User talk:Richard Nevell (WMUK)/2016–2018

Senghenydd
Hi Richard, I hope all is well with you. Just a brief note that the Senghenydd colliery disaster article is now an FA, thanks to several people, not least you, and 's 'Dragon' project. Cheers – SchroCat (talk) 16:43, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
 * That's Great news! Thanks SchroCat for all your hard work on this. Congratulations.Jason.nlw (talk) 16:04, 11 April 2016 (UTC)


 * That is tremendous work, well done SchroCat! Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 09:34, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Hm
About this ... would you please explain your role here? (You can reply here) Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 17:20, 27 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Hello Jytdog. I have been helping the course leader with getting to grips with Wikipedia. My comment was made with the intention of starting a dialogue. Editors have been advising the students to use secondary sources and to consult WP:MEDRS, and I think discussing with the students which sources in particular pose issues and which are acceptable would be a very useful next step. That would help them identify which areas are fine and which need more work. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 10:23, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for replying! Your requests there and here are not reasonable to me. I spend a lot of time helping new users get oriented.  Don't get my wrong there.  Just this request in particular.  Jytdog (talk) 10:40, 28 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I understand it's easy for me to say 'can you please help' and helping new editors is time consuming. What is it about this request you object to? Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 11:08, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for asking! I went back and looked at their interactions with the editing community before I reverted that, and two of our most experienced health/med editors had already advised them they were painting with way too broad a brush. And the content they wrote was little changed and is ... unuseable.   The more I read the deeper into "oh no" i got. (I can talk about that more, but basically the content has no nuance and assumes that women have something very like estrus that determines their behavior, which is just.... ack. double ack.  really the worst kind of evolutionary psychology)  And when I started checking their refs I found they didn't cite page numbers for books, used popular media, and most aggravatingly, didn't use any PMIDs as they are instructed to, in the tutorial.  (The latter may sound petty if you don't know how we use PMID in citations, but it saves so much time  and when there are 55 refs the inefficiency of working without PMIDs is too much)
 * In general it is really unwise for students to try to work on FAs, especially in health/medicine. It is really hard to improve them.  It is possible (of course), but it takes sophistication in the subject matter not to mention WP skills.
 * While I am talking. There is something I wish the Education program would help better frame for students, just on a high conceptual level.  Students spend their whole lives producing work that is very much meant to be their own, that they present as a whole for grading.  That makes complete sense in school.  It makes no sense in Wikipedia.  Around this time we get scads of students who have created some chunk of content that they want to plop into a Wikipedia article, that takes little to no account of issues like WEIGHT or a bunch of other things.  Real editing is nothing like that.
 * I don't know if you have done any translation work (one language to another) but there is always a tension when you do that, between hewing close to the syntax and feel of the source language or writing beautifully in the target language. (For example, the Hebrew expression that we usually translate as "he became angry" is literally translatable as "his nose grew long"; you get a whole different feel if you hew closer to the source language.  Someone has actually done a whole translation of the Hebrew Bible that way.).
 * I think sometimes the Education program allows/supports/enables students working in Wikipedia to stay too close to what they know, in terms of what "schoolwork" is. I have wondered if a better model wouldn't be to clone off articles and have students improve whole articles as part of their classwork.   And leave it to the students if they want to try to implement any of the individual edits making up those improvements in Wikipedia, once they have been worked over in class.  I don't know if that has ever been kicked around.  But that is what I mean about a different notion of "schoolwork".   As it is, the editing community has to deal with these "nose grew long" kind of things that are just really abnormal - almost impossible to deal with -  for us.  And so many at once!  Anyway, enough from me.  Thank you again for asking and this was I am sure way more than what you wanted. :) Jytdog (talk) 11:36, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Hi Jytdog, rather than being too much that definitely helps me understand the situation. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:25, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your gracious reply.Jytdog (talk) 15:42, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Just want to add here that as part of the training, getting teachers and students to deal with a) whole articles and b) what the most recent and best sources say about the the whole topic, and whether the article is actually NPOV with regard to WEIGHT, and whether there is OR or everything is actually well supported... can be very engaging and high level scholarship. To do that work you need to really engage with the subject matter and the sources (and go out and find sources), weigh strength of sources and judge which are actually "best" and for what, and think critically, not only about what is in the sources but what is already presented in the article. This is all good meaty scholarly stuff and students would learn all kinds of things that way, along with getting more deeply trained in WP's mission and the policies and guidelines). Jytdog (talk) 19:34, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

