User talk:Philosopher/Archive 25

The Signpost: 11 March 2013

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 10:26, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Highlights from February 2013
Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for February 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement About &middot; Subscribe/unsubscribe &middot; Distributed via Global message delivery, 21:20, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Wikimedia Foundation highlights
 * Legal victory for Wikivoyage and free knowledge
 * Mobile watchlist available
 * Language Engineering team attends open source conferences in India
 * Data and Trends
 * Financials
 * Other movement highlights
 * Commons Picture of the Year 2012 contest results announced
 * New ombudsman commission
 * Open database of public art in Sweden

Wikidata weekly summary #49
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Global message delivery 18:37, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Development
 * Design improvements to the SetClaim API module
 * More work on implementing the simple inclusion syntax that will be 1 way to access Wikidata data on Wikipedia
 * More work on Lua (the second way to access Wikidata data on Wikipedia)
 * Added parser page property to hold entity id in client. This fixes:
 * 45037 - don’t show edit link if noexternallanglinks has suppressed all Wikidata links
 * 44536 - have the edit link go directly to the Q### pages, instead of Special:ItemByTitle which shall make the link be more reliable and work for all namespaces
 * Selenium tests for deleted-property-handling
 * Selenium tests for multiline references
 * Selenium tests for add-sitelinks-from-client
 * Selenium tests for Entity-Selector-as-Searchbox
 * Selenium tests for language-table
 * Implemented in-process caching for entities
 * Lua support to access the repo data and implement getEntity (so you can use stuff like entity = mw.wikibase.getEntity("Q1459") in Lua modules)
 * rebuildTermSearchKey is now ready for production (this still needs to be run but once done it will make search case-insensitive)
 * Improved error reports from the API
 * Ground work for better edit summaries from the API
 * Added a table of content to item pages
 * Added debug functionality to be able to investigate why it takes longer than it should for Wikidata changes to show up on recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia
 * Finished implementation of References-UI
 * Implemented GUID generator in JavaScript
 * Worked on fixing a bug related to deleted properties where the UI would display wrong information
 * Minor fixes/additions to the JS datamodel implementation
 * Minor bugfixes in Statements-UI
 * More work on RDF export
 * Discussions/Press
 * When to autoconfirm users
 * More property proposals
 * Events
 * Bibliothek und Information
 * 3rd Media Web Symposium
 * upcoming: Wikidata trifft Archäologie
 * upcoming: SMWCon
 * Log of latest office hour on IRC (in German)
 * We’ll be at the Amsterdam Hackathon
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * New features/bugfixes on wikidata.org are planned for March 20
 * Lua roll-out! You’ll be able to use it soon to access Wikidata data on Wikipedia. Here's two introductory blogposts:
 * The new pope didn’t go unnoticed on Wikidata either
 * Someone sent the dev team a cake! <3
 * Want an easy way to add authority control data? Check this
 * We crossed item ID 7000000
 * We now have over 4000 active editors \o/
 * Some more stats based on a database dump from end of February
 * Reasonator got a few more goodies
 * Did you know?
 * If you add a Babel box to your user page Wikidata will show you items and descriptions in other languages you speak as well without you having to switch the language
 * Want to know which items use a certain property? Try the “what links here” link on a property page
 * Open Tasks for You
 * Help translate Wikidata/Deployment Questions
 * Hack on one of these

New U.S. legislative data project
Hi there, Philosopher! I'm working with a group of Wikipedians on a Legislative Data Workshop to explore ways of using legislative data to enhance Wikipedia, and since it's a subject area you've been active with, I figured you might like to know of it. We've set up a provisional WikiProject at WikiProject United States Federal Government Legislative Data (WP:LEGDATA) where we're developing new ideas, so if you'd like to offer your views or help out, we'd love to have you join! Cheers, WWB (talk) 18:47, 15 March 2013 (UTC)


 * That sounds very interesting. Unfortunately, I am unable to contribute to Wikipedia regularly at the moment.  When I become available again, I'll certainly take a look at it! – Philosopher Let us reason together. 20:38, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Purpose of Wiki should be to reduce problems while creating solutions. And to properly value solutions and equitably distribute the value of the solutions.
Please put in big letters on the main page and create the "idea combinatory solutions chain" where people post solutions and they are added to one of three feeds, solution, problem, or potential in their respective place based on logic with the fundament  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markdumasjr83 (talk • contribs) 15:19, 16 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Hello. Have you visited the Help desk, Teahouse, or Village pump?  These are noticeboards that are designed to help users with various questions.  Additionally, there is a general reference portal linked from the sidebar on the left-hand side of the page with links to more resources.  I hope these help! – Philosopher Let us reason together. 20:40, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 March 2013

