikipedia articles be separated?, A meta item namespace (Mxxx) for structured data about Wikidata, Structured path for property definition changes, Improved instructions for translation admin

Events

• Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 6, 2024: Wikimedia user Dnshitobu will discuss Wikidata for Education, the Dagbani NLP project, and the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group/sister communities. In the last part of the meeting, Dnshitobu will lead a discussion of your ideas for Wikidata Affinity Group activities in 2024 using Jamboard. Agenda
• Kick-Off Panel Discussion: Black Histories Wikipedia & Wikidata Edit-a-thon February 6, 17:00 - 18:00 CET. Toronto Metropolitan University. Edit-A-Thon's are also being hosted on Feb. 8th 16:00 CET and Feb. 15th 18:00 CET.
• Wikidata 101 is a clinic, part of the #LoveDataWeek hosted at Toronto Metropolitan University; February 13th 11:00 - 12:30 EST in LIB 387 - Library Collaboratory building.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Diff Blog: #LD42023 II: Getting to Know Each Other, Librarians in the Wikidata World by SEgt-WMF
  • 20th Century Press Archives: access extension and full-text search via Wikidata
• Papers
  • Wikidata Challenges in the Semantic Web Community by Andrea Westerinen. This presentation was given at the Data Modelling Days conference.
  • Comparative Study on the Approaches of Name Authority Control and Wikidata Identity Management pages 63 - 74 of the Proceedings of the 18th International ISKO Conference (2024). Authored by Chen C. & Yuxuan Z.
• Videos
  • Connecting People, Connecting Archives Project (CACP) – Wikidata Workshop (Arabic). Archivists and scholars collaborated to align objectives and methods for the Connecting Archives Connecting People (CACP) Project. The aim of the workshop was to understand biographical data in archives.
  • Wikibase SPARQL Demo A live demo of the SPARQL MediaWiki extension during the February 2024 Wikibase Stakeholder Group meetup.
• Podcasts: Between the Brackets, Episode 155 - Alan Ang and Kris Litson discuss Wikidata partnerships and outreach.
• Notebooks
  • Mapping of a director's work a tool which explores the narrative locations of works directed by a filmmaker.
  • Mapping of a writer's work : a tool which explores the narrative locations of works written by an author.

Tool of the week

• A Query and UI for exploring works of Venezuelan authors, artists, scientists and creators in the Public Domain.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikidata development goals for 2024 Q1 has been updated: Wikidata:Development plan

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • official list URL (URL of a website listing instances of the subject, maintained by the authority on the subject)
  • Laws of Malaysia URL (Uniform Resource Locator for laws of Malaysia)
  • semantic derivation (links a lexeme sense to a particular sense it is derived from)
  • date of application (date of a application/request that lead to a membership in an organisation, an employment or issuance of an identifier)
• Newest External identifiers: VMH ID, protected heritage site in Brussels ID (web version), Euro+Med PlantBase taxon ID, LoverFans ID, DigiListan artist ID, Letterboxd director ID, Letterboxd user ID, Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana ID, Dansk Forfatterleksikon ID, Qantas hotel ID, Veterans Legacy Memorial ID, China Animal Scientific Database dbb ID, National Library of Malaysia OPAC ID, Taiwan Biographical Database ID, IFOPT stop ID, Jinji Koshinjyo ID (1st edition), Jinji Koshinjyo ID (4th edition), Jinji Koshinjyo ID (8th edition), TheTVDB season ID, TheTVDB company ID, TheTVDB award ID, Kialo ID, Internet Dictionary of Polish Surnames ID, Myths on Maps identifier, Plants of Hawaiʻi ID, Kalliope.org author ID, PteridoPortal taxon ID, Wörterbuch zur Verbvalenz sense ID, XWord Info author ID, Bluesky DID, Unified Saudi Occupational Classification, Lobbypedia ID, ru.hayazg.info ID, VD 17 ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • smells of ()
  • moment of onset of sexual maturity (the point in time after which an individual attains the ability to reproduce sexually)
  • url namespace (URL prefix behind which values of this property can be found using a search engine)
  • ultima verba (last words spoken by a subject)
  • Performing organization (organization that received funding to create this entity)
  • filial church (church which acts as the less important temple of a parish)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Identifiant Mémoire des lieux d'un bâtiment, PlaymakerStats.com executive ID, Identifiant du Référentiel national des bâtiments, Dictionary of American Regional English ID, Dictionary of Old English ID, Encyclopedia Mythica ID, Shamela Author ID, Oxford English Dictionary object identifier, Daryab Pashto Glossary ID, Great Plains Herbaria taxon ID, PROSPEROPatches game ID, ORBISPatches game ID, Quake Wiki ID, Hong Kong Cinema ID, Műemlékem.hu identifier, Trakt-Film-ID, Arabic Ontology lexical concept ID, MobiTUKI Swahili-English Dictionary entry, Personen der Moderne Basis person ID, Spesalay Pashto (Dari/Persian Dictionary) ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Projects with which New Zealand Thesis people overlap (source)
  • Most articles about films in each Wikipedia
  • Largest companies by revenue in USD
• Newest database reports: Popular Items without claims (Items with the most links but without statements)
• Showcase Items: Airbus (Q67) - European aircraft manufacturer
• Showcase Lexemes: sala (L578377) - translates to "human" or "charcoal" in Dagbanli

