User talk:John Cummings/Archive 8

Latest comment: 5 years ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
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Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Wikidata imaged

Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock.

Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists.

 
Gran Teatro, Cáceres, Spain, at night

It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more.

And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more.

Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake.

 
Birthday logo
Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2018

 




Headlines
  • Belgium report: Erbstuecke edit-a-thon; Women in Tech edit-a-thon; Wiki Club Brussels; Wikidata workshop party
  • Brazil report: "There is no reason not to participate in a GLAM-Wiki initiative": an interview with the director of the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy
  • Estonia report: Estonian art and geoscience collections finding their way to Commons
  • Finland report: (RE)Photographic autumn
  • France report: GLAMWiki 2018 Tel Aviv; City of Grenoble
  • Germany report: GLAMorous Conferences
  • Netherlands report: ‘More Gelders Heritage available via Wikimedia’ by Erfgoed Gelderland; Writing week Friesland; Wiki Techstorm
  • Norway report: Wiki Loves Monuments and wikinobel
  • Poland report: Heirlooms - locally and internationally
  • Serbia report: The growing GLAM
  • Sweden report: Roundtripping Project, Books Import and Wikidata Imported to SOCH
  • Switzerland report: Built heritage conservation on Commons; les sans pagEs at a Modern art museum
  • UK report: Wikidata in Oxford
  • USA report: Wikiconference North America Culture Crawl
  • WMF GLAM report: Documentation survey, Structured Data on Commons consultations, blog posts and conferences
  • Calendar: November's GLAM events
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ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, John Cummings. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

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

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

December 2018 at Women in Red

 
The WiR December editathons provide something for everyone.



New: Photography Laureates Countries beginning with 'I'

Continuing: #1day1woman Global Initiative

Latest headlines, news, and views on the Women in Red talkpage (Join the conversation!):

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--Rosiestep (talk) 13:55, 27 November 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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WikiCite issue

GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California.

 
Wikidata training for librarians at WikiCite 2018

In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point.

Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.

Links

Account creation is now open on the ScienceSource wiki, where you can see SPARQL visualisations of text mining.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi. I just wanted to remind you of your illustration workshop request. :) TilmannR (talk) 14:03, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Industrial property

Hi John, thanks for your message. I replied on my talk page. Cheers --Edcolins (talk) 20:26, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

See Talk:Industrial_property#Reverting_redirect_(discussion_moved_from_User_talk:Edcolins). --Edcolins (talk) 20:37, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: November 2018

 




Headlines
  • Albania report: Wiki Photo Walk Albania 2018; Wiki Loves Monuments Albania
  • Armenia report: Singing Wikipedia; Photographs by Vahan Kochar
  • Brazil report: Diverse milestones for the Brazilian community
  • Denmark report: Intercontinental digitisation efforts
  • Estonia report: Making contacts both internationally and in Estonia
  • Finland report: Art and edit-a-thons
  • France report: Bibliothèque publique d’information; 3D museum collections on Wikimedia Commons
  • Indonesia report: Conserving and digitizing texts in West Sumatra
  • Macedonia report: Wiki Training at National and University Library "St. Clement of Ohrid"
  • New Zealand report: Equity, Wikidata, and the New York Times
  • Norway report: Collaboration with The National Archives of Norway
  • Philippines report: Wiki Loves Art
  • Poland report: Archival image uploads, student collaborations and international projects
  • Serbia report: Photo finish of the WIR's
  • Sweden report: The Swedish Performing Arts Agency; Library data starts to take shape; Learning Wikipedia at the Archives; Wikimedia Commons Data Roundtripping
  • UK report: Sum of All Astrolabes
  • USA report: Wikidata Workshop at Pratt School of Information; Wikidata Presentation for the New York Technical Services Librarians; Wikipedia Asian Month; Cleveland Park Wikipedia Edit-a-thon; Historic Ivy Hill Cemetery Workshop
  • Wikipedia Library report: Books & Bytes–Issue 31, October–November 2018
  • WMF GLAM report: Welcoming Satdeep Gill; Structured Data on Commons; WikiCite
  • Calendar: December's GLAM events
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January 2019 at Women in Red

 
January 2019, Volume 5, Issue 1, Numbers 104-108


Happy New Year from Women in Red! Please join us for these virtual editathons.

