User talk:Ocaasi (WMF)

Please leave me a message below:

Your message here!
FYI: Wikipedia talk:De Gruyter and de:Wikipedia: De Gruyter Greets --Informationswiedergutmachung (talk) 23:40, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Hey thanks for the heads up. Saehrimnir is coordinating there and it looks like signups are going well.  They should be sent out soon, hopefully by New Year's.  Best, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Partnership with French paid journal sources
Good evening,

In France, there are ongoing experiments by journalists to free themselves of the advertisement business and to run paid pure player journals.

Mediapart uses this model since 2008 and has recently been joined by a project started on Kickstarter, by experimented French journalists from serious background, fr:Hexagones. The first has proven in several French affairs to be a valuable source. The last wants to provide a source more oriented to quality investigation than to buzz news.

I would like to approach these two medias to offer a Library partnership.

For that, I would first like to know if you have a grid of the arguments (better content and verifiability for Wikipedia, more external links and usage increase for the partner) to use for such approach.

Secondly, I would also like to know if I got a positive answer, if web newspapers enters in the scope of the Library project, or if only archives of web journal enters in scope. --Dereckson (talk) 22:44, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Dereckson! We've just updated our partner promotional messaging.  You can view/use/copy/adapt it here: .  Any reliable sources are within the scope of the project, definitely including web newspapers.  Thanks so much for inquiring and let me know if you have any questions or progress or success!  Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

De Gruyter data protection
Hi can u answer us on German WP what are exactly the data protection conditions. Thx.--Sanandros (talk) 05:44, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I've replied there. Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia Library
Hi, I notice that Research coordinators are needed for the Wikipedia library and I would love to help by becoming one. I have access to Questia so Ibelieve I could do the job. Thanks.  Uhlan  talk  00:26, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Uhlan. Thanks so much for your offer.  I'm excited to have you on as a new Research Coordinator.  I'm excited to be working with you! Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you and your team!

 * That is so kind User:JimRenge! It indeed takes a team and I want to share this wholeheartedly with User:Astinson (WMF), User:Nikkimaria, and User:PEarley (WMF).  Best wishes from all of us this holiday.  I hope you enjoy it.  Best, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 21:22, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

London Times archival access
I don't know if anyone's approached Gale about access to their archive of the London Times, but I would really like access as it's a very good reference to British military and naval promotions and appointments. I believe that most editors in the UK can get access through their public libraries, but that leaves most non-academic users outside the UK in the lurch. I believe that the New York Public Library has a subscription so that might be another avenue to be explored.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 18:11, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the suggestion Sturmvogel. We have unsuccessfully tried to get LT before, but I will add it to our ongoing outreach list.  We are also always tracking suggestions at The_Wikipedia_Library/Journals/Requests in case other ideas cross your mind.  Cheers! Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 00:35, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Partner/Outreach Coordinators
Hi Jake - I see that the Wikipedia Library needs Partner and Outreach coordinators. What do those jobs entail? - Thanks; LeoRomero (talk) 19:00, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi ! Thanks so much for expressing interest.
 * Partner coordinators help out with contacting potential donors--publishers, databases, university presses, journals, etc. We have pretty refined brochures and packaging about our programs but it still takes time to make contact and see those initial talks through to a donation.  We are ready to train someone comfortable with professional, real-world outreach skills so we can broaden the number and scope of our partnerships.
 * Outreach coordinators help us connect with and communicate to the external world of institutions, organizations, groups, and events. This involves micro-tasks like reposting relevant twitter content from @WikiLibrary and on Facebook, medium tasks discovering stories from among journal access recipients for the Wikimedia Blog or working on the TWL Books & Bytes newsletter, high-impact conference coordination such as submitting proposals for major events where TWL would present, and advanced tasks such as writing long-form opinion pieces about the role of Wikipedia in a changing landscape of digital reference.
 * For both positions we would be ready to gradually introduce you to increasingly relevant and challenging projects so you could grow into them. We are learning as you are learning about how to scale our work and would be excited to experiment with you in a role that felt well-scoped and interesting for your background and leanings.  Let me know what you think!  Please feel free to email me at: jorlowitz@undefinedwikimedia.org if you'd like to chat off-wiki. Cheers! Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks Jake, email's on the way! LeoRomero (talk) 19:36, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