Development

• Wikibase REST API:
  • We are finishing the endpoint for adding/replacing a sitelink on an Item for a given wiki (phab:T342987) and have finished the ones for getting and removing a sitelink from an Item (phab:T344039, phab:T344685)
  • We have documented the differences in sitelink data structure between Wikibase REST API and Action API responses (phab:T355659)
  • We fixed the bug where sitelink data was not including badges even when available (phab:T355293)
• IP masking: We are continuing the work on adapting Wikibase so we don't show IP addresses for non-logged-in users.
• mul: We finished the user testing and will now work on the remaining blockers for the first release.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · -MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:30, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Category:Draughtsmen has been nominated for renaming

Category:Draughtsmen has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Mason (talk) 01:00, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

CS1 error on USS Halyburton

Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page USS Halyburton, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A "bare URL and missing title" error. References show this error when they do not have a title. Please edit the article to add the appropriate title parameter to the reference. (Fix | Ask for help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 22:41, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Hector Costita albums

A tag has been placed on Category:Hector Costita albums indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 18:30, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Template capitalization

Template:Template capitalization has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. —Alalch E. 18:22, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

This was an error. Apologies. —Alalch E. 18:36, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for updating. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 19:02, 11 February 2024 (UTC).

Wikidata weekly summary #615

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.

Discussions

• New request for permissions/Bot:
  • CJMBot - let users upload a CSV file in a certain format. The data inside is validated and processed, creating new items or updating existing items by adding statements and references.
  • MidLeadingBot_5 - create items for books in National Diet Library (Q477675).
• Closed request for comments: Revamping Birth related properties the use of P1545-Series ordinal was recommended.