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 10:13, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #50
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Global message delivery 00:21, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Development
 * Rolled out new code on wikidata.org. The new stuff you probably care about is:
 * Improved references. They can now have multiple lines. This should make references much more useful. You can now have one reference with for example values for each of the properties "book", "author", "page" to describe one source.
 * Fixed the prev/next links in diff view (45821)
 * d:Special:EntitiesWithoutLabel now lets you filter by language and entity type
 * Widget to add language links on the Wikipedias directly: added setting to enable/disable it per wiki and made it available for logged-in users only
 * Widget to add language links on the Wikipedias directly: improved layout / size
 * Made it so that the “edit links” link on Wikipedia is also shown when the corresponding item only has a link to this one language and no other languages
 * Submitted improved Apache config patch to make wikidata.org always redirect to www.wikidata.org, which is awaiting code review and deployment.
 * Improved the script that is responsible for taking Wikidata changes to the Wikipedias
 * Added a few ways to better debug the script responsible for taking Wikidata changes to the Wikipedias. This should help with investigating why some changes take way to long to show up on the Wikipedias.
 * Started work on automatically adding edited items to the user’s watchlist (according to preferences)
 * Finished script for rebuilding search keys, so we can finally get case insensitive matches in a lot of places
 * Support for multi-line references in diff view
 * Selenium tests for inclusion syntax
 * Improved parser function (that will be used to access Wikidata data on the Wikipedias) to accept property ID or label
 * Increased isolation of data model component to increase clarity and visibility of bad dependencies
 * Worked on schema access in the SQLStore (of the query component)
 * Discussions/Press
 * Denny had a look at some data about Wikidata
 * Events
 * 3rd Media Web Symposium 2013
 * Wikidata trifft Archäologie
 * SMWCon Spring NYC
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Join us for the Amsterdam and Wikimania hackathon and Wikimania
 * Too many items with the same label and no description? Terminator helps you hunt them all down and clean them up. Also check out the top 1000
 * Interested in the distribution of books by genre on Wikidata and similar things? WikidataStats can help
 * d:Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot needs input from more people
 * Detailed list of bots
 * Collecting information about creating a bot
 * We’ve crossed Q8000000
 * Did you know?
 * When you edit a statement there is a little wheel in front of the text field. This lets you choose between “custom value”, “unknown value” and “no value”. “No value” means that we know that the given property has no value, e.g. Elizabeth I of England had no spouse. “Unknown value” means that the property has a value, but it is unknown which one -- e.g. Pope Linus most certainly had a year of birth, but it is unknown to us.
 * Open Tasks for You
 * Hack on one of these
 * Still looking for the right way to contribute for you? Have a look at d:Wikidata:Contribute