ProQuest Congressional
Hi, Ocaasi. Wehwalt suggested that I leave a message here on your talk page. I was wondering if there is some way for me to gain access to the website ProQuest Congressional. Most of my work on Wikipedia involves coins and coin legislation, which is covered in-depth on ProQuest Congressional, including laws, proposed laws and Congressional hearings. Currently, Wehwalt has access to the website through his Wikipedia partnership with George Mason University, so he has been able to supply some absolutely invaluable information to me, but his access will expire shortly. Do you know if the Wikipedia Library will at some point begin a partnership with ProQuest Congressional, or if there is another way that I could gain access as an active editor? Thank you in advance for your time.-RHM22 (talk) 20:17, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi RHM22. Indeed, ProQuest is very valuable and also huge.  We are starting with a pilot donation for their Literature Online program.  If that is successful we will aim to receive a much broader 'package' including sources like Proquest Congressional.  To be very honest, this will take up to a year, so your best bet for now is still WP:RX.  Thanks for the feedback and happy researching!  Cheers, Jake Ocaasit &#124; c 20:20, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the extremely fast reply, Ocaasi! I understand that it will take some time. ProQuest is indeed an enormous resource, as even just the Congressional archives are incredibly massive. I believe I have everything needed for now, but I will probably require Congressional records for future projects, so I will enquire at the noticeboard if so. Thanks again.-RHM22 (talk) 20:23, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

fa.wiki
Hello dear Jake, I'm working on Farsi branch of The Wikipedia Library in fa.wiki. Please creat your account in our wiki. I'm translate and creat main and about page in this wiki. we are in touch with Patrick. Thank you Darafsh Kaviyani  (Talk) 09:19, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

It is a pleasure
It was a pleasure to talk to you in the video chat. You are the first WMF staff member, let alone Wikipedian, that I visually communicated with. :-). If I have any further questions regarding IA, I will let you know.—cyberpower Chat:Limited Access 17:10, 14 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Cyberpower, the please was all mine. It's great to have you in the movement contributing so much!  I'll update you on our IA talks in late August.  Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

A question
Reading the list of paid databases for which Wikipedians may request free accounts prompted me to consider a related thought. Does Wikipedia make available a list of free online resources for use in research? I have been writing and editing articles for more than a year, and I haven't seen one.

The donated accounts are a great help, and I appreciate the ones that I was fortunate to receive this year. The number of accounts, however, is limited. Meanwhile, some free resources offer specialized searches (such as The Official Academy Awards Database) and searches of publications not included in either newspaper databases or academic journals (such as Media History Digital Library).

As I have written, edited, and done research, I have compiled a list of free resources that have been useful to me to varying degrees. I suspect that many others who work on material on Wikipedia have done the same.

I wonder whether a directory-style list of such resources could be compiled and made available somewhere on Wikipedia. I think it would be especially helpful to newcomers who perhaps are familiar with little more than using basic search engines for online research. It could also be good for those of us who have some experience; perhaps we might pick up a few sources to add to our own favorites.

I thought that your running of The Wikipedia Library might make you the best person for considering this question/proposal. I am interested in your thoughts of whether my idea is feasible and/or desirable. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:17, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Hey Eddie Blick! Great question.  Yes, we do: 1) WP:TWL/OA is an index of useful open access sources and projects; 2) WP:TWL/Resources is a more comprehensive directory of generally useful free (but not necessarily open acess) resources.  We even have a team of Research coordinators working on that, and you can sign up to be one if you like :)  I hope this helps, I like your ideas, and feel free to reach out any time! Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 16:00, 9 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your reply. I wasn't aware of those two sites; I'll take a look and find out what is available on them. I will also look at the information about being a research coordinator and see whether I might be able to contribute in that way. I appreciate your help. Eddie Blick (talk) 19:22, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Request for assistance
Hello : Today I have sent you an e mail asking for you counseling and assistance. Please take the time to look at it. ThanksRudy235 (talk) 00:19, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

How long is the Pete Forsyth panel discussion tonight
Thanks. Cheers! 20:55, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
 * 6pm-7:30pm California time. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-cF7433aT4 Cheers, Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 21:14, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
 * See you there. Cheers!  22:42, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

 * Hi Ocaasi (WMF)! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
 * The Teahouse new editor help space
 * Wikipedia Help pages

-- 11:04, Sunday, November 15, 2015 (UTC)

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

 * Hi Ocaasi (WMF)! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
 * The Teahouse new editor help space
 * Wikipedia Help pages

-- 22:58, Thursday, November 19, 2015 (UTC)

Telegram
-- samtar whisper 18:58, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Phabricator
Hi Ocaasi, I dropped you a line a little while back - just letting you know I got a project created on Phabricator for tracking bugs more effectively! I've added all the old ones on there - please become a member so you can get updates and notifications :) -- samtar whisper 19:02, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

My kudos to Nikkimaria and your thanks
Well, it is Nikkimaria and (I guess) you who should be praised for granting us the access, not me ;).