WMUK AGM
I assume that this is the email you were pointing me towards, and while I'd normally be happy to lead a wikitakes I don't know yet whether I will be able to make this year's AGM in person. If I do make it, it may not be for the whole day - I have an engagement in Loughton that evening that may also have an afternoon component. Until I know details of the WMUK AGM programme I am unable to see what portion(s) of the day I'll benefit from the most, how practical and affordable travel, and thus how I will divide my day. Sorry I can't be more helpful. Thryduulf (talk) 16:51, 25 May 2016 (UTC)


 * No problem, I hope you can make the AGM but if you can't make sure to send in your proxy vote!
 * What I had in mind was the email I sent (20th May) about the training module we'd like to give a trial run. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 09:57, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't seem to have received that email... Thryduulf (talk) 10:13, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
 * That's peculiar, I've tried re-sending it. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 10:20, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

Funding for a photography
Dear Richard Nevell, I was advised by Dr. Blofeld to contact you regarding an enquiry for photographs from the Ashmolean Museum to improve content. Let me clarify my request: members of the WikiProject Ancient Egypt, most importantly user Khruner and I, have set ourselves an ambitious goal a couple of years back: to acquire and post on Wikicommons and Wikipedia at least one image per pharaoh article for pharaohs known from archaeological evidences, especially for those of the shadowy Second Intermediate Period. Thanks to Khruner's impressive illustrations (e.g., ), some contacts with itinerant Egyptologists whom we convinced to release the copyrights on their photos (e.g. ) and materials with expired copyrights in libraries (e.g. ) we managed to get pretty close to our goal. There is however a few stubborn cases that are nearly impossible to solve and this is the object of my request. Pharaoh Sekheperenre is known from a single scarab seal bearing his name, housed but not displayed in the Ashmolean Museum. The curator of the Egyptian collection gave me the exact reference of the seal in the museum catalog, from which I can order for a photography to be made by the museum, at a fee of circa 50 GBP. Provided the museum agrees to release all copyrights of the photography once taken, I wonder if it would be possible to have this fee payed by the Wikimedia foundation, so as to finally secure the image of this rare seal?&#32;Iry-Hor (talk) 16:00, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

The problem here is licensing I think, when you contacted me I thought you meant they charged a fee for you to take photographs in the museum yourself which you wanted help on. If other people take photographs and you pay them for it, that'll be difficult as they would be unlikely to put it in CC non attribut licensing, you'd need OTRS ticketing and full confirmation on that. That's something which WMUK might be less likely to support, paying people for photographs, but perhaps Richard can help you!♦ Dr. Blofeld  20:04, 3 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Iry-Hor, thanks for getting in touch, and thank you Dr. Blofeld making the suggestion. It sounds like a really interesting project, and those are some really useful photos. The first hurdle is working out whether the museum would release an image under a Creative Commons licence, and if that's clear WMUK would decide if £50 for an otherwise unreachable photo is something we'd fund. Looking at the museum's contact list, was it Liam McNamara you talked to? We would need to talk to the Publications, Filming & Licensing department. I'm happy to get in contact with them and copy you in. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 12:16, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * As a bit of background, in the past image releases from the Ashmolean have required committee approval (see GLAM/Bodleian/4th month report). Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 12:28, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Dear Richard, yes I had an email exchange with Liam McNamara, he told me, among other things, that "you should contact my colleagues in museum’s Picture Library (picture.library@ashmus.ox.ac.uk) to enquire about existing photographs or to commission new photography. They will also be able to advise about copyright as it applies to images of Ashmolean objects used on Wikipedia." Given the nature of the object (by its way the exact accession number is AN1935.100a and we need a photo of the side of the scarab with the hieroglyphic inscriptions with the king's name) it is almost certain that no photography already exist of it, hence according to this, we are looking at a 50 GBP cost. The photography enquiry form mentions the following options for the "Reproduction Rights required": Study only, Publication, Media, Online, Commercial and Display. I am not sure which applies best (online or display?), but we can state in the "additional information" that this is for wikipedia and hence they can decide if they agree. Should I or you complete the form and see what comes of it?&#32;Iry-Hor (talk) 13:46, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * My feeling is our request wouldn't quite fit with the form so I'll email them directly. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 14:30, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Dear Richard, I am very very surprised that Amy states the seal is on display as I have visited the museum numerous times until early 2015 and I have never seen it. Unfortunately I am not in Oxford anymore and cannot go back to the museum to find it. Let me know if the copyright she proposes is acceptable, if not I will try to find a wikipedian who lives in Oxford so that he/she can visit the museum and take the photograph. In this case, I will ask Amy to clarify where the seal is on display as I am absolutely certain to have never seen it.&#32;Iry-Hor (talk) 13:07, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
 * My understanding of the licence is that the restrictions would make the file effectively fair use. Wikipedia does of course have fair use files, but I think we might be best off finding an Oxford Wikipedian who can spot it in the exhibition. I'll reply to Amy that the image would really need to be CC and then you can ask about where the scarab is on display. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:06, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
 * So I have found a number of Wikipedians in Oxford willing to go take the picture. I asked Amy to specify where the scarab is on display as you suggested. As soon as I get this precision, I will pass it on to the interested people.&#32;Iry-Hor (talk) 09:32, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Dear Richard, I hope all is well with you. I would like to enquire about what to do regarding Amy's offer: would the foundation be willing to pay 85 pounds to get a copyright-free photography of the scarab? If not, there is the possibility of paying only 20 pounds for a copyrighted low-resolution photography. From this photography we should be able to make a very good drawing of the scarab, drawing which would be copyright-free and hence can be posted. The last alternative is to wait for Liam McNamara to be back from the field and ask him to accompany someone to the storage for a photo to be taken, although as Amy stated, this is unlikely to happen given the museum desire to get a fee out of the whole deal. Anyway, can we have WMUK last word on the matter?&#32;Iry-Hor (talk) 08:52, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi Iry-Hor, sorry for the delay, I've got your email and will reply later today. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 10:07, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Classics editathon messages
Hello!! thanks for all the help and patience! Great eventLeanwa13 (talk) 12:42, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Mmmm hope I'm doing this right! Can't quite get used to the idea that EVERYTHING is editable! Thanks for the info and support Srsval (talk)

