User talk:Harej/Archive19

Happy New Year Harej!


Happy New Year! Harej, Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. NorthAmerica1000 13:44, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year 2015}} to user talk pages.

Wikidata weekly summary #139
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 23:01, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Provide your input on article placeholders based on Wikidata
 * new RfC: CoI editing
 * Anonymous artists at wiki project visual arts
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * We need to start talking about scaling Wikidata over the next months and years: Scaling Wikidata: success means making the pie bigger
 * The next big step for Wikidata—forming a hub for researchers
 * wikidata4research4all
 * There was a well-attended Wikidata meetup at 31C3
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Wikidata Query now runs on multiple, load-balanced, self-restarting servers. Thanks to Yuvi for the help.
 * Vandals suck. Don't know how to help us fight them? Here are two pages to get you started: Wikidata:Vandalism and Wikidata:Abuse filter.
 * The Wikidata BEACON generator was updated by Magnus. It now uses all properties with “formatter URL”, so always up-to-date with target URLs. It is faster, too.
 * Number of visual artworks on Wikidata by institution
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: Terminologia Histologica (TH), Terminologia Embryologica (TE), ICD-9-CM, operations and procedures key (OPS), ICD-10-PCS, central government debt as a percent of GDP, AniDB identifier, main property, awarded for work, Pokémon browser number, inscription, quote, subtitle, BBC Your Paintings artwork identifier, has vertex figure, index case of, number suspected, number probable, number confirmed, general formula, this taxon is source of, Route number, LAC identifier, CONA, ATCvet, TGN, Chess Club ID, Chess Games ID, Cycling Database ID, ProCyclingStats ID, DOI Prefix, Alexa rank, has index case, related property, number of faces, MPAA film rating, unveiled by, station number, wing configuration, TERYT municipality code, referee, YouTube video identifier, BBF identifier, Korean Movie Database ID, Dictionary of Welsh Biography ID
 * Showcase items: Iggy Azalea, Helsinki
 * Development
 * Happy new year! :) It'll be a great one for Wikidata!
 * Have you filed bugs in the past? Awesome! It'd be super helpful if you have a look at your old bugs and see if they are still relevant. You can find them at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/authored/ (make sure you're logged in on Phabricator)
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

Wiki Loves Monuments registration
Hi, I saw your invitation to rate Wiki Loves Monuments submissions on WT:NRHP. However, I can't seem to register; every attempt is returned with "the captcha is invalid" even though it clearly isn't. Any solutions, or an alternative means of registration perhaps? Knight of Truth (talk) 04:18, 31 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Hello Knight of Truth. I contacted the person who maintains the tool and he fixed something that was wrong with the server. Can you try again? Thanks, Harej (talk) 21:56, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the help, it seems to be working just fine now and I'm rating awsy! Knight of Truth (talk) 03:18, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2014
Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 11:31, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #140
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:25, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Upcoming: Office hour on IRC on Friday. You should come :)
 * Past: London Wikidata Meetup 2
 * We had a meetup with nine people:
 * set up WikiProject UK and Ireland (sound recording of meeting available)
 * Upcoming: Open Data Day, 21st February 2015
 * For generic wiki, see International Open Data Day
 * Open Data Camp UK, Saturday/Sunday 21st/22nd February 2015
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * We just crossed 14000 active users (over the last month). Thank you all!
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: Gray's Anatomy 1918 subject, Total valid votes, inverse of, NLP identifier
 * Newest WikiProjects: Food, UK and Ireland, Suisse
 * Newest gadgets: ExportClaims, Mark as patrolled from list of changes
 * Development
 * The sitelink section has been reworked. This will go live on Wikidata on Tuesday. The sitelinks will then be slimmer and they will appear in a sidebar on the right side if there is enough space.
 * More performance improvements when parsing an item page, ~%15 faster for some pages :)
 * Titan was selected as the graph DB to implement a Wikidata query service running in production
 * Fixed adding links to ru.wikinews.org which was broken by its change to HTTPS-only
 * Worked on redesigning the header area (label, description, alias, in-other-languages box)
 * Polished d:Wikidata:Data access and d:Wikidata:Database download. Could still use some more work though if you have time.
 * Enabled PHP_CodeSniffer with Mediawiki rules and some additional ones to make us aware of more code issues
 * We no longer log some common 404 errors in the exception log
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