Zezen (talk) 20:59, 4 April 2016 (UTC), who has already researched in depth 19th c. Liberia migration policies using this resource and found a fascinating long-forgotten book from 1903 about this very subject, when a spade was still called a spade...

APPRECIATION Hey I just love the Wikipedia Adventure. I wonder where do you get such ideas. Must tell me the place!

Amy2563 (talk) 17:22, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks you for the award
I am taking up the work/pleasure of editing in wikipedia (en español/spanish) and I found The Cure Award. It's very motivating, now I will put more effort to continue in this knowledge sharing adventure. I'm studying now to validate my doctor of medicine degree in USA, and editing Wikipedia is part of my studying routine. Thanks again, greetings, --Behemot leviatan (talk) 02:01, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Help needed for OAbot
Hi Jake! Can you please see Help_talk:Citation_Style_1 and lead the relevant discussion at WP:TWL? Cheers, − Pintoch (talk) 17:35, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

You've got mail!
--Cameron11598 (Talk) 01:42, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

Teahouse question unanswered
Someone had an idea for The Wikipedia Library but didn't get a response here. Thanks.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  19:25, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I replied! Best, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 15:35, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Okay, where is the response, because I checked the Teahouse archives and the talk page of the person who asked for help.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •
 * Funny, I found another response I left and confused it for the question you asked about. Replied new now on the user's Talk page.  Thanks Vchimpanzee! Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Page for Litwin Books, LLC
Hi Jake! Good meeting you at DLF in Milwaukee. As you suggested, I created a page for Litwin Books and Library Juice Press in my sandbox page. You had offered to review it. Thanks! Rlitwin (talk) 16:23, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Hi Rlitwin! I added the draft template to the top of your page.  Just click the blue button to submit it for review.  I can't review it myself because of my conflict of interest with WMF staff and library publishers, but we have a team of volunteers who do just that!  Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 19:39, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Great - Thank you. Rlitwin (talk)

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

 * Hi Ocaasi (WMF)! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission.  I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Start Page
 * The Wikipedia Adventure Lounge
 * The Teahouse new editor help space
 * Wikipedia Help pages

-- 18:10, Wednesday, April 19, 2017 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 1 – 14 June 2017
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:33, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 2 – 13 July 2017
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 * Facto Post – Issue 2 – 13 July 2017

 

Editorial: Core models and topics
Wikimedians interest themselves in everything under the sun — and then some. Discussion on "core topics" may, oddly, be a fringe activity, and was popular here a decade ago.

The situation on Wikidata today does resemble the halcyon days of 2006 of the English Wikipedia. The growth is there, and the reliability and stylistic issues are not yet pressing in on the project. Its Berlin conference at the end of October will have five years of achievement to celebrate. Think Wikimania Frankfurt 2005.

Progress must be made, however, on referencing "core facts". This has two parts: replacing "imported from Wikipedia" in referencing by external authorities; and picking out statements, such as dates and family relationships, that must not only be reliable but be seen to be reliable.

In addition, there are many properties on Wikidata lacking a clear data model. An emerging consensus may push to the front key sourcing and biomedical properties as requiring urgent attention. Wikidata's "manual of style" is currently distributed over thousands of discussions. To make it coalesce, work on such a core is needed.

Links

 * WikiFactMine project pages on Wikidata, including a SPARQL library (in development).
 * Fatameh tool for adding items on scientific papers to Wikidata, by User: T Arrow. It has made a big recent impact. Offline for maintenance as we go to press, it is expected back soon.
 * As of July 2017, Zotero has a Wikidata translator. A personal Zotero library acts as an intermediary in managing and storing citation metadata.
 * GLAM Newsletter June 2017, Wikidata report. This is a good monthly round-up to follow, and welcomes contributions.
 * Exciting and Impressive! The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) was launched in April: Infodocket on the first three months.
 * Olivia Solon in San Francisco, the net neutrality protest matters, opinion piece in The Guardian'' on 11 July.

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Facto Post – Issue 3 – 11 August 2017
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 * Facto Post – Issue 3 – 11 August 2017

 

Wikimania report
Interviewed by Facto Post at the hackathon, Lydia Pintscher of Wikidata said that the most significant recent development is that Wikidata now accounts for one third of Wikimedia edits. And the essential growth of human editing. Impressive development work on Internet-in-a-Box featured in the WikiMedFoundation annual conference on Thursday. Hardware is Raspberry Pi, running Linux and the Kiwix browser. It can operate as a wifi hotspot and support a local intranet in parts of the world lacking phone signal. The medical use case is for those delivering care, who have smartphones but have to function in clinics in just such areas with few reference resources. Wikipedia medical content can be served to their phones, and power supplied by standard lithium battery packages.

