User talk:Samwilson/Archive 2

Latest comment: 6 years ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

thanks

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thanks for the 15th! JarrahTree 13:45, 15 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Yes, was a good evening! Thanks for the positivity re the sometimes non-positive aspects of wiki whatnot. See you in Feb. Sam Wilson 00:35, 16 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
it is who turned up who made it - it was good to see how we can keep going in the face of everything, roll on February indeed !!! JarrahTree 00:49, 16 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

please note

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change of arrangements [1], thanks JarrahTree 05:32, 22 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the heads up! :) See you then then. Oh and it's odd that you're not allowed to redirect a user talk page isn't it? Ah well. I'll put it back how it was. Sam Wilson 06:18, 22 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
nah it is just me, I dont know what the official version is... looks odd, but hey, you freo people always do things different hey!  :) JarrahTree 12:41, 22 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Workers Club

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grrr. notability, no comment JarrahTree 23:59, 28 January 2016 (UTC)Reply

Ha! Yes, good to get it cleared up :) Sam Wilson 00:05, 29 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
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Wikimania 2016: IdeaLab Workshops

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Wikimania 2016 is almost here! Mjohnson (WMF) and I are running two workshops for IdeaLab during the conference, and you are invited to join us for either (or both!)

If you have a proposal or idea you are thinking about, and would like a space to work on it on your own or with others, please consider joining us for either the Thursday or Saturday sessions. We'll discuss a little about IdeaLab and how it works, and the rest of the time is space for idea building. You can also use this session to ask questions about Wikimedia Foundation grants that are available if your proposal or idea may need funding. Thanks, and see you at the conference! I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 19 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Greetings

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G'day, Sam!

Pleased to meet you at dinner yesterday. As we talked about visualisation, here's my (slightly-obsolete) write-up of my dynamic illustration work and more up-to-date but brief slide deck. Looking forward to working with you!

Cheers,
cmɢʟeeτaʟκ 14:39, 23 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

That's very cool! And yes, was good to meet you. See you tomorrow probably. :-) —Sam Wilson 14:40, 23 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for the instruction

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It is really nice to know there is a such extension in all wikisource now! Hope you have a great time with Michael and @CFCF: there in Milan! --Liang (WMTW) (talk) 13:46, 27 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

I'm very glad that there's more wikisources working with proofreadpage! Good to meet you. Hope your travels are going/gone well. :-) —Sam Wilson 05:21, 28 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

meta:Meetup/Perth

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New portal on meta outlining various Perth/WA activities related to wikimedia projects. Any ideas for it, or help in adding/editing/updating it, would be appreciated. - Evad37 [talk] 09:06, 22 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

Thanks @Evad37! Looks good. I'll add what I can to it. —Sam Wilson 09:17, 22 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

wow

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Sf already? enjoy your trip and your time there - we need a very big report on your return!! :) JarrahTree 13:40, 5 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

Yes for sure!! :-) Will see you at Perth open days. —Sam Wilson 03:14, 6 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

Your NR class loco question

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I saw your question about the NR Class and its fuel efficiency. Your best bet is to post at rail page.com.au and see what answer you get. Lots of knowledgable people there.Jamesbushell.au (talk) 11:29, 8 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Jamesbushell.au: Cool, thanks for the link! I'm afraid I've rather forgotten to follow up on that... for a decade! :-) —Sam Wilson 00:18, 9 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Haha, yep i know. Better late than never I guess!!Jamesbushell.au (talk) 02:09, 9 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

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Hello, Samwilson. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Suggestions

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WikiProject Genealogy - newsletter No.1

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Newsletter Nr 1 for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
 

Participation:

This is the very first newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise.

(To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, see below)

Progress report:

Since the Projects very first edit 9 december 2002 by User:Dan Koehl, which eventually became the WikiProject Genealogy, different templates were developed, and the portal Portal:Genealogy was founded by User:Michael A. White in 2008. Over the years a number of articles has been written, with more or less association to genealogy. And, very exciting, there is a proposal made on Meta by User:Another Believer to found a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, read more at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project where you also can support the creation with your vote, in case you havnt done so already.

Future:

The future of the Genealogy project on the English Wikipedia, and a potential creation of a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, is something where you can make a an input.

You can

Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy founder and coordinator Dan Koehl

To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery Dan Koehl (talk) 22:28, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
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Mediawiki feeds error

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I get the following error for http://tools.wmflabs.org/mediawiki-feeds/feed.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw%2F&category=Category%3AWikipedia+Signpost+RSS+feed&title=The+Signpost in Chrome, and in Firefox I get a blank feed with just the title.