WikiProject X
Hi Harej: Don't forget to Join the project. I recommend that you place your user name atop, because you are one of the founders the project! N ORTH A MERICA 1000 18:01, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Hello Northamerica1000, I have now joined the project. Out of curiosity, what does membership in WikiProject X entail? I hadn't previously thought of participation in terms of membership, but more in terms of various modes of participation (from doing the bare minimum of signing up for a newsletter to the highly active mode of participation of being a pilot tester). Perhaps this is something that could be clarified? (Regardless, I am quite obviously a member Smile.svg.) Harej (talk) 19:09, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
 * HI Harej: It just seemed natural to have a members section, whereby participants can actually sign-up as a member for the project. This may provide a sense of unification for folks, and also provides an area where people can check out "official" participants to possibly enable potential various collaborations. The page seems to be functioning as intended; as of this post there are now 10 members signed on with the project. I'm a fan of WikiProjects, and I look forward to the prospect of WikiProject X's potential to revive various projects. Hope this clarifies matters, and feel free to contact me anytime. N ORTH A MERICA 1000 03:40, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Idea
In the main page of Wikiprojec ask, create a link to a subpage where people can post their ideas to improve the projects. I'd be the first to leave my ideas. (ping me) Tetra quark (don't be shy) 21:43, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #141
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 21:00, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * RfC: Speedy vs Regular deletion‎
 * Closed RfAs: George.Edward.C (successful)
 * Open RfAs: Petr Matas, Edoderoo
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * The Wikidata for research proposal was submitted to the European Union on January 14. Congrats to Daniel for spearheading that huge effort.
 * Blog post about how Wikidata can change the way citizen scientists contribute
 * IRC office hour happened (log)
 * Blog posts about gender inequality index based on Wikidata data by Max and Magnus
 * MediaWiki Developer Summit
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * The development plan has been updated and expanded
 * Official Wikipedia app now uses Wikidata descriptions \o/ More to come!
 * Usage tracking will likely be deployed on February 2 on Wikidata. This will not be user-visible. It just means that pages using data from arbitrary items get updated/purged when the data changes. Arbitrary access is being tested at Test Wikidata and Test Wiki. An example is at Kitten on arbitrary page.
 * Assigning items on Mix'n'match will now make that change on Wikidata for you automatically
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: IGESPAR identifier, SIPA identifier, SkyscraperPage building id
 * Development
 * Deployed new sitelinks interface design to Wikidata. It's not done yet but we're getting there. Tweaks are in progress.
 * Worked on redesign of header area
 * Fixed some bugs that popped up after deployment
 * Enabled usage tracking and arbitrary access on test.wikipedia.org and test.wikidata, and preparations for enabling it on Wikidata
 * Collecting Query examples for the new query functionality
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Good luck with Project X
I'm really hoping your efforts to revitalize this component of the project are successful, particularly because I hope it will improve with editor retention. I'm not seeing many signs others are perceiving the same thing in general, but I've sometimes of late been feeling like a can hear the slighest creaking from this place in terms of stability -- not just in small (but more common) technical hiccups, but even on content-side, and in procedural areas, everything feels "undermanned" at present; seems like everywhere has a backlog or just generally not enough hands to go around. If your efforts can do something to reverse that trend, the effort will worth that alone, even putting aside the other kinds of value your grant statement speaks to. But the challenge as I see it is that by the time an editor comes to a WikiProject, they've already passed a certain threshold of interest in (and knowledge of) the project and thus are amongst those who are (at least marginally) more likely to be retained anyway, at least for a time.

What we really need is a way to keep the countless people who decide to make just a few test edits, who have just discovered talk space but aren't sure how welcome their thoughts are going to be. How you recruit new editors with knowledge of a key area into a WikiProject even as they are just learning the basics of policy and process, I'm not sure. And great pains would need to be taken so that newer editors in WikiProject understood the limits to what a WikiProject can do and don't get too WP:OWN about things (ArbCom will not thank any project for bringing that kind of mess to their workload again, I daresay). But the truth is, we don't have that many community spaces where large numbers of editors can coordinate, and many of those we do have are for administrative purposes more connected with behavioural problems and grievances than anything. WikiProjects could really fill that void, if more tightly (and and maybe uniformly) coordinated. I know there's always some concern of making the project too familiar, or personal, or social, or what-have-you and some of those concerns I completely endorse, while others are clearly farcical, histrionic or just reflect impractical thinking. But one thing that's for certain is that this project has accomplished as much as it has in good part because of a sense of community and if we fail to maintain that sentiment, we're going to see real consequences to our manpower and the way things get done here. WikiProjects can straddle the divide of making people feel engaged and connected to their fellow editors while keeping us all focused on the task of building the encyclopedia, I think, but very few have come even close to realizing that potential.