 

January events: Women of War and Peace Play!

January geofocus: Caucasus

New, year-long initiative: Suffrage

Continuing global initiative: #1day1woman2019

Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe

To subscribe: Women in Red/English language mailing list and Women in Red/international list
Unsubscribe: Women in Red/Opt-out list
Image attribution: Nevit Dilmen (CC BY-SA 3.0)

--Rosiestep (talk) 17:40, 21 December 2018 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
 

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.

Learning from Zotero

Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support.

 
Zotero logo

Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects.

Zotero demo video

There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine.

Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.

Links

Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2018

 




Headlines
  • Armenia report: Cooperation with Yerevan Drama Theatre Named After Hrachia Ghaplanian; Singing Wikipedia (continuation); Photographs by Vahan Kochar (continuation)
  • Australia report: 2019 Australia's Year of the Public Domain
  • Belgium report: Writing weeks German-speaking Community; End of year drink; Wiki Loves Heritage photo contest
  • Brazil report: Google Art and GLAM initiatives in Brazil
  • India report: Collaboration with RJVD Municipal Public Library
  • Italy report: Challenges and alliances with libraries, WLM and more
  • Macedonia report: Exhibition:"Poland through photographs" & Wikipedia lectures with children in social risk
  • Malaysia report: Technology Talk and Update on Wikipedia @ National Library of Malaysia
  • Portugal report: Glam Days '18 at the National Library of Portugal
  • Sweden report: Hats 🎩🧢👒🎓
  • UK report: Oxford
  • USA report: Holiday gatherings and visit to Internet Archive
  • Wikidata report: Wikidata reports
  • WMF GLAM report: Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons: pilot projects and multilingual captions
  • Calendar: January's GLAM events
Read this edition in fullSingle-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

February 2019 at Women in Red

 
February 2019, Volume 5, Issue 2, Numbers 107-111


Happy February from Women in Red! Please join us for these virtual editathons.

 

February events: Social Workers Black Women

February geofocus: Ancient World

Continuing initiatives: Suffrage #1day1woman2019

Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe

Join the conversations on our talkpage:


Image attribution: Johntex (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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--Rosiestep (talk) 20:09, 26 January 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

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.

Links

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

This Month in GLAM: January 2019

 




Headlines
Read this edition in fullSingle-page

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March 2019 at Women in Red

 
March 2019, Volume 5, Issue 3, Numbers 107, 108, 112, 113


Happy Women's History Month from Women in Red!

 
 
 

Please join us for these virtual events:
March: Art Feminism & #VisibleWikiWomen
Geofocus: Francophone Women
Continuing initiatives: Suffrage #1day1woman


Other ways you can participate:
Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe
Join the conversations on our talkpage
Follow us on Twitter: @wikiwomeninred
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--Rosiestep (talk) 22:09, 18 February 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Move discussion notice - Wikipedia talk:Adding open license text to Wikipedia#Requested move 25 February 2019

  Hey there! I'm Psantora. There is a move discussion at Wikipedia talk:Adding open license text to Wikipedia#Requested move 25 February 2019 requiring more participation, please consider commenting/voting in it along with the other discussions in the backlog (Wikipedia:Requested moves#Elapsed listings). - PaulT /C 16:01, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

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.

Links

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

This Month in GLAM: February 2019

 




Headlines
Read this edition in fullSingle-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

April 2019

 
April 2019, Volume 5, Issue 4, Numbers 107, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117


Hello and welcome to the April events of Women in Red!

Please join us for these virtual events:


Other ways you can participate:


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--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:00, 25 March 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

(Please excuse this post if it is a duplicate!)

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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When in the cloud, do as the APIs do

Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook.

File:Cloud-API-Logo.svg
Logo of Cloud API on Google Cloud Platform

The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API.

APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web.

Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)