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 26 at column 37: Encoding error
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

The Signpost https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category%3AWikipedia+Signpost+RSS+feed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-02-06/Traffic report https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53078760

The category used is Category:Wikipedia Signpost RSS feed, which I created last night. It was working then, except that it only showed pages in the 2017-01 subcategory. - Evad37 [talk] 02:35, 24 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Evad37: hm, thanks for finding this bug. :) It seems there's some wierdness going on. I'll investigate further. Sam Wilson 02:39, 24 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Okay, it should be fixed now. It was breaking a character in the middle, resulting in an invalid character. Switched to using mb_substr for producing the description (first 400 characters of the post). I think a better system for description could be devised! Probably should get around to supporting https://schema.org/BlogPosting but that's more work. :-) Let me know how it goes now. Oh, and great idea there of making an explicit feed category! Sam Wilson 03:10, 24 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! Having a feed category just seemed like an obvious thing to do, given the way the tool works. - Evad37 [talk] 03:54, 24 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
yes, true, but I'd tried it a while ago just using Category:Wikipedia Signpost archives, and of course all the old stuff in there made it not work (for earlier Signposts not using the current header template). Sam Wilson 04:20, 24 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hey Sam, it would be awesome if we could get better descriptions for the RSS feed – that would allow the Signpost feed to be republished on sites such as m:Planet Wikimedia. If it's not too much work, can you look into that BlogPosting schema you mentioned? Or is there way to get the tool to grab content that is hidden from humans, like within a {{void}} template, or in a <div style="display:none;"> element? - Evad37 [talk] 02:04, 26 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Evad37: Okay, so you should now be able to define a description by adding a <span itemprop="description">...</span> (can be a div or whatever else as well). Sam Wilson 00:47, 27 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

WikiProject Genealogy - newsletter No.2

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Newsletter Nr 2 for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
 

Participation:

This is the second newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise.

(To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below)

Progress report:

In order to improve communication between genealogy interested wikipedians, as well talking in chat mode about the potential new wiki, a new irc channel has been setup, and you are welcome to visit and try it out at: #wikimedia-genealogy connect

(In case you are not familiar with IRC, or would prefer some info and intro, please see Wikipedias IRC tutorial)

At m:Talk:Wikimedia_genealogy_project#Wikimedia_user_group is discussed the possibility of creating a genealogy-related Wikimedia user group: please submit comments and suggestions, and whether you would like to be a member in such a group. Prime goal for the group is the creation of a new, free, genealogy wiki, but there is also a discussion weather we should propose a new project or support the adoption of an existing project?

Read more at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project where you also can support the creation with your vote, in case you haven't done so already.

Future:

The future of the Genealogy project, and creation of a new Wikimedia Genealogy Project, is something where you can make a an input.

You can

Don't want newsletters? If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page.

Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl.

To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

we do not have one yet

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but that map deserves a fremantle project/freopedia barnstar!! or medal, or something - thanks! JarrahTree 09:30, 12 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

@JarrahTree: Thanks! :-) And a massive thank you for organising today!!! It was a great thing to do. I'll start uploading my pics tomorrow. Sam Wilson 10:14, 12 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I am kicking myself I didnt ask him to go out just a little beyond the north mole a bit - will have to go to rottnest just for that sometime soon i think JarrahTree 10:29, 12 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

New blue section

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at freopedia needed - see my nobot/knownothing page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JarrahTree/Other  :) please add it to the freopedia line up - thanks JarrahTree 12:57, 18 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

wow - one your fellow tech geeks has made my life on wp better again - I can see all of the edit summary text in the box for the first time in months !!! yippee JarrahTree 10:41, 24 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for your presence at the meetup - appreciate your involvement JarrahTree 14:50, 7 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Genealogy project need your vote for creation of an email list

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Newsletter Nr 3 for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
 

Participation:

This is the third newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise.

(To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below)

Request:

In order to improve communication between genealogy interested wikipedians, as well as taking new, important steps towards a creation of a new project site, we need to make communication between the users easier and more effective.

At Mail list on meta is discussed the possibility of creating a genealogy-related Wikimedia email list. In order to request the creation of such a list, we need your voice and your vote.

In order to create a new list, we need to put a request it in Phabricator, and add a link to reasoning/explanation of purpose, and link to community consensus. Therefore we need your vote for this now, so we can request the creation of the mail list.

Read more about this email list at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project mail list where you can support the creation of the mail list with your vote, in case you haven't done so already.

Future:

Don't want newsletters? If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page.

Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl.

To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

WikiProject Genealogy - newsletter No.4: Mail list created!

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Newsletter Nr 4, 2017-03-24, for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
 

Participation:

This is the fourth newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise.

(To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below)

Mail list is created:

The project email list is now created and ready to use!

Please feel free to subscribe at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-genealogy

Future:

Don't want newsletters? If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list or alternatively to opt-out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Opted-out of message delivery to your user talk page.

Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl.

To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

Mark Clements

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Hello Sam, Thanks for the page on Mark Alwin Clements. I have written (and red-linked) that name hundreds of times - all fixed now by you. Much appreciated. Gderrin (talk) 10:04, 26 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Gderrin: no worries! :-) I'm glad it's useful. I hope I got it all right. And I tried to track down the source for the mis-speling of Alwyn/Alwin but couldn't find it (I also added a redirect). Sam Wilson 10:07, 26 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Yep - fading memory. Sometimes wrote Alwyn, others Alwin (mostly the latter tho). Will gradually go back, correct and wikilink the ones I missed. Making a couple of small changes to the Clements page. Gderrin (talk) 10:18, 26 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Ah, cool; I thought perhaps there was two people somehow, but all good! :-) Thanks. Sam Wilson 10:35, 26 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

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Hi Samwilson! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.

-- 05:18, Wednesday, August 30, 2017 (UTC)

Xtools timecard

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Hello! I understand that you are a maintainer of Xtools. I'm looking for the documentation for the Xtools timecard, which is part of the general user statistics. I haven't been able to find it on toolforge, Phabricator, or elsewhere! I'm hoping to look at the documentation, potentially contribute, and also look into what data I can get from it. Any info you can provide on where to find the timecard documentation would be appreciated! Hexatekin (talk) 01:07, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Hexatekin: The docs are at https://xtools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/editcounter.html#timecard (and their source is on GitHub). We definitely would love any contributions! What are you trying to do? If you're on IRC, come and chat with us on #wikimedia-xtools connect. —Sam Wilson 01:15, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

For your edification and exploration

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Southern_newspapers JarrahTree 12:22, 2 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Help design a new feature to stop harassing emails

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The Anti-Harassment Tools team plans to start develop of a new feature to allow users to restrict emails from new accounts. This feature will allow an individual user to stop harassing emails from coming through the Special:EmailUser system from abusive sockpuppeting accounts.

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Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017

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Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017
 

Editorial: Annotations

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Annotation is nothing new. The glossators of medieval Europe annotated between the lines, or in the margins of legal manuscripts of texts going back to Roman times, and created a new discipline. In the form of web annotation, the idea is back, with texts being marked up inline, or with a stand-off system. Where could it lead?

 
1495 print version of the Digesta of Justinian, with the annotations of the glossator Accursius from the 13th century

ContentMine operates in the field of text and data mining (TDM), where annotation, simply put, can add value to mined text. It now sees annotation as a possible advance in semi-automation, the use of human judgement assisted by bot editing, which now plays a large part in Wikidata tools. While a human judgement call of yes/no, on the addition of a statement to Wikidata, is usually taken as decisive, it need not be. The human assent may be passed into an annotation system, and stored: this idea is standard on Wikisource, for example, where text is considered "validated" only when two different accounts have stated that the proof-reading is correct. A typical application would be to require more than one person to agree that what is said in the reference translates correctly into the formal Wikidata statement. Rejections are also potentially useful to record, for machine learning.

As a contribution to data integrity on Wikidata, annotation has much to offer. Some "hard cases" on importing data are much more difficult than average. There are for example biographical puzzles: whether person A in one context is really identical with person B, of the same name, in another context. In science, clinical medicine requires special attention to sourcing (WP:MEDRS), and is challenging in terms of connecting findings with the methodology employed. Currently decisions in areas such as these, on Wikipedia and Wikidata, are often made ad hoc. In particular there may be no audit trail for those who want to check what is decided.

Annotations are subject to a World Wide Web Consortium standard, and behind the terminology constitute a simple JSON data structure. What WikiFactMine proposes to do with them is to implement the MEDRS guideline, as a formal algorithm, on bibliographical and methodological data. The structure will integrate with those inputs the human decisions on the interpretation of scientific papers that underlie claims on Wikidata. What is added to Wikidata will therefore be supported by a transparent and rigorous system that documents decisions.

An example of the possible future scope of annotation, for medical content, is in the first link below. That sort of detailed abstract of a publication can be a target for TDM, adds great value, and could be presented in machine-readable form. You are invited to discuss the detailed proposal on Wikidata, via its talk page.

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Editor Charles Matthews. Please leave feedback for him.

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Charles Matthews (talk) 15:17, 17 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017

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Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017
 

WikidataCon Berlin 28–9 October 2017

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WikidataCon 2017 group photo

Under the heading rerum causas cognescere, the first ever Wikidata conference got under way in the Tagesspiegel building with two keynotes, One was on YAGO, about how a knowledge base conceived ten years ago if you assume automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished: the mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, to be taken off the hands of its author Magnus Manske by the WMF; a Wikibase incubator site is on its way. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development on Wikidata is now not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate automated compilation of dictionaries.