But I'm droning on and should probably save this for the project. I did have one practical notion along the lines touched upon by the second talk thread. It would require a certain non-trivial amount of effort to galvanize the community to support and implement this, mind you, but why not a new class of editor privileges (let's call them "coordinator privileges") that would allow certain editors to do things like a) send out mass messages to those who have already joined a WikiProject announcing events, projects and important discussions (through an interface, template, bot or such, rather than requiring them to manually message each person, or b) allow them to see a list of all new editors who have contributed a certain number of edits to articles which have that have a given projects template on their talk page, so they can invite them to participate in the relevant project?  And though it's arguably silly, just the mere fact that coordinators have been invested with specific tools (which they would have to be vetted for, of course, same as admins, bureaus, and other with special privileges) might give projects more of a feeling of legitimacy. Though again, I can't stress enough how important it will be to educate members that they are there to advise and help one-another, not generate their independent rules for content to apply on top of policy; the more prestige WikiProjects get, the more explicit we will have to make that line. It's already in policy itself, but needs to somehow be codified into the way the projects themselves operate, in order to avoid run-ins with the larger community of editors as they go about forming local consensus.

Anyway, that's enough dumping upon your talk page. It's all rather long-winded way of saying best of luck and that whatever little support I can give, I will!  S n o w  talk 06:43, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Snow Rise! I do hope WikiProjects can help make people feel like they are a part of the community while also encouraging encyclopedic contributions (or even the occasional copyedit!). It's feeling like you're part of a community that makes people want to stick around for the long term, or so I've found in my experience and observations. As for your ideas, I think they can be done without creating new classes of editors. I'm entertaining the idea of "WikiProject hosts"—dedicated people who are interested in volunteering for maintenance work. The mass message sender privilege can be made available for WikiProject hosts if they want. As for WikiProjects asserting that their guidelines are equal to Wikipedia-wide policies and guidelines when they're not, I am going to be working on that too, though I caution I cannot stop existing projects from doing this. But in any case, I do hope that something great comes from this project. Harej (talk) 03:21, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


 * To be honest, I had never realized that  rights were given out as individual privileges; that does simplify things quite a bit.  Still, with apparently only 32 such (non-admin) users having these privileges at present, this would be a significant upscale and the process for requesting these rights seems to fall on one person at present (User:Cenarium), if I am reading the page history correctly, so you might want to give them an early head's up once you've begun to flesh things out.  I suppose one could also use the system that's in place for RfC's; contributors to a given project could sign up to receive bot notices on a certain number of randomly selected discussions per month.  But then you need someone to develop and maintain the bots.


 * And yeah, as to the issue of project overreach, I know one user can only do so much on such a broad issue, but my thinking is that Project X might end up having some influence on small changes towards uniformity in projects, and if we can get every active project to include a caution regarding WP:Advice pages somewhere on its front or talk page, that alone could make a significant difference. And actually WP:Advice pages itself should probably be augmented and promoted to its own guideline page to reflect the importance of the distinction between giving advice and trying to create ad-hoc topical policy outside the proper process.   S n o w  talk 04:23, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #142
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:09, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Closed RfAs: Petr Matas (unsuccessful), Edoderoo (successful)
 * Open RfAs: Eurodyne
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Upcoming: MediaWiki Developer Summit
 * Upcoming: FOSDEM
 * Upcoming: Wikidata for research meetup in February in Paris and Berlin
 * Past: Meetup in Cambridge
 * Brainstorming for Wikimania talks related to Wikidata is happening at T87334 and you can apply for a scholarship
 * Wikidata - a year in numbers
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Want to help out mapping schema.org and Wikidata properties? There is now a ticket for coordination.
 * The new Content Translation tool uses Wikidata data to suggest the correct article to link to when translating a Wikipedia article to another language
 * Using GNOME Shell? There is a Wikidata search provider for you.
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: award shared with, native label, pollenizer, pollination
 * You can influence the languages shown in the "in other languages box" by adding a bable box to your user page like here.
 * Development
 * More work on header section redesign
 * Released Wikibase DataModel 2.5
 * Broke and fixed JSON dumps - sorry!
 * Implemented entity change subscription service
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Saturday February 7 in NYC: Black Life Matters Editathon
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Meetup/DC/January 2015
Hi. Meetup/DC/January 2015 looks pretty sad currently... could you ping the mailing list and maybe send out another talk page message? My suspicion is that people have forgotten that this meetup is happening. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:36, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Learning Quarterly: January 2015
 L&E Newsletter / Volume 1 / Issue 3 / January 2015  Learning Quarterly

  Frontpage:  #EducationCollaborative  #CrossingBorders

<div style="float:left; background-color:; color:#656565; padding: 1.5em 1em 1em 1em; margin: .5em; "> <span style="font-size: 1.5em; font-family: Futura, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, sans-serif; color: #DCDCDC"> Stay tuned <span style="font-size: 1.5em; font-family: Futura, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, sans-serif; color:"> blogs, events & more!

