User talk:Cmglee/archive2018

Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018
{| style="position: relative; margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; padding: 0.5em 1em; background-color: #7FFFD4; border: 2px solid #00FFFF; border-color: rgba( 109, 193, 240, 0.75 ); border-radius: 8px; box-shadow: 8px 8px 12px rgba( 0, 0, 0, 0.7 );"
 * Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018

 

Metadata on the March
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, 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. 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.

Links
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below. Editor, 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. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:38, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
 * 1lib1ref campaign starts today, see The Wikipedia Library/1Lib1Ref: also #1lib1ref introductory video by
 * Funders should mandate open citations, article 9 January 2018 in Nature by David Shotton
 * From snowflake to avalanche: Possibilities of using free citation data in libraries, translation from the German original of Annette Klein, Mannheim University Library
 * GLAM/Newsletter/December 2017/Contents/WMF GLAM report
 * Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won't happen again: Copyrights from the 1920s will start expiring next year if Congress doesn't act, Timothy B. Lee, 8 January 2018, Arstechnica
 * }

ISO 8601
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_talk:Date_format_by_country.svg#Palette_and_forking 92.226.174.207 (talk) 17:24, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
 * ping 85.181.118.157 (talk) 22:37, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
{| style="position: relative; margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; padding: 0.5em 1em; background-color: #7FFFD4; border: 2px solid #00FFFF; border-color: rgba( 109, 193, 240, 0.75 ); border-radius: 8px; box-shadow: 8px 8px 12px rgba( 0, 0, 0, 0.7 );"
 * Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

 

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

Wikidata as Hub
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.

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 takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL.

Links
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below. Editor, 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. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
 * What galleries, libraries, archives, and museums can teach us about multimedia metadata on Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation blogpost, 29 January 2018, by Jonathan Morgan and Sandra Fauconnier
 * The Wikipedia Library/1Lib1Ref/Connect, 2018 institutional participation in the #1lib1ref campaign
 * Newspeak House queries, created at 3 February 2018 event in London led by
 * Cochrane–Wikipedia Initiative, Wikipedia Signpost special report 5 February 2018, by
 * What is the Last Question?, 5 February 2018
 * }

Using one of your illustrations for an essay project
Hi, I was wondering if you would give permission for me to use your illustration 'Fatalities in earthquakes of magnitude 8 and greater since 1900' in a university project. My essay is comparing the 2011 Japan earthquake and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and I would like to make sure that I have consent to use your work (with full referencing/citation). Thanks Imzu (talk) 12:25, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Certainly! If it's online, I'd love to have a look at your conclusions. Best wishes, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 22:37, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

2019 maths problem
$$\text{ Express } \tfrac{1}{\sqrt{39 + \sqrt{39^2 - 1}}} \text{ as } \sqrt{x} - \!\!\sqrt{y} \text{ where } x \text{ and } y \text{ are integers. }$$

$$\begin{align} & \frac{1}{\sqrt{n + \sqrt{n^2 - 1}}} \quad \color{grey}{\Big( \text{let } n = 39 \Big) \leftarrow x \text{ and } y \in \Z \text{ iff } n \text{ is odd}} \\ = & \frac{\sqrt{n - \sqrt{n^2 - 1}}}{\sqrt{\big( n + \sqrt{n^2 - 1} \big) \big(n - \sqrt{n^2 - 1} \big)}} \;\;\; \color{grey}{\Bigg( \!\text{multiply by } \tfrac{\sqrt{n - \sqrt{n^2 - 1}}}{\sqrt{n - \sqrt{n^2 - 1}}} \Bigg)} \\ = & \frac{\sqrt{n - \sqrt{(n + 1)(n - 1)}}}{\sqrt{n^2 - \big( \sqrt{n^2 - 1} \, \big)^2}} \qquad\quad \color{grey}{\Big( \because (a + b)(a - b) = a^2 - b^2 \Big)} \\ = & \frac{\sqrt{\frac{n}{2} + \frac{n}{2} + \frac{1}{2} - \frac{1}{2} - \sqrt{4 \cdot \tfrac{(n + 1)(n - 1)}{4}}}}{\sqrt{n^2 - (n^2 - 1)}} \\ = & \frac{\sqrt{\frac{n + 1}{2} + \frac{n - 1}{2} - 2 \sqrt{\tfrac{n + 1}{2} \cdot \tfrac{n - 1}{2}}}}{\sqrt{1}} \\ = & \sqrt{\; \Big( \sqrt{\tfrac{n + 1}{2}} \Big)^2 - 2 \sqrt{\tfrac{n + 1}{2}} \sqrt{\tfrac{n - 1}{2}} + \Big( \sqrt{\tfrac{n - 1}{2}} \Big)^2} \\ = & \sqrt{\; \Big( \sqrt{\tfrac{n + 1}{2}} - \sqrt{\tfrac{n - 1}{2}} \Big)^2} = \sqrt{\tfrac{n + 1}{2}} - \sqrt{\tfrac{n - 1}{2}} \;\; \color{grey}{\Big( \because \sqrt{x} - \!\sqrt{y} > 0 \Big)} \\ \therefore & \;\; x = \tfrac{n + 1}{2} = \mathbf{20} \;, \; y = \tfrac{n - 1}{2} = \mathbf{19} \end{align}$$