Citation templates
I can't find the "Reply to" template on the Gaelic wikipedia, so I'm pinging you here. I left a question for you on my page. GunChleoc (talk) 16:03, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

Ping GunChleoc (talk) 15:48, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the extra info, I'll put it on my todo-list. GunChleoc (talk) 16:12, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your help today
Thanks for sorting us out to translate from Finnish at UCL TrabiMechanic 23:10, 2 August 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheTrabiMechanic (talk • contribs)
 * Glad I could help, let me know if you need a hand with anything else! Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 11:55, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

You've got mail
Regarding WMUK 2014 Stub contest's prize. --Skr15081997 (talk) 12:48, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

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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OK to add you to list?
Hi! Would you mind if I add your username to the attendee list at GLAM/NHSF_Project? No worries if you'd rather not. Please WP:PING me if you reply. Thanks! zazpot (talk) 12:47, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
 * sure, go right ahead! Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 13:21, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ zazpot (talk) 14:41, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

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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Template for Finland Centenary Translatathon, 29th Nov 2017
Hi Richard, as you recommended I created a template Template:Finland_Centenary_Translatathon. It's still Draft so I'm not actually sure what anyone can see of it. Here's the contents, just in case:

Category:Wikipedia templates

Could you approve it when you're happy? Thanks, TrabiMechanic 11:09, 31 October 2017 (UTC)


 * The template looks good and makes it very clear what the person displaying it would be doing. I've moved it to Template:Finland Centenary Translatathon. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 12:34, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks - I've created some guidance for our participants (happy to move this onto Wikipedia if it's useful). https://wiki.ucl.ac.uk/x/jgy9B --TrabiMechanic (talk) 14:54, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Salford Wikipedia workshop
Hi Richard, in preparation for the Salford Wikipedia workshop next Sunday, could you arrange for to have the accountcreator right (and anything else that you think might be useful). He's an admin on Commons, as you probably know, and is a long-term editor, even though he doesn't edit as much here as he does on Commons. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 01:02, 13 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

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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)
 * 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

 

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
 * }

Courses Modules are being deprecated
Hello,

Your account is currently configured with an education program flag. This system (the Courses system) is being deprecated. As such, your account will soon be updated to remove these no longer supported flags. For details on the changes, and how to migrate to using the replacement system (the Programs and Events Dashboard) please see Education noticeboard/Archive 18.

Thank you! Sent by: xaosflux 20:28, 8 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
 * }

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)