<div style="float:left; background-color:; color:#656565; padding: 1.5em 1em 1em 1em; margin: .5em; "> <span style="font-size: 1.5em; font-family: Futura, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, sans-serif; color: ">Grow the <span style="font-size: 1.5em; font-family: Futura, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, sans-serif; color:#DCDCDC"> Awesome: GLAM+Ed: Barcelona Design Museum

<div style="float:left; background-color:; color:#656565; padding: 1.5em 1em 1em 1em; margin: .5em; "> <span style="font-size: 1.5em; font-family: Futura, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, sans-serif; color: #DCDCDC"> Leave your mark on Meta! <span style="font-size: 1.5em; font-family: Futura, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, sans-serif; color:"> Get #Inspired on IdeaLab and Learning Pattern Library.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:57, 30 January 2015 (UTC) <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Futura, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, sans-serif;"> If this message is not on your home wiki's talk page, update your subscription.

Museum hacks and museum edits
<div style="padding:3em; font-family:'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif; font-size:110%; line-height:1.75;"> Hello there!

Upcoming events:


 * February 6–8: The third annual ArtBytes Hackathon at the Walters Art Museum! This year Wikimedia DC is partnering with the Walters for a hack-a-thon at the intersection of art and technology, and I would like to see Wikimedia well represented.
 * February 11: The monthly WikiSalon, same place as usual. RSVP on Meetup or just show up!
 * February 15: Wiki Loves Small Museums in Ocean City. Mary Mark Ockerbloom, with support from Wikimedia DC, will be leading a workshop at the Small Museum Association Conference on how they can contribute to Wikipedia. Tons of representatives from GLAM institutions will be present, and we are looking for volunteers. If you would like to help out, check out "Information for Volunteers".

I am also pleased to announce events for Wikimedia DC Black History Month with Howard University and NPR. Details on those events soon.

If you have any questions or have any requests, please email me at james.hare@undefinedwikimediadc.org.

See you there! – James Hare

(To unsubscribe, remove your username here.) 03:11, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #143
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:21, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Closed RfAs: Eurodyne (unsuccessful)
 * Open RfAs: BlackBeast
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Past: MediaWiki Developer Summit
 * Past: FOSDEM
 * Upcoming: ArtBytes hackathon
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * ATOM feeds for changes in Wikidata Query results. Define your own to keep an eye on changes in specific topics
 * Overview of the number of visual artworks items on Wikidata by creator (>5 items)
 * The Wikidata Free Image Search Tool can now also search Commons (not just follow language links)
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: British Museum person-institution, Sächsische Biografie, equivalent class, LfDS object ID, DAAO identifier
 * Newest WikiProjects: Authority control
 * Development
 * Fixed diffs not showing old ranks, qualifiers and references on the left side (T87096)
 * Worked on several date and time related issues, like incorrect padding of the year to 11 instead of 16 digits (T87764)
 * Further work on header section redesign (T75654)
 * Started redesign of statements section (T87316)
 * Introduced a hint showing the language when a language fallback is used on an item or property (T85105)
 * Working on splitting a Wikibase View component out of the Wikibase Repo code base
 * Currently testing how PHPCS and PHPMD can help raising Wikibase’ code quality
 * Released Wikibase DataModelSerialization 1.3 with language fallback support
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Invitation to Participate in a WikiProject Study
Hello Harej,

We’d like to invite you to participate in a study that aims to explore how WikiProject members coordinate activities of distributed group members to complete project goals. We are specifically seeking to talk to people who have been active in at least one WikiProject in their time in Wikipedia. Compensation will be provided to each participant in the form of a $10 Amazon gift card.

The purpose of this study is to better understanding the coordination practices of Wikipedians active within WikiProjects, and to explore the potential for tool-mediated coordination to improve those practices. Interviews will be semi-structured, and should last between 45-60 minutes. If you decide to participate, we will schedule an appointment for the online chat session. During the appointment you will be asked some basic questions about your experience interacting in WikiProjects, how that process has worked for you in the past and what ideas you might have to improve the future.

You must be over 18 years old, speak English, and you must currently be or have been at one time an active member of a WikiProject. The interview can be conducted over an audio chatting channel such as Skype or Google Hangouts, or via an instant messaging client. If you have questions about the research or are interested in participating, please contact Michael Gilbert at (206) 354-3741 or by email at mdg@uw.edu.

