User talk:Jdforrester/Archive 9

What is Talk Page Theatre? Come find out!
Please join us in downtown San Francisco!



Come find out what "Talk Page Theatre" is all about! The last Wednesday evening of every other month, wiki enthusiasts gather at Bay Area WikiSalon to collaborate, mingle, and learn about new projects and ideas.  We allow time for informal conversation and working on articles. Newcomers and experienced wiki users are encouraged to attend. Free Wi-Fi is available so bring your editing devices. We will have beverages (including beer and wine) plus light snacks. We will be at the NEW Wikimedia Foundation offices! w00t!!!  Please note: You should RSVP here, and bring a photo ID that matches your registration name. This also helps us figure out how much food and drink to bring in.  For further details, see: Wikipedia:Bay Area WikiSalon, November 2017  See you soon! ,, and | ( Subscribe/Unsubscribe to this talk page notice ) | MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:30, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017
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 * Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017

 

WikidataCon Berlin 28–9 October 2017
Under the heading rerum causas cognescere, the first ever Wikidata conference got under way in the Tagesspiegel building with two keynotes, One was on YAGO, about how a knowledge base conceived ten years ago if you assume automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished: the mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, to be taken off the hands of its author Magnus Manske by the WMF; a Wikibase incubator site is on its way. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development on Wikidata is now not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate automated compilation of dictionaries. And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops, through to 11 pm on Saturday. Wikidata applies to GLAM work via metadata. It may be used in education, raises issues such as author disambiguation, and lends itself to different types of graphical display and reuse. Many millions of SPARQL queries are run on the site every day. Over the summer a large open science bibliography has come into existence there.

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

Links

 * Wikidata statistics
 * I4OC progress in its first year, with 47% of scientific citation data now open (announced two days ago)
 * The flowering ORCID, Magnus Manske blogpost on identifying authors of scientific papers
 * @querybook, a Twitter feed devoted to SPARQL queries
 * Massive progress on Wikidata coverage of the UK parliament
 * Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM

Editor. Please leave feedback for him. 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) 10:02, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
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December 13: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC
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Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017
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 * Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017

 

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

Behind this achievement are a technical advance (fatameh), and bots that do the lifting. Much more than dry migration of metadata is potentially involved, however. If paper A cites paper B, both papers having an item, a link can be created on Wikidata, and the information presented to both human readers, and machines. This cross-linking is one of the most significant aspects of the scientific literature, and now a long-sought open version is rapidly being built up. The effort for the lifting of copyright restrictions on citation data of this kind has had real momentum behind it during 2017. WikiCite and the I4OC have been pushing hard, with the result that on CrossRef over 50% of the citation data is open. Now the holdout publishers are being lobbied to release rights on citations.

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

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

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



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) 14:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
 * WikidataCon: Giving more people more access to more knowledge, report by Peter Kraker of Open Knowledge Maps
 * This is a story of my knowledge adventure in New Zealand moths via Wikicommons, Wikipedia and Wikidata, @SiobhanLeachman
 * Wikidata and Arabic dialects, research paper, DOI: 10.1109/AICCSA.2017.115
 * c:Commons:British Library/Mechanical Curator collection/georeferencing status, Mechanical Curator project on Commons hits 50K maps milestone
 * Historical dataset on the provenance of Wikipedia text: Who wrote this?, by Tilman Bayer, WMF blogpost
 * "Anyone can edit", not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap (PDF), journal paper, Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman
 * Alpha Zero’s "Alien" Chess Shows the Power, and the Peculiarity, of AI, MIT Technology Review, by Will Knight, December 8, 2017
 * }

New Year's resolution: Write more articles for Women in Red!
--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:13, 27 December 2017 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018
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 * 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
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Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
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 * Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

 

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

Wikidata as Hub
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
 * }

February 21: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC
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SFMOMA Edit-a-Thon in San Francisco, March 8
You're invited to an Art+Feminism Edit-a-Thon at SFMOMA in San Francisco on Thursday March 8, 5-9 pm. It'll be at 151 Third Street, 2nd floor, free to the public. Everyone is welcome to participate in an evening of communal updating of Wikipedia entries on subjects related to gender, art, and feminism. (This message is from User:Dreamyshade. You can subscribe/unsubscribe to San Francisco event talk page notices here.) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:58, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
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 * 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
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