Events

• Knowledge Graphs and large Language Models (KALLM) workshop in Bangkok, Thailand. Call for Papers (details) has begun (deadline May 10th)
• WMF Community Wishathon is coming next month: March 15th-17th, 2024! Sign up by Wednesday, March 15th.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • What does it take to become a Spotify artist? - Skoove blog uses Wikidata and other databases to put together an infographic.
  • WiLMa Updates, OpenRefine training, Biodiversity, and Librarians (GLAM newsletter)
  • Love Data Week - My Kind of Data by Ali Smith. Shared relevant links to learn about data equity and inclusion, disciplinary communities, and creating a kinder world through data.
• Papers
  • Paying it forward: Crowdsourcing the harmonisation and linking of taxon names and biodiversity identifiers - with detailed discussion of curation of taxon-related information in Wikidata
  • Wikidata for Teaching Biology: Coloration in Felines (Spanish) - a paper that showcases Wikidata as a learning tool for students through the use of properties and statements applied to biological entities can enhance students computational and informational skills, by Marín1 D. & Michán L.
  • LIS Journals' Lack of Participation in Wikidata Item Creation by Willey, E. & Radovsky S., Vol. 7 No.1 (2024) of the Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies.
• Videos
  • GLAM Wiki Conference 2023 - Uruguay
    • Wikisource and Wikidata - when 2 cool kids play together. Session given by Bodhisattwa.
    • Wikidata + Education + Heritage - hosted by Sailesh Patnaik (WMF) & Nat Hernández Clavijo (WMU)
    • Using Wikidata integration on Wikimedia projects to enhance GLAM-Wiki content sharing - hosted by Mike Peel (WMB/WMF volunteer) & João Peschanski (WMB)
  • Advancing Drinking Water Justice at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Conference discusses how Wikidata and Wikibase Cloud can help address differences in data quality (at the 55:00 minute mark)
  • Mapping Graiguenamanagh Heritage Trail 2 - shows how to create a Heritage walking trail and add subject:wikidata to plaques to OpenStreetMap
• Notebooks
  • Au bord de l'eau Mapping Wikidata's items next to a body of water using P206 property.

Tool of the week

• MediaWiki:Gadget-dataDrainer.js - this userscript allows you to delete the data of an item. You can choose what you want to delete: labels and/or descriptions and/or aliases and or sitelinks.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• There is a new update relative to the experiment with splitting the Wikidata Query Service graph. A project page for the experiment has also been published.
• WMDE is currently conducting a research on Knowledge Equity in Linked Open Data. The goal is to try to better understand how the use of Wikidata, Wikibase Suite, and Wikibase Cloud both support knowledge equity and create barriers to knowledge equity when people are contributing historically and structurally marginalized knowledge and perspectives. If you are interested in participating in this project, please fill out this survey!

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • Environmental Performance Index (measure of understanding environmental performance and sustainability for 180 countries)
  • age of onset of sexual maturity (the point in time after which an individual attains the ability to reproduce sexually)
  • Beta Code (representation of Ancient Greek as ASCII characters)
  • phonetic value (phonetic value of signs/characters)
  • civil rank (non-military rank of a civil office holder in Russian Empire)
• Newest External identifiers: Dongqiudi.com team ID, ‎Nintendo eShop (Europe) ID, Joseph Smith Papers person ID, Il Nuovo De Mauro ID, ‎Sundance Institute Archive film ID, Sundance Institute Archive event ID, Sundance Institute Archive person ID, notify.moe anime ID, Swetrails POI-ID, UT.no ID, The StoryGraph author ID, X place ID, nixpkgs path, Shamela author ID, PROSPEROPatches game ID, ORBISPatches game ID, Quake Wiki ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • is invariant under (subject is preserved by this process / function / group of transformation)
  • formatter URL for IIIF manifest (URL to generate IIIF manifest from specific ID)
  • location information URL (URL of a web page providing information on the locations of stores or other physical locations of a brand or operator)
  • SMIRKS (A superset of "reaction SMILES" and a subset of "reaction SMARTS", is a line notation for specifying reaction transforms.)
  • appeals to (court or other body that hears appeals from subject's decisions)
  • in service of (qualifier, which must be used when a person is in the service of a settlement or institution through his position)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Spesalay Pashto (Dari/Persian Dictionary) ID, government.ru person ID, Kremlin.ru glossary ID, British Listed Buildings Online ID, Parsifal cluster ID, Oskar Schindler Archive agent ID, Souls Grown Deep ID, OHDSI ID, identifiant Trismegistos d'une divinité, Encyclopedia Sindhiana entry, Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330-1500) ID, GNM ID, AniSearch anime ID, livechat.me anime ID, NACSIS-CAT library ID, JAHIS Law Database ID, Texas Legislator ID, Company ID number (Slovenia), Weird Gloop article ID, nagrada.srs.kg person ID, who.ca-news.org person ID, literatura.kg person ID, 2nd German Basketball Bundesliga ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Map of items next to the Seine (source)
  • 300 most followed Mastodon accounts (source)
  • Hospitals across Scotland (source)
  • People educated at the University of Leeds with a Wikipedia article (source)
  • Compare lat/long of UK Parliament and Wikidata constituency records [federated query] (source)
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • Library and Information Science - this new Wikiproject aims to identify and fill gaps in LIS-related content. If you are interested in the areas of librarianship, information studies, metadata and indexing; then please consider joining!
  • Political murders in the Weimar Republic - Collect historic political murders in the Weimar Republic e.g. through historic newspaper articles or scientific articles.
• Newest database reports: Humans with missing claims
• Showcase Items: Cactaceae (Q14560) - family of mostly succulent plants, adapted to dry environments
• Showcase Lexemes: ग़रीब को कौड़ी अशरफ़ी है/غریب کو کوڑی اشرفی ہے (L656971) Hindustani proverb that translates to "a farthing is a pound to one who is poor"