 
WD-FIST explained

And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops, through to 11 pm on Saturday. Wikidata applies to GLAM work via metadata. It may be used in education, raises issues such as author disambiguation, and lends itself to different types of graphical display and reuse. Many millions of SPARQL queries are run on the site every day. Over the summer a large open science bibliography has come into existence there.

Wikidata's fifth birthday party on the Sunday brought matters to a close. See a dozen and more reports by other hands.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 15 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

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Hello, Samwilson. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

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Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Jack plane, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Jack of all trades (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)

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Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017

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Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017
 

A new bibliographical landscape

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At the beginning of December, Wikidata items on individual scientific articles passed the 10 million mark. This figure contrasts with the state of play in early summer, when there were around half a million. In the big picture, Wikidata is now documenting the scientific literature at a rate that is about eight times as fast as papers are published. As 2017 ends, progress is quite evident.

Behind this achievement are a technical advance (fatameh), and bots that do the lifting. Much more than dry migration of metadata is potentially involved, however. If paper A cites paper B, both papers having an item, a link can be created on Wikidata, and the information presented to both human readers, and machines. This cross-linking is one of the most significant aspects of the scientific literature, and now a long-sought open version is rapidly being built up.

 

The effort for the lifting of copyright restrictions on citation data of this kind has had real momentum behind it during 2017. WikiCite and the I4OC have been pushing hard, with the result that on CrossRef over 50% of the citation data is open. Now the holdout publishers are being lobbied to release rights on citations.

But all that is just the beginning. Topics of papers are identified, authors disambiguated, with significant progress on the use of the four million ORCID IDs for researchers, and proposals formulated to identify methodology in a machine-readable way. P4510 on Wikidata has been introduced so that methodology can sit comfortably on items about papers.

More is on the way. OABot applies the unpaywall principle to Wikipedia referencing. It has been proposed that Wikidata could assist WorldCat in compiling the global history of book translation. Watch this space.

And make promoting #1lib1ref one of your New Year's resolutions. Happy holidays, all!

 
November 2017 map of geolocated Wikidata items, made by Addshore
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WikiProject Genealogy - newsletter No.5 -2017

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Newsletter Nr 5, 2017-12-30, for WikiProject Genealogy (and Wikimedia genealogy project on Meta)
 

Participation:

This is the fifth newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise.

(To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below)

A demo wiki is up and running!

Dear members of WikiProject Genealogy, this will be the last newsletter for 2017, but maybe the most important one!

You can already now try out the demo for a genealogy wiki at https://tools.wmflabs.org/genealogy/wiki/Main_Page and try out the functions. You will find parts of the 18th Pharao dynasty and other records submitted by the 7 first users, and it would be great if you would add some records.

And with those great news we want to wish you a creative New Year 2018!


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Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl.

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Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018
 

Metadata on the March

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From the days of hard-copy liner notes on music albums, metadata have stood outside a piece or file, while adding to understanding of where it comes from, and some of what needs to be appreciated about its content. In the GLAM sector, the accumulation of accurate metadata for objects is key to the mission of an institution, and its presentation in cataloguing.

Today Wikipedia turns 17, with worlds still to conquer. Zooming out from the individual GLAM object to the ontology in which it is set, one such world becomes apparent: GLAMs use custom ontologies, and those introduce massive incompatibilities. From a recent article by sadads, we quote the observation that "vocabularies needed for many collections, topics and intellectual spaces defy the expectations of the larger professional communities." A job for the encyclopedist, certainly. But the data-minded Wikimedian has the advantages of Wikidata, starting with its multilingual data, and facility with aliases. The controlled vocabulary — sometimes referred to as a "thesaurus" as term of art — simplifies search: if a "spade" must be called that, rather than "shovel", it is easier to find all spade references. That control comes at a cost.

 
SVG pedestrian crosses road
 
Zebra crossing/crosswalk, Singapore

Case studies in that article show what can lie ahead. The schema crosswalk, in jargon, is a potential answer to the GLAM Babel of proliferating and expanding vocabularies. Even if you have no interest in Wikidata as such, simply vocabularies V and W, if both V and W are matched to Wikidata, then a "crosswalk" arises from term v in V to w in W, whenever v and w both match to the same item d in Wikidata.

For metadata mobility, match to Wikidata. It's apparently that simple: infrastructure requirements have turned out, so far, to be challenges that can be met.

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To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:38, 15 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
 

m:Grants:Project/ScienceSource is the new ContentMine proposal: please take a look.

Wikidata as Hub

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One way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites.

 

Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8.

Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL.

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To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
 

Milestone for mix'n'match

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Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal.

Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders.

These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more.

For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading.

Congratulations to Magnus, our data Stakhanovite!

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3D printing

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)Reply