Yesterday Katherine Maher unveiled the draft Wikimedia 2030 strategy, featuring a picturesque metaphor, "roads, bridges and villages". Here "bridges" could do with illustration. Perhaps it stands for engineering round or over the obstacles to progress down the obvious highways. Internet-in-a-Box would then do fine as an example.

"Bridging the gap" explains a take on that same metaphor, with its human component. If you are at Wikimania, come talk to WikiFactMine at its stall in the Community Village, just by the 3D-printed display for Bassel Khartabil; come hear talk at 3 pm today in Drummond West, Level 3.

Link

 * Plaudit for the Medical Wikipedia app, content that is loaded into Internet-In-A-Box with other material, such as per-country documentation.

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Facto Post – Issue 4 – 18 September 2017
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 * Facto Post – Issue 4 – 18 September 2017

 

Editorial: Conservation data
The IUCN Red List update of 14 September led with a threat to North American ash trees. The International Union for Conservation of Nature produces authoritative species listings that are peer-reviewed. Examples used as metonyms for loss of species and biodiversity, and |theoretical discussion of extinction rates, are the usual topics covered in the media to inform us about this area. But actual data matters. Clearly, conservation work depends on decisions about what should be done, and where. While animals, particularly mammals, are photogenic, species numbers run into millions. Plant species lie at the base of typical land-based food chains, and vegetation is key to the habitats of most animals.

ContentMine dictionaries, for example as tabulated at d:Wikidata:WikiFactMine/Dictionary list, enable detailed control of queries about endangered species, in their taxonomic context. To target conservation measures properly, species listings running into the thousands are not what is needed: range maps showing current distribution are. Between the will to act, and effective steps taken, the services of data handling are required. There is now no reason at all why Wikidata should not take up the burden.

Links

 * What Makes a Good Collaborative Knowledge Graph: Group Composition and Quality in Wikidata (paywall)
 * Wikimedia and the free knowledge ecosystem by Maria Cruz
 * Another Year Again: 2017 this time (long), blog by Joe Wass of CrossRef
 * Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, blog by User:David Gerard
 * WikiTribune in beta

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Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017
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 * Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017

 

Editorial: Annotations
Annotation is nothing new. The glossators of medieval Europe annotated between the lines, or in the margins of legal manuscripts of texts going back to Roman times, and created a new discipline. In the form of web annotation, the idea is back, with texts being marked up inline, or with a stand-off system. Where could it lead? ContentMine operates in the field of text and data mining (TDM), where annotation, simply put, can add value to mined text. It now sees annotation as a possible advance in semi-automation, the use of human judgement assisted by bot editing, which now plays a large part in Wikidata tools. While a human judgement call of yes/no, on the addition of a statement to Wikidata, is usually taken as decisive, it need not be. The human assent may be passed into an annotation system, and stored: this idea is standard on Wikisource, for example, where text is considered "validated" only when two different accounts have stated that the proof-reading is correct. A typical application would be to require more than one person to agree that what is said in the reference translates correctly into the formal Wikidata statement. Rejections are also potentially useful to record, for machine learning.

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

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

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

Links

 * Jon Udell, blogpost Annotating to extract findings from scientific papers, 15 December 2015
 * TDM and Libraries, Virginia Tech report
 * Magnus Manske, The Whelming: Scaling up Wikidata editing
 * OCLC and Internet Archive collaborate to expand library access to digital collections, metadata and linking exchange
 * GLOW week in November: Wikidata workshops on politician info

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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

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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
 * }

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)
 * <div style="color: #936c29; font-family: Copperplate, 'Copperplate Gothic Light', serif">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
 * }

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
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 * Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

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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
 * }

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
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 * Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

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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
 * }

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
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 * Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

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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
 * }

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
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 * Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

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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)

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

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

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

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Invitation to participate in a discussion about publicly disclosing subscribers of TWL resources
Hi, I have started a discussion over our Village pump with the aim of maintaining a public list of all editors who are granted access to any TWL resource. Your thoughts and opinions on the proposal are welcome:-) Regards, &#x222F; <b style="color:#070">WBG</b> converse

not sure if its of much value, but wrote an diversity and inclusion essay here, if youre interested
Any thoughts appreciated :) -- [E.3]  [chat2]  [me]   18:36, 13 August 2019 (UTC)