Development

• The new mul language code is now ready for beta testing. You can find out more at Help talk:Default values for labels and aliases.
• The graph split testing for the Wikidata Query Service has started. Please find more details in the "Other Noteworthy Stuff" section above.
• IP Masking: We are continuing the work on adapting Wikibase for the upcoming IP Masking feature, so that IP addresses for non-logged-in users are no longer published.
• Wikibase REST API:
  • We finished the route for getting and removing a sitelink from an Item (phab:T344039, phab:T344685) and we continue work on the one for adding/ replacing and modifying a sitelink on an Item (phab:T342987, phab:T342988)
  • We now handle of case sensitive statement IDs in GET, PUT, PATCH and DELETE requests as HTTP redirect (phab:T354261)
  • We documented the differences in sitelink data structure between Wikibase REST API and Action API responses (phab:T355659)
  • We fixed the bug where sitelink data did not include badges (phab:T355293)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · -MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:12, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 February 2024

• News and notes: Wikimedia Russia director declared "foreign agent" by Russian gov; EU prepares to pile on the papers

• Disinformation report: How low can the scammers go?

• Gallery: Before and After: Why you don't need to touch grass to dramatically improve images of flora and fauna

• In the media: Speaking in tongues, toeing the line, and dressing the part

• Serendipity: Is this guy the same as the one who was a Nazi?

• Traffic report: Griselda, Nikki, Carl, Jannik and two types of football

• Crossword: Our crossword to bear

• Comix: Strongly

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:36, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

"Five pounds (British coin" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Five pounds (British coin has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 February 14 § Five pounds (British coin until a consensus is reached. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 01:43, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

"Dean Jones (actor" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Dean Jones (actor has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 February 14 § Dean Jones (actor until a consensus is reached. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 01:44, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Category:Nova albums has been nominated for discussion

Category:Nova albums has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:11, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Editor experience invitation

Hi Rich. I don't think we've really interacted before but I noticed you in my watchlist doing some copyediting. :) Anyways, I've been trying to interview as many experienced editors as I can the past few months here. Feel free to pitch in if you're interested or to pass if you're not. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 15:19, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #617

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.

<translate> Discussions

• Open request for adminship: WT2O_2 - (RfP deadline: February 22, 2024 17:46 UTC)
• Other: Project chat: PI Bot is an interesting conversation about the function of PI Bot in creating Stub articles and evolves into discussing ways of matching articles, categories and templates in sibling projects with their Wikidata items. Contribute to the discussion or even better, use one of the many tools posted and get linking!