The Signpost: 25 March 2013

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 02:03, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Expanded
Greetings! You have been randomly selected to receive an invitation to participate in the request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Expanded. Should you wish to respond to the invitation, your contribution to this discussion will be very much appreciated! If in doubt, please see suggestions for responding. If you do not wish to receive these types of notices, please remove your name from Feedback request service. — RFC&#32;bot (talk) 19:15, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #51
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
 * Development
 * The first 11 Wikipedias can now include data from Wikidata in their articles (If you want to see it in action see the infobox at it:Torino)
 * Worked on automatic summaries for statements
 * Worked on making properties accessible from the client using their label so you can use instead of  for example
 * Made qualifiers ready for the next deployment (Please test. See details further down.)
 * Selenium tests for qualifiers
 * Fixed some issues related to QUnit testing
 * Worked on improved handling and code design of multiple snak lists in the UI (qualifiers, references)
 * Discussions/Press
 * Denny wrote down how we’re planning to support queries on Wikidata. Feedback welcome.
 * Proposal for a vandalism policy
 * Now that improvements for references have been deployed here’s a discussion on the best way to use them. (You can see an example of how it could be used in the source for “CAS registry number” on Q153)
 * Should Wikidata have featured items?
 * RFC about restricting the ability to create properties to some users
 * Heise.de reporting about deployment of phase 2 on the first 11 Wikipedias
 * Report about a collaboration event between Wikipedians and archeologists
 * Events
 * Newline 2013
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * We’re currently carefully monitoring performance after the deployment of phase 2 on the first 11 Wikipedias. There seem to be a few small issues. As soon as they are resolved we'll deploy on English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are planned to follow very soon after that.
 * Bye and a big thank you to Anja, Silke, Jens and John who are leaving the development team at the end of the month and will work on other cool things. You’ll be missed!
 * Ever had any doubt about the possibilities of Wikidata? Talk to Wiri!
 * We worked on reducing the time it takes for Wikidata edits to show up in the Wikipedias and made some progress. Daniel posted an analysis
 * We started running a script on the database in order to make search on Wikidata case-insensitive. This should be finished in a few days and then search should be more useful.
 * In addition to the above we have rolled out a new search box that suggests items. This should also make finding things on Wikidata a lot easier for you.
 * We’re making some progress with Internet Explorer 8 support but there are a lot of issues with it (some outside our control). It’s unclear at the moment how much we can improve it still without spending an unjustified amount of time on it. You can follow the progress at 44228
 * Edits are now auto-confirmed for users with more than 50 edits and account age 4 days: 46461
 * Do you need old-style interwiki links for a sister project for example? This is for you
 * The Wikimedia Foundation applied as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code again. We have proposed some Wikidata projects for students to take up if the Foundation is accepted again. At least 2 other organisations that applied also propose Wikidata ideas. More details on that once we know which organisations are accepted.
 * Denny hacked together a tree of life based on data from Wikidata
 * Wikidata was added to wikipulse
 * A template to retrieve data from Wikidata if no local value is set
 * Did you know?
 * If you need to merge two items d:Help:Merge explains how
 * Open Tasks for You
 * See note at the end of this weekly summary
 * Help test qualifiers (Wikidata/Notes/Data model primer - see also example statements there) on the test wiki so we can roll it out with the next release
 * Did you file a bug report for Wikidata or did someone else do it for you? Please take a minute to check if it is still valid. (Thanks for filing it btw!)
 * Add some missing descriptions to those items with the same label?
 * Hack on one of these

Could I have 2 mins of your time? As I’ll be working on some other projects for Wikimedia Germany as well from now on the time I can spend on Wikidata will be reduced. This means I’ll have to figure out what is useful to spend time on. If you’re reading this could you let me know for example on this discussion page? Also if you have ideas how to improve the weekly summaries please post them. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Global message delivery 20:38, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 01 April 2013

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 16:23, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #52
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
 * Development
 * The first year is over. Thank you everyone for being amazing and helping to build Wikidata and making it more than we could possibly have hoped for already. <3
 * Put a lot of work into improved support for Internet Explorer 8
 * Worked on improving recent changes code in client
 * Finished valueview refactoring. Created new extension “ValueView”
 * Implemented string formatter
 * Discussions/Press
 * RFC for defining the bureaucrats role on Wikidata
 * RFC about statements for items related to software
 * Events
 * upcoming: GLAM-Wiki 2013
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Deployment of phase 2 on English Wikipedia is currently planned for April 8. The remaining Wikipedias are scheduled for April 10. As usual this might change if we run into problems along the way.
 * There is now a page showing the current lag for changes propagating to the Wikipedias so they can show up in watchlists and recent changes for example. This should ideally be in the range of a few minutes. Right now it is higher because of some abnormally high bot activity but decreasing. Should be down to a few minutes soon.
 * There’s now a badge you can add to Wikipedia articles to indicate there is data about it on Wikidata
 * We hit Q10000000
 * A Wikidata item in the wild ;-)
 * Did you know?
 * There are a number of task forces that take care of specific jobs or topics on Wikidata
 * You can get database dumps to play with
 * There are a lot of stats about Wikidata on http://stats.wikimedia.org
 * Open Tasks for You
 * Hit a random item and add a missing source?
 * Hack on one of these

Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Global message delivery 02:30, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 April 2013