We cannot guarantee the confidentiality of information sent by email.

The link to the relevant research page is m:Research:Means_and_methods_of_coordination_in_WikiProjects

Ryzhou (talk) 23:18, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #144
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:54, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Open RfAs: BlackBeast
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Upcoming: Eurpeana Tech
 * Andrew Su gave a talk about crowd sourcing and citizen science for biology including Wikidata (slides)
 * Going to Wikimania? Apply for a scholarship.
 * Internet Archive, Wikidata and Open Education
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Wikibooks will get access to language links via Wikidata on February 24th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks.
 * Roughly 17000 of the candidate articles that Google identified as potentially being about the same topic but lacking a language link have been merged. About 17500 are remaining and waiting for you to go through them via https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/
 * Mix'n'Match got a face lift
 * Magnus says every day new images are added to over 1000 items \o/
 * RStats client for Wikidata
 * Reasonator now also supports biography texts in French
 * Did you know?
 * Showcase items: Lucy (first name)
 * Development
 * Did more work on Capiunto to get it into a state where it can be deployed to Wikimedia sites.
 * Mourned Titan (T88550) as its developers were bought up. Began evaluation for which graph database to use instead for a Wikidata query service (Wikibase/Indexing)
 * Further work on header section redesign
 * Tweaks to the sitelink section
 * Worked on making monolingual text datatype accept more languages
 * Finished showing the language when a language fallback is used
 * Started looking into fixing the existing Guided Tours after Guided Tours extension API changes
 * Worked on implementing Lua convenience functions for rendering arbitrary Snaks. This is useful for displaying references or qualifiers. (T76213)
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Wikimedia DC celebrates Black History Month, and more!
<div style="max-width:1000px; margin:0 auto; font-family:'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif; font-size:110%; line-height:1.75;"> Hello again!

Not even a week ago I sent out a message talking about upcoming events in DC. Guess what? There are more events coming up in February.

First, as a reminder, there is a WikiSalon on February 11 (RSVP here or just show up) and Wiki Loves Small Museums at the Small Museum Association Conference on February 15 (more information here).

Now, I am very pleased to announce:


 * Tuesday, February 17 from 10 AM to 3 PM there will be #WikiTurgy at the University of Maryland. Join fellow theatre enthusiasts for a “mass act of public dramaturgy!”
 * Thursday, February 19 from 10 AM to 4 PM we are hosting the Howard University Black History Edit-a-Thon. We are working in partnership with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of African-American and African diasporic history.
 * Tuesday, February 24 from 6 PM to 8 PM we have the Black History Month “First Edit” at NPR. Help improve Wikipedia and help others make their first edit to Wikipedia!
 * Finally, our monthly dinner meetup is on Saturday, February 28.

There is going to be a lot going on, and I hope you can come to some of the events!

If you have any questions or need any special accommodations, please let me know.

Regards,

James Hare

(To unsubscribe, remove your username here.) 18:20, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 1
Hi! Thank you for subscribing to the WikiProject X Newsletter. For our first issue...

'''Has WikiProject X changed the world yet? No.'''

We opened up shop last month and announced our existence to the world. Our first phase is the "research" phase, consisting mostly of reading and listening. We set up our landing page and started collecting stories. So far, 28 stories have been shared about WikiProjects, describing a variety of experiences across numerous WikiProjects. A recurring story involves a WikiProject that starts off strong but has trouble continuing to stay active. Most people describe using WikiProjects as a way to get feedback from other editors. Some quotes:
 * "Working on requested articles, utilising the reliable sources section, and having an active WikiProject to ask questions in really helped me learn how to edit Wikipedia and looking back I don't know how long I would have stayed editing without that project." – Sam Walton on WikiProject Video Games
 * "I believe that the main problem of the Wikiprojects is that they are complicated to use. There should be a a much simpler way to check what do do, what needs to be improved etc." – Tetra quark
 * "In the late 2000s, WikiProject Film tried to emulate WP:MILHIST in having coordinators and elections. Unfortunately, this was not sustainable and ultimately fell apart." – Erik

Of course, these are just anecdotes. While they demonstrate what is possible, they do not necessarily explain what is typical. We will be using this information in conjunction with a quantitative analysis of WikiProjects, as documented on Meta. Particularly, we are interested in the measurement of WikiProject activity as it relates to overall editing in that WikiProject's subject area.

We also have 50 people and projects signed up for pilot testing, which is an excellent start! (An important caveat: one person volunteering a WikiProject does not mean the WikiProject as a whole is interested; just that there is at least one person, which is a start.)