</translate> <translate> Events

• Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 20, 2024: In honor of Valentine's Day month, we are bringing back the popular program from last February: What's Your Wikidata Passion? What is your central Wikidata interest right now? It can be a work or personal project, even if you’re just beginning to think about it, or just what you like to edit when you have time. This is a great way to share your ideas, solicit community input and ask questions about resources or tools. This will be an open mic session, completely informal. Please add yourselves to the list on our agenda here if you would like to talk for 5 minutes or so. You can share your screen if you like, but there’s no need for slides. Or just show up and talk on the spur of the moment. This will be a community session where we welcome all to participate! Agenda
• Workshop on Knowledge Graphs and LLMs (KaLLM) at ACL 2024. Submission Deadline: May 10, 2024 at 23:59, UTC -12h, AoE
• Wiki Workshop 2024 ― Research Track Papers - Call for contributions. Submission deadline: April 22, 2024 (23:59 AoE)

</translate> <translate> Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • 2023 Year Review by ADDSHORE, a prominent contributor and community member for WBStack and Wikibase.Cloud.
  • Wikidata Literary Influencers by Paul Matthews shows step-by-step how to get to an interactive network visualization based on Wikidata data
• Papers: Language models for extracting Wikidata statements and generating Wikipedia content - is a Wikimedia Research proposal to improve Wikidata and English Wikipedia content using machine-learning power of AI and LL Models; by Thang, T.
• Videos
  • Kairntech Demo Entity Extraction using Wikidata - is an example of how Wikidata is being used as a knowledge base to populate AI companions and LLM's with relevant content for profit.
  • Dancing Digital Project with Rebecca Salzer is a Wikibase instance sharing LOD between itself, video archives and Commons.
  • WikiPod AI - try listening to last week's Status Updates with AI-generated speaking, an experiment by Tiago Lubiana.
• Notebooks: TTTTRPG - Timeline Tree of Tabletop Role-Playing Games queried using SPARQL from Wikidata.

</translate> <translate> Tool of the week

• User:Yair rand/DiffLists.js - this userscript changes the appearance of Recent Changes, Watchlist, Contributions, History pages, and Related Changes. It also adds filter options.
• Wikidata Topic Curator (a rewrite of ItemSubjector into a webapp) help wikimedians add relevant topics to items. Based on a given topic QID it fetches articles matching the label, aliases or a custom user-provided term of that QID that is currently missing the main subject property.
• Author Disambiguator - is a tool for editing the authors of works recorded in Wikidata, e.g. for finding Wikidata Items for the authors (P50 instead of 'author name string').

</translate> <translate> Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • has cabinet (value is the advisory committee to the item's head of state)
  • ISCED field (mapping of a particular course or curriculum to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED))
  • ‎appeals to (court or other body that hears appeals from subject's decisions)
  • ‎location information URL (URL of a web page providing information on the locations of stores or other physical locations of a brand or operator)
  • phonographic copyright (person or organization that holds the phonographic copyright)
  • is invariant under (subject is unchanged by this process / function / group of transformation)
  • formatter URL for IIIF manifest (URL to generate IIIF manifest from specific ID)
  • PyPI trove classifier (standardized classification system for software, used and maintained by the Python Package Index)
  • graduation rate (proportion of students who graduate from the institution in the given timeframe)
  • normal graduation time (expected or typical duration of an educational program from matriculation to graduation)
  • multiplier of normal graduation time (how much longer than "normal" someone took to graduate; used as a qualifier for the "graduation rate (P12469)")
  • top scorer (best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition or the best ever scorer of the history of a competition)
• Newest External identifiers: Anglo-Norman Dictionary entry, TopKar ID, Mindat taxon ID, China Animal Scientific Database taxon ID, Daryab Pashto Glossary ID, Dictionary of American Regional English ID, Dictionary of Old English ID, Encyclopedia Mythica ID, Arabic Ontology lexical concept ID, Great Plains Herbaria taxon ID, FrameNet frame ID, Parsifal cluster ID, Archives départementales de Vaucluse fonds ID, Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330-1500) ID, National Buildings Repository identifier, Location Memory building ID, JSTOR Global Plants type specimen ID, EDIT16 catalogue title ID, EDIT16 catalogue place ID, Trismegistos god ID, Universal Spectrum Identifier, ‎Weird Gloop article ID, Kremlin.ru glossary ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • Hindawi Foundation book ID (A property for IDs of books published by [[Q20397014|Hindawi Foundation]])
  • Castradenumber (number for a registred subject in a Castrade)
  • latest end date ((qualifier) latest date on which the statement could have ceased to be true (i.e., latest date beyond which the statement could no longer be true))
  • anthesis start (time of the year when a plant normally starts flowering)
  • leaf morphology (characterization of aspects of the shape of a plant’s leaves)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Oyez Project ID, GARAE, WhatPub pub ID, Tashrihi Qamos Pashto Glossary ID, Dictionary of Gandhari ID, UCA authority ID, DoblajeVideojuegos dub actor ID, Epigraphic Database Roma ID, European Union trade mark number, GCatholic Episcopal Conference ID, Consortium of Midwest Herbaria taxon ID