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 10:47, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #53
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
 * Development
 * Got some external professional review of our code and architecture and started working on their feedback
 * Worked on reducing the dispatch lag (the time it takes for changes on Wikidata to be sent to the Wikipedias for display in watchlist, recent changes and to purge affected pages)
 * Worked on using Redis for job queue to improve the lag situation even further
 * Created new Wikibase Query extension for phase 3 functionality
 * Autocomments & Autosummaries for SetClaim module
 * Worked on the GeoCoordinate parser
 * Events/Press
 * right now: GLAM-WIKI 2013
 * Discussions
 * The RFC about bureaucrats was closed
 * RfC about policy for translation admins
 * We need feedback from contributors working on references addition or having tried to add references to statements. Please comment about your problems or your trials at d:Help:Sources
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Deployment of phase 2 on the remaining Wikipedias was delayed because of a high lag of changes being propagated to the Wikipedias. The lag has been reduced considerably now and is going down even more. The new date for deployment will not be next week because there are other large changes on Wikimedia infrastructure scheduled that we do not want to interfere with. It will hopefully happen very soon after that though.
 * Next code update on wikidata.org is planned for Wednesday. This should include qualifiers and bugfixes.
 * There will probably be a short outage/read-only for wikidata.org on Tuesday (database is being switched to MariaDB)
 * If you're a student and interested in coding on Wikidata consider applying for Google Summer of Code.
 * There is a new user right: property creators
 * There is now a page to request deletion of a property
 * We now have Bureaucrats
 * Reasonator was improved and extended (1 2)
 * Open Tasks for You
 * Hack on one of these
 * Help draft the next weekly summary

Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome. <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; Global message delivery 23:27, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Highlights from March 2013
<div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for March 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">About &middot; Subscribe/unsubscribe &middot; Distributed via Global message delivery, 00:00, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Wikimedia Foundation highlights
 * Lua speeds up pages and empowers Wikimedia's technical contributors
 * Mobile uploads launch for apps and the mobile web
 * First Individual Engagement Grants awarded to innovative community projects
 * Wikipedia Zero wins award, reaches new users
 * Ombudsmen meet, might expand mandate
 * Data and Trends
 * Financials
 * Other movement highlights
 * Phase 2 of Wikidata is becoming available on Wikipedia
 * Evaluating the success of the "Mediagrant" project to document nature reserves
 * WikiAfrica offers physical space for Wikimedia contributions in Cameroon

The Signpost: 15 April 2013
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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 23:33, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #54
<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; Global message delivery 22:52, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Development
 * Dispatch lag is now down to 0 so changes should show up very quickly on the Wikipedias in watchlists and recent changes
 * wikidata.org now always redirects to www.wikidata.org. This should among other things solve the issue where people were not able to edit when on wikidata.org (45005)
 * Fixed weird blocked-user/protected-page handling in UI (45140)
 * Final meetings for the external professional review of our code and architecture. They were quite happy with the quality of the codebase and gave useful tips for improvements
 * Worked on automatic summaries for editing claims
 * Investigation of different JavaScript frameworks dealing with date and time
 * Worked on using Redis and the job queue for change notifications to clients
 * Work on the storage code for answering queries
 * Events/Press
 * GLAM-WIKI 2013
 * upcoming: office hour on IRC about sources
 * upcoming: Opensource Treffen
 * upcoming: intro to Wikidata at the British Library
 * Discussions
 * RfC about references and sources
 * RfC about local oversighters
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Deployment of phase 2 (infoboxes) on English Wikipedia is planned for April 22. All remaining Wikipedias are planned for April 24.
 * Qualifiers are available now. In the same update several bugs have been fixed mainly related to Internet Explorer 8. At the same time search has been made case-insensitive. More details here.
 * d:Wikidata:Notability has been completely rewritten
 * Cool task force page: d:Wikidata:Video games task force
 * List of Wikipedia articles that still have language links in the wiki text
 * Open Tasks for You
 * Hack on one of these

Pending release of Notifications
Hey :). I'm dropping you a note because you have signed up for the Notifications, or Echo, newsletter.

If all goes according to plan, we should be launching Echo on en-wiki either tomorrow, or next Tuesday - I'll drop a followup tomorrow when we know what's happening. Should the launch succeed, we'll begin the process of triaging bugs and gathering feedback on what features work, what cause problems, and what we should do next; I hope you'll help us out on these fronts by leaving any comments you might have on the talkpage.

Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:00, 24 April 2013 (UTC)