While carrying out our research, we are documenting the problems with WikiProjects and our ideas for making WikiProjects better. Some ideas include better integration of existing tools into WikiProjects, recommendations of WikiProjects for people to join, and improved coordination with Articles for Creation. These are just ideas that may or may not make it to the design phase; we will see. We are also working with WikiProject Council to improve the directory of WikiProjects, with the goal of a reliable, self-updating WikiProject directory. Stay tuned! If you have any ideas, you are welcome to leave a note on our talk page.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing!

– Harej 17:21, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

 * Thank you Northamerica1000! Harej (talk) 21:56, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2015
<div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:58, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

WP:Co-op news for December 2014 – Feburary 2015
Hey, it's been a while. The Co-op team has been hard at work during over the winter, so let's get right into what's been happening: Thanks to all of the new mentors who have joined over the past few months. Big thanks to to posting about our little project here to the gendergap-l mailing list. <b style="font-family:Candara;color:green">I, JethroBT</b> drop me a line 00:47, 13 February 2015 (UTC) on behalf of Wikipedia:Co-op.
 * Graphic design work is nearing completion and development work is coming along slowly but surely. The main components of the space, profiles, the landing page, and the mentor landing page have all been built, and we're basically just putting the pieces together.  We have close-to-final draft of the landing page, which is currently at User:Slalani/Landing_page, and in the thumbnail to the right.  You can check out other components over at User:Slalani if you're curious., , and I are working together on some of the front page elements.  We've also been doing some testing on test.wikipedia.org for profile building and matching.  If you're curious about checking that out, let me know.
 * We've finished up a survey for newer editors to assess their experiences of using existing help spaces (e.g. Reference Desk, Teahouse, IRC, The Wikipedia Adventure) on en.wikipedia.  is putting together a summary of that survey, and in the meantime, some findings from that survey of 45 newer editors include:
 * On average, editors found contributing to Wikipedia to be easier after using the help space compared to before.
 * However, after using one or more help spaces, only half of editors reported that editing, addressing social challenges, and resolving technical issues were easy or very easy. The other half of editors were either neutral, or reported that these matters were difficult or very difficult.
 * Just under 30% (11 of 38 editors) of newer editors said they probably would have stopped editing entirely had they not received support from the help space they used.
 * Editors frequently reported either 1) that they would not have been learn what they needed without the help space, or 2) That they could have found it, but admitted that it would have been difficult or taken much longer.
 * We will be making one final move of the pilot start date to March 4th, 2015. This is the last move (I promise), because we can't afford to run the pilot any later than that.  So there it is:  March 4th or bust!  But we won't bust, because there are just a few things left on our plate before we can run our pilot successfully.  I'll be alerting you about when you will be able to make mentor profiles soon, so when you get a message about that, please take a minute or two to create your profile here (otherwise, you won't get matched to any editors!).

(Opt-out Instructions) This message was send by through MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:36, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #145
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 10:25, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Past: Europeana Tech
 * Wir lieben Freie Software
 * Mapping resources using open knowledge: starting with books!
 * New recommendations outline ways to strengthen Europeana’s future relationship with Wikimedia
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Spiffy new project building on top of Wikidata: inventaire.io. Check out this example entry!
 * You will now see when a language fallback for a label is used on an item or property. The language name will be shown next to it.
 * Automatic descriptions for Wikidata items by Magnus
 * The templates for adding badges (good article, featured article, etc) to articles on Wikipedia in the sidebar are getting removed from articles rapidly in favor of getting that information from Wikidata \o/ German Wikipedia even deleted those templates already. English Wikipedia seems to be getting close.
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: Journalisted ID, Biography at the Bundestag of Germany, Metacritic ID
 * Newest WikiProjects: Identical Twins
 * Development
 * <3
 * We are hiring! Passionate about Wikidata and know your way around Java Script and co? Apply!
 * We'll spend the next week working with Nik and Stas from WMF to move queries forward in Berlin
 * Worked on implementing a Lua interface for arbitrary Snak rendering. This can be used to render eg. qualifiers or references in Wikipedia infoboxes.
 * Did groundwork for Lua convenience functions that render data in the user’s interface language, rather than the content language (for multilingual wikis, like Commons or Wikidata only)
 * Did further work on making the Lua interface code nicer and share code with the parser functions
 * Removed input method selector in the sitelink input as it was hiding the actual input and not very useful there
 * Fixed some issues in diff views showing new data instead of old data
 * Created a few scripts to make it easier for 3rd parties to install Wikibase
 * Fixed icinga notification that tests if dispatch lag gets high
 * Investigated several issues regarding storage of time values and started fixing them
 * Fixed editing of qualifiers
 * Fixed most browser tests after introduction of new header design
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Native American literature wikithon
Hi Harej -

I'm an academic who researches and writes about Native American and First Nations literatures. I'm also an occasional Wikipedian and would like to work to improve the project's coverage of Native American authors and books.