</translate> <translate> You can comment on all open property proposals! </translate> <translate>

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Graph of ancient philosophers master/student relationships
  • Properties for UK lakes (contains a report-within-a-report allowing to look at Items having the Property) (source)
• Newest WikiProjects: Looted heritage - aims to use Wikidata to document looted cultural heritage. Its primary focus is on the colonial era, but it also encompasses other relevant historical periods. It's scope includes artworks, sacred items, human remains, and other forms of tangible and intangible artifacts that may be considered a part of a people's heritage.
• WikiProject Highlights: Staedel Museum Wikidata Clean-up The Staedul Museum comprises 24,000+ works of art spanning more than 700 years. They have generously opened up digital surrogates of their collection to the Wikimedia community. This project improves the metadata quality and create Wikidata items for works of art.
• Newest database reports: Genderless people with Facebook ID
• Showcase Items: Varanus komodoensis (Q4504) - species of reptile
• Showcase Lexemes: scala (L683571) - "stairs" in Italian

</translate> <translate> Development

• IP Masking: We added redirect-related parameters to most Wikibase API modules (phab:T357024; an announcement is in the works)
• We migrated Termbox SSR from Node 16 to 18 (phab:T355685)
• We made the (legacy) termbox remember its expanded/collapsed state for anonymous visitors and temporary users (phab:T351976)
• We deployed and backported several security fixes to Wikibase release branches (phab:T345064, phab:T356764)

</translate> <translate> You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer. </translate> <translate> Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge: #128 Languages
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

</translate>

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · -Mohammed Abdulai · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:46, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

"Dendrite (crystal" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Dendrite (crystal has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 February 21 § Dendrite (crystal until a consensus is reached. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 07:02, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Invitation to join New pages patrol

Hello Rich Farmbrough!

• The New Pages Patrol is currently struggling to keep up with the influx of new articles needing review. We could use a few extra hands to help.
• We think that someone with your activity and experience is very likely to meet the guidelines for granting.
• Reviewing/patrolling a page doesn't take much time, but it requires a strong understanding of Wikipedia’s CSD policy and notability guidelines.
• Kindly read the tutorial before making your decision, and feel free to post on the project talk page with questions.
• If patrolling new pages is something you'd be willing to help out with, please consider applying here.

Thank you for your consideration. We hope to see you around!

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:21, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Canterbury Effect albums

A tag has been placed on Category:Canterbury Effect albums indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:21, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Welcome back

story · music · places

Good to see your name again on my watchlist! I meant to say so sooner, and realize: I better give thanks in the morning ;) - The hidden croci were captured last year, on a cemetery after a funeral; they stand for hope for me. Best wishes, and I hope you enjoy my stories, music and places. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:06, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much. The crocus is a favourite flower of mine, not just as a sign of renewal, but because I remember learning about the crocus, snowdrop and daffodil as a small child. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 09:09, 21 February 2024 (UTC).

thank you, - more music and flowers - yes, crocus - on Rossini's rare birthday --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:27, 29 February 2024 (UTC)