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
{| style="position: relative; margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; padding: 0.5em 1em; background-color: #7FFFD4; border: 2px solid #00FFFF; border-color: rgba( 109, 193, 240, 0.75 ); border-radius: 8px; box-shadow: 8px 8px 12px rgba( 0, 0, 0, 0.7 );"
 * Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

 

Milestone for mix'n'match
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,, 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. 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!

Links
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below. Editor, 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. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia goes 3D allowing users to upload .STLs for digital reference, Beau Jackson for 3dprintingindustry.com, February 22 2018
 * WikiCite report (video)
 * Formal publication and announcement of ISBN citation dataset, see Twitter post, February 23 2018
 * Plotting the Course Through Charted Waters, workshop on data visualization literacy from Mikhail Popov, Wikimedia Foundation
 * Using Wikidata to build an authority list of Holocaust-era ghettos, Nancy Cooey, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, February 12 2018
 * Why Should You Learn SPARQL? Wikidata! Mark Longair, blogpost November 29 2017
 * Back to the future: Does graph database success hang on query language?, George Anadiotis for Big on Data, March 5 2018
 * }

A barnstar for you!
Thank you very much – glad you like my SVG efforts! Thanks for telling me about Johnson solids, too. Now that Commons allows uploading STL (file format), I plan to move make 3D models directly, like this one.

Nevertheless, if you've lists of their vertices on each of their faces, preferably in anticlockwise/counter-clockwise direction as viewed from outside the polyhedron, I'll try to write a script to generate these models. Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 02:19, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Your orbit graphic
Hello Cmglee - please have a look at Featured_picture_candidates/Earth_orbits and see what you could do about a sufficiently explaining caption for your graphic - you have two conditional supports hanging on that... ;-) I think it's a useful graphic, but there needs to be a simple explanation that the orbits are not equatorial. As the creator of the graphic, I thought you'd be the best to explain.  Best regards, --Janke | Talk 07:40, 19 March 2018 (UTC) ____________________________________________

Unreal Tournament Draft
Hey! I noticed you haven't edited your draft on Unreal Tournament at User:Cmglee/UT in a while. I wanted to remind you in case you might be able to prepare it for publication in mainspace. Happy editing! Daask (talk) 06:53, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I copied the article when I was learning to edit Wikipedia and didn't intend it for publication. I've moved it to my sandbox. Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 13:30, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Number of images on last row of gallery with x columns and y images
[[File:gallery_pics_vs_cols.png|thumb|250px|Green = ideal, Yellow = under half full, Red = orphan

Number of images on last row of gallery with x columns (browser-dependent) and y images (editor can control)

Hence, good number of images to have in a gallery = 6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 24, 30, 32, 38]]

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
{| style="position: relative; margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; padding: 0.5em 1em; background-color: #7FFFD4; border: 2px solid #00FFFF; border-color: rgba( 109, 193, 240, 0.75 ); border-radius: 8px; box-shadow: 8px 8px 12px rgba( 0, 0, 0, 0.7 );"
 * Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

 

The 100 Skins of the Onion
Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that.

Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron.

Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF. From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart.

Links
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below. Editor, 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. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Crossref as a new source of citation data: A comparison with Web of Science and Scopus, CWTS blogpost 17 January 2018, Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo Waltman, Vincent Larivière, Cassidy Sugimoto
 * Citations with identifiers in Wikipedia, figshare dataset
 * Making women more visible online—with Wikidata tools!, Wikimedia blogpost 29 March 2018 by Sandra Fauconnier
 * Village pump discussion, Turn on mapframe? We’re ready if you are reaches conclusions
 * The Power of the Wikimedia Movement beyond Wikimedia, Forbes 28 March 2018, Michael Bernick
 * Tracing stolen bitcoin, blogpost 26 March 2018 by Ross J. Anderson
 * }

Apologies
Greetings! I redirected your stale draft for the Unreal Tournament to that article per standard, without first checking to see if you are still active (which you are). My apologies. You can restore it if you want, although I would ask that you please add __NOINDEX__ to the page and remove the userspace draft so that it leaves the maintenance cue. Thanks! —Compassionate727 (T·C) 14:48, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I also apologize for taking four edits to clean up this notice. —Compassionate727 (T·C) 14:50, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
 * No problem at all, . I'm happy to leave it as an abandoned draft. Thanks for your efforts and for informing me. Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 15:19, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Images & templates
Hi!

I've noticed that you are providing some of your illustrations in the form of templates. That is imho usually not a good idea, because it it blocks (other) editors from individual adaptions to articles. For instance they may want to adapt the thumbnail size or some of the subtexts to the situation of an individual article, which is not possible that way. And even if they were to change the template they are likely to create side effects elswhere assuming the template is used in more than one article.--Kmhkmh (talk) 10:08, 27 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your message. I've tried to make the messages customisable using template parameters such as in this image. The advantage of using a template is to maintain consistency between articles using the image. Additionally, when the image is updated, all the captions can be updated at one go. For specific uses of the image, one can link to the image directly without using the template, so I think having these templates do not reduce existing functionality. Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 15:42, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
{| style="position: relative; margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; padding: 0.5em 1em; background-color: #7FFFD4; border: 2px solid #00FFFF; border-color: rgba( 109, 193, 240, 0.75 ); border-radius: 8px; box-shadow: 8px 8px 12px rgba( 0, 0, 0, 0.7 );"
 * Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

 

ScienceSource funded
The Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.

The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen.
 * A medical canon?

The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm.

Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help.

Links
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below. Editor, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. ScienceSource pages will be announced there, and in this mass message. 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. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
 * d:Wikidata:Lexicographical data, Wikidata's multi-lingual dictionary project gets going
 * Ordia tool, a basic search interface for Wikidata lexemes and forms
 * OpenRefine tool 3.0, May update allows wrangling of tabular information into Wikidata
 * d:Wikidata:WikiProject British Politicians pushes ahead with data modelling and imports
 * #1Lib1Ref Returns for a Second Time in 2018, IFLA blogpost 25 May 2018, second chance this year to participate in referencing Wikipedia
 * }