With this in mind, I've proposed that the next Native American Literature Symposium (NALS) in March run a wikithon session to get academics and writers, of whom there should be around 150 in attendance, contributing to Wikipedia. I have a list of authors who don't currently have articles, and I will also get participants working on improving existing stub articles. The NALS programme can be found here.

I'd love to get your input on how best to get the maximum out of this session. Please feel free to email me directly at j dot mackay @ euc dot ac dot cy.

Best, James Mackay, aka Vizjim (talk) 12:28, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #146
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 20:45, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Asking ever bigger questions with Wikidata
 * Wikidata4Research meetup in Berlin
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * As announced Wikibooks is getting access to Wikidata for their sitelinks on 24th. Coordination at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks
 * ViziData
 * Update on data quality project
 * Update on structured data for Commons
 * Using mw.wikibase.getEntity in a Lua module? Please read this.
 * Number of visual artworks items by property (type, genre, creator...) on Wikidata
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: operty:P1721|pinyin transliteration]], posthumous name, temple name, courtesy name, SANDRE ID, brand
 * Showcase items:Montblanc
 * Development
 * Still looking for an awesome frontend developer to join the team
 * Met with Nik and Stas from WMF in Berlin for a week to move query functionality forward. Made good progress on evaluating backends and languages
 * Worked on RDF mapping/export
 * Introduced mw.wikibase.renderSnak(s) for rendering arbitrary Snaks in Lua. This can be used for rendering for example qualifiers or references.
 * Made it so that links in the “other projects” sidebar are alphabetically ordered
 * Made the diff views for dates easier to read
 * Continued work on the planned Wikibase View component
 * Continued work on header redesign
 * Worked on a new special page that lets you set label, description and aliases in one page
 * Fixed all browsertests to use new header section and adjusted them to use phantomjs
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * d:Wikidata:Glossary could use some serious simplification to make it easier to understand. Can you help?
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

WP:Co-op: Presentation at Wikimania 2015
Hey. I've put in a submission for a presentation at Wikimania 2015 called Is Two the Magic Number?: The Co-op and New Editor Engagement through Mentorship. I'll be talking about the state of finding help spaces on en.wiki and how our new mentorship space, The Co-op, factors into that picture. Reviewing will begin soon and I'll need your help to be able to present our work. Please review our proposal and give us feedback. If you would be interested in seeing this presentation, whether you are attending or not, please add your name to the signup at the bottom of the proposal (you do not need to attend Wikimania to express interest in presentations). <b style="font-family:Candara;color:green">I, JethroBT</b> drop me a line on behalf of Wikipedia:Co-op.

(Opt-out Instructions) This message was send by through MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:19, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Talkback
Hell in a Bucket (talk) 15:19, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Another presentation
I have also proposed a proposal to make Wikipedia free of data charges for users from developing countries, I will be glad if you can sign up here (just to ensure that you are also interested in making Wikipedia free of data charges), signing up doesn't mean that you have to attend so don't worry. Thank you, friend.  Jim Car  ter  11:05, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Co-op: Mentor profiles and final pilot prep
Hey mentors, two announcements:
 * 1) You can now make your profile at The Co-op!  Please set up your mentor profile here as soon as you are able, as the pilot begins on March 4th.  It isn't very involved and should only take a minute.  If you need more info about what the different skills mean (e.g. writing, communication), please refer to these descriptions.
 * 2) Profile creation, invitations, and automated matching of editors, profile creation, that will be coordinated through and a few gadgets may not be ready for our pilot, and will have to be done manually until they are ready.  In preparation for the pilot, please read over these instructions on how we will be manually performing these tasks until the automated components are ready. <b style="font-family:Candara;color:green">I, JethroBT</b> drop me a line on behalf of Wikipedia:Co-op.

(Opt-out Instructions) This message was send by through MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:41, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #147
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Lydia Pintscher 12:49, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * RfC: Reforming administrator inactivity criteria
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Platypus - a speaking interface for Wikidata
 * Past: Wikidata for Research meetup
 * Past: GLAMhack (two of the results: The Endless Story and a family tree)
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Wikidata reached 200,000,000 edits
 * Welcome Wikibooks! Wikibooks now gets its language links via Wikidata as well.
 * Vote for your favorite Wikimania submissions. Here are the Wikidata related ones.
 * New release of the Wikidata Toolkit with lots of good stuff.
 * There are now over 30,000 objects in OpenStreetMap tagged with a Wikidata ID. Can you add more?
 * Want to see where we want infoboxes to go with Wikidata? Check out the infobox fromage on French Wikipedia. Have a look at the wiki text here.
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: Naturbase ID, Fach, AllMusic song ID, AllMusic album ID, AllMusic artist ID, Flora of North America ID, Florentine musea Inventario 1890 ID, beats per minute
 * Newest WikiProjects: Cheese, Filming Locations
 * Showcase items: None this week. Yours next week?
 * You can listen to Wikidata (setting at the bottom)
 * Development
 * Chaged a number of Lua modules (from deprecated function mw.wikibase.getEntity to mw.wikibase.getEntityObject)
 * Updated the json documentation
 * Always link to Wikidata on client pages that don’t have any langlinks. This affects users without JavaScript and logged out users, logged in users will still see the link item dialog. 168632
 * Fixes for the Wikibase qunit Jenkins job
 * Made Vagrant git-update also properly update Wikibase and dependencies
 * Fix for T88254 (malformatted Wikidata entries appearing in Watchlist RSS feed in clients)
 * Final touches on new header design
 * Investigated how we can provide language fallback also in suggestions when search or adding new statements
 * More work on allowing additional languages in monolingual text datatype
 * Added missing backend piece for quantities with units. Now the remaining piece is the user interface.
 * Enabled Wikibase Client on Wikibooks
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Editing for Women's History in March
<div style="padding:3em; font-family:'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif; font-size:110%; line-height:1.75;"> Hello,

I am very excited to announce this month’s events, focused on Women’s History Month:


 * Sunday, March 8: Women in the Arts 2015 Edit-a-thon – 10 AM to 4 PM
 * Women in the Arts and ArtAndFeminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Free coffee and lunch served!
 * More information • RSVP on Meetup
 * Wednesday, March 11: March WikiSalon – 7 PM to 9 PM
 * An evening gathering with free-flowing conversation and free pizza.
 * More information • RSVP on Meetup (or just show up!)
 * Friday, March 13: NIH Women's History Month Edit-a-Thon – 9 AM to 4 PM
 * In honor of Women’s History Month, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is organizing and hosting an edit-a-thon to improve coverage of women in science in Wikipedia. Free coffee and lunch served!
 * More information • RSVP on Meetup
 * Saturday, March 21: Women in STEM Edit-a-Thon at DCPL – 12 PM
 * Celebrate Women's History Month by building, editing, and expanding articles about women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields during DC Public Library's first full-day edit-a-thon.
 * More information • RSVP on Meetup
 * Friday, March 27: She Blinded Me with Science, Part III – 10 AM to 4 PM
 * Smithsonian Institution Archives Groundbreaking Women in Science Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Free lunch courtesy of Wikimedia DC!
 * More information • RSVP on Meetup
 * Saturday, March 28: March Dinner Meetup – 6 PM
 * Dinner and drinks with your fellow Wikipedians!
 * More information • RSVP on Meetup

Hope you can make it to an event! If you have any questions or require any special accommodations, please let me know.

Thanks,

James Hare

To unsubscribe from this newsletter, remove your name from this list. 02:24, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #148
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 00:19, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Open RfA: Haplology
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * upcoming: Wikidata for Wikipedians at Lokal K in Köln in 17th of March
 * upcoming: Wikidata editathon in Berlin on 24th of March
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Help flesh out landing pages for partners
 * Update on the Wikidata query service progress
 * The automatic description API can now generate infoboxes (currently, "person" and "artwork" on en.wp)
 * Wikidata Skim gives you very simple query functionality
 * Meet Kian, the first neural network to serve Wikidata
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: Information Center for Israeli Art artist identifier, Comedien.ch identifier, oath of office date, Steam ID
 * Showcase items:Symphony No. 7
 * Development
 * Fixed edit buttons sometimes not showing up because of caching
 * Added mailto to the allowed protocols in the URL data type
 * Worked on updating the data model documentation
 * Worked on client wiki subscription/notification mechanism
 * Improved handling of scientific notation for quantity values
 * Reworked a lot of code related to time parsing and formatting, e.g. proper support for language independent parsing of YYYY-MM-DD ordered dates
 * Continued working on the new Special:SetLabelDescriptionAliases
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Sunday March 22: Wikipedia Day NYC Celebration and Mini-Conference
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)