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

File:Lu Xiaoman and Xu Zhimo on a punt.png listed for discussion
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Lu Xiaoman and Xu Zhimo on a punt.png, has been listed at Files for discussion. Please see the to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. Thank you. Ron h jones (Talk) 23:57, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Strange
I came across this report - see the "Favorite Sessions" table - I really cannot remember that we even had 10 participants in the room!! Shyamal (talk) 08:00, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, – well spotted! That was a long time ago, but if my memory serves me right, the room was so packed people were on the stairs.
 * How have you been lately? Still illustrating birds? Have you attended other Wikimanias recently? I haven't been as active as before – life's been busy, though a few months back, I was hooked on STL 3D models when they were first allowed on Commons. Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 20:49, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Good to hear Gordon! I am glad to hear that more people attended - my memory was perhaps from the numbers present when I started! I have not been doing too many SVGs of birds - but I did work on a few contour maps with QGIS and opensource DEM data. And I am currently getting another small bunch of people comfortable with Inkscape and SVG editing. Was in fact at the recent Wikimania in Cape Town. I did check out your STL files! Have fun. Shyamal (talk) 04:07, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
 * How was Wikimania 2018, ? Cape Town and Montreal were a bit far – hope to go to the next one in Stockholm.
 * Quite interesting, I suspect that the overall favorite was perhaps the talk by Joy Buolamwini - see https://www.ajlunited.org/ - of course the area is stunning - especially the flora and the topography. Did not go to Montreal and do not plan to apply for the next. Shyamal (talk) 13:47, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Nice to hear that you're doing contour maps. I tried converting DEM data to 3D models, initially assuming a Flat Earth then trying different ways to tesselate a sphere. I found regular grids very wasteful of polygons, though, and read that triangulated irregular networks work better. Do you have any experience with generating them? Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 13:16, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
 * The standard SRTM source data is a regular grid (although that regularity may have been generated/preprocessed using some interpolation). I found that getting nice and lean SVG files with contours is tricky - one needs to run QGIS/GDAL's contouring algorithm - then use mapshaper (which tries curve simplification with constraints to avoid contour intersection) and SVG optimiser to get anything that is nice and smaller than a raster image. I have tried TIN on other kinds of data but they naturally tend to produced jagged contours. Shyamal (talk) 13:35, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, . Yeah, I thought it wasn't obvious. Even worse is trying to loft the contours into a 3D surface. Guess I'll leave it to someone else to mess with... cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954;
 * This plate splines are ideal for smoothness but my luck with running it successfully in QGIS has been bad (and that is country/continent scale unlike presumably your plan to use it at planetary scale!) Shyamal (talk) 06:52, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Even at country level, Earth curvature can swamp the difference in elevation. A few years back, a friend and I discussed the relative strengths of mountains and curvature. Using formulas at Circular_segment gives

h = R ( 1 - cos (s/R) )

We can calculate the rise in the middle relative to the width of the country. Assuming countries are square, width = sqrt(area).


 * For UK: 6400*(1-cos(sqrt(243e3)/6400))/sqrt(243e3)*100 = 3.8%
 * Russia: 31%

so it's definitely perceptible.

Using List_of_elevation_extremes_by_country gives the following maximum change in elevation relative to the amount of rise in the middle:


 * Monaco: 0.14/(6400*(1-cos(sqrt(2.02)/6400)))*100 = 89000% (highest in the world)
 * Nepal: 77% (likely highest for a decent-sized country)
 * UK: 7.0%
 * China: 1.2% (even though it has the largest elevation difference)
 * Russia: 0.44%
 * Australia: 0.38% (lowest in the world)

Since I had the length of Chile, I didn't have to assume square-ness: Chile: 0.50%

(Multiply with rise/width percentage for percentage of country width.)

The difference in elevation, however, is almost completely swamped by the curvature, except for crazy ones like Monaco, Nepal and Bhutan!

Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 13:07, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey this week
May I ask if you have any suggestions for the Community Wishlist Survey? It's open until November 11, 2018, and I suspect you'd have some really good ideas for how to improving the technical tools on Commons. You might want to vote on some of the proposals, too. HLHJ (talk) 03:28, 31 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks, . I'd requested the following features back in 2016, but not much has come out of it:


 * meta:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2016/Categories/Multimedia
 * meta:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2016/Categories/Multimedia
 * I understand the reasoning behind their not wanting to add non-standard features to SVG (2), but think (1) is still relevant. Can I resubmit it?

cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 15:49, 1 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Ta,


 * Sorry for hasty reply, but yes, I think the rules say you can resubmit. You might also talk to User:Yurik about it being in-scope of this proposal. HLHJ (talk) 01:40, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I think it would be a good fit to explain your use cases. Feel free to edit the proposal to extend it :) --Yurik (talk) 15:34, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Yurik, I have done so, but I fear that proposal may be a bit large and vague. There is also meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Multimedia and Commons, which seems not unrelated to your #1, Cmglee. HLHJ (talk) 02:35, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, and . meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Multimedia and Commons covers what I'd like, so I'll leave it as that. cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 16:27, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

Template:Diagonal split header
Hello

Have you noticed how Template:Diagonal split header is displayed changed this past few days ?

Before the line was solid, and now it is dashed ! Perhaps since the last MediaWiki update since there is no update done on the template ?

Do you have an idea of waht to do ?

Regards. --Archimëa (talk) 23:24, 15 November 2018 (UTC)


 * I think that part of it is the way that it draws the diagonal "line". It's done as a [//www.w3.org/TR/css3-images/#linear-gradients linear gradient] along the diagonal from bottom left to top right, with four stop values hence five bands of colour. Three of these bands are solid - the first and fifth are light grey and extend from lower left to 49.5% along the diagonal and from 50.5% along the diagonal to top right, the third is a darker grey and extends from 49.5% along the diagonal to 50.5%. The second and fourth bands are the actual gradient transitions between the two greys, positioned at 49.5% and 50.5% along the diagonal, but they are zero width so the change from one grey to the other is perceived as sudden, this is what gives a theoretically sharp edge to the third band. With that third band's width being no more than 1% of the length of that diagonal, it follows that if the diagonal is less than 100 pixels long, a solid band cannot be drawn and it will necessarily have points where the paler grey bands seem to touch one another giving a dotted or dashed effect. If the cell concerned is large enough, say 250x250 pixels for a diagonal of 354 pixels (approx.),

cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 12:15, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * we see that the central band is broader (it is now approximately 3.54 pixels wide) and clearly solid. Now imagine making that band so narrow that its width is less than one pixel; it can no longer be drawn solid, but must break into fragments which we perceive as a dashed line. Other than always using large cells, I don't think that there's a universal solution. You could broaden the band by changing the colour stops from 49.5% and 50.5% to 49% and 51% but that would make the line more obtrusive. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 10:14, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for explaining it so clearly, . Indeed, I chose 49.5 and 50.5 to give the most pleasing line (to my eyes) for typical cell sizes; I originally used 49 and 51, but the line was obtrusive.
 * As you seem to know quite a lot about CSS, would you know how I can work around the problem? One workaround is to have a parameter for an editor to specify (or at least override) these percentages. Is there a way to compute the percentages from the cell width and height in Wikitext?
 * , if it's changed recently without any code change, it could be a web browser update on CSS rendering, or even a graphics driver or operating system update on how it does anti-aliasing. Could you please tell on which table and page you saw this anomaly?
 * Cheers,
 * Hello. Thank you all for your help. Amazing explanations !
 * This behaviour could be seen on every linked pages to the template of Wikipedia in French yesterday, here or here . But as i'm writing this two links, I see the solid lines are back. :O
 * It could be a Firefox problem. I really apology for this false report. I should have wait at least few days before to ask. --Archimëa (talk) 12:24, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * No problem, ; it was good you brought it up. Let me know if you see further issues. Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 12:38, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * P.S. Glad to see someone has ported the template to the French Wikipedia. If you can spare some time, as don't speak French, may I trouble you to update the documentation on fr:Modèle:Séparateur_diagonal/Documentation so that it includes the new features on Template:diagonal_split_header/doc, please? Merci beaucoup! cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 12:46, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * FYI, I did this tiny change to have a smoother (and a bti wider) line. It looks ok cross-browser and on old IE apparently. --AntonierCH (talk) 12:57, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, . It looks the same to me – I don't expect 0.5% to change things much – so will leave it to Archimëa to see if it's still a problem. Cheers, cm&#610;&#671;ee&#9094;&#964;a&#671;&#954; 22:47, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Different browsers - even different revisions of the same browser - may produce different results. To the question "is there a way to compute the percentages from the cell width and height in Wikitext?" - the short answer is no. For most table cells, we do not set the dimensions but instead allow the browser to compute them (the algorithm for which is horribly complicated, I'll dig it out if you like). Even when we do set the dimensions explicitly (as in my example), these dimensions cannot be read easily, if at all. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 00:32, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Comparison computational complexity.svg listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Comparison computational complexity.svg. Since you had some involvement with the Comparison computational complexity.svg redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Stefan2 (talk) 21:38, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Comparison computational complexity.svg
Template:Comparison computational complexity.svg has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Steel1943 (talk) 23:13, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

