Hon. Erica Shafudah, Namibia's Minister of Finance and Wikimedia's sum of all know knowledge

Mrs Shafudah became Namibia's Minister of Finance on 22 March 2025 replacing Mr Ipumbu Shiimi. The German Wikipedia was aware of her consequently there was a Wikidata item but it did not have the detail that she is the current Minister of Finance of Namibia. Wikidata was only aware of Mr Shiimi and not of the other dignitaries known on a list on the English Wikipedia.

Editing Wikidata is easy enough. The English lists dates in years, English articles are often more precise.. The real time result is best observed in Reasonator.. an invaluable tool by Magnus Manske. Only one problem, it does not have an audience and it is hardly effective.

Only static lists on all Wikipedias provide a global audience. All these lists need to be updated everywhere whenever needed when we are to share the sum of all knowledge. Listeria is a tool that has the potential to do just that..  A bot may run on a Wikipedia and update when the underlying data at Wikidata changes. 

Now check out this launch page for African politicians. It includes all African countries some of its national political positions. Each line presents a Listeria list that is updated whenever an update is known to Wikidata. Most relevant is that there are links to nine African language Wikipedias. When all these Listeria lists are present on these Wikipedias, the information is available as long as the Listeriabot is active. 

We can share the sum of all lists on all our Wikipedias. The lists link to an article when there is one and links to Wikidata when it is not. Key is that the information is as up to date as we have it and therefore it supports the Wikimedia mission more effectively than our current fragmented practice.

Thanks,

      GerardM

Maintaining information on African politicians

There are many Wikipedias in many languages with an African public. They all have their own public and we want to share the sum of all knowledge with them all of them. Maintaining complete information on all the major African politicians on all these Wikipedias in text based articles is not realistic.

On many projects there are links for African politicians and when the Listeria bot is active. It will update the links whenever there is an update and it will perform this update on any Wikipedia that shares these links. For someone like Mr Bola Ahmed Tinubu it is likely that there will be an article and it will be show in the list. For someone like Mr Osagie Ehanire this is less likely and it will show a link to Wikidata.

In a personal project there are many national politicians for African countries.. The idea is that when something changes, it is reflected in the Listeria list on all the participating Wikipedias.. Recently I have done some work on Nigerian politicians, later office holders and some new Listeria lists. The new lists have to be added on other Wikipedias for them to share the latest data. 

New national elections will be held in Nigeria in November .. There will be many new people who will be a candidate and compete with incumbent politicians. They all belong to parties, they studied, some may already be known to Wikidata. They may make claims about their education, their background and yes, all these claims can be verified and find a place at Wikidata. For both claims that can and cannot be substantiated there is room if only to support a public that is to make a choice.

Thanks,

       GerardM

My three anwers for the questions of Bernadette Meehan

Mrs Meehan will be the next Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. In her personal presentation she indicates what her questions will be to learn about our organisation:

* What brought you to this movement?

* How do we stay relevant over the next 25 years?

* What three Wiki resources should I read first?

* I read about Wikipedia on the website of Byte magazine. It sounded interesting and it was.

** This is where I have opinions

*** This is where I know that others will make better recommendations

I am certain that we will retain relevance. How that relevance will evolve has dimensions.

• we remain independent and thanks to our contributor communities our trust model remains in tact
• our relevance for AI training is likely to decrease because of our current inability to harness the knowledge we have and ensure validity
• when we improve the validity and consistency of our data, we will be better able to retain our English language public the main difference will be in the growth of the public for other languages

The most relevant factor will be the transformation of our community and its practices. Will it evolve so that one community will know what to trust from other communities. Will communities find ways to facilitate other communities. Will we trust other organisations and trust their qualities in order to partner and provide the best information possible?

Many Wikimedians have strong opinions declaring their objections as insurmountably. The problem is that even when they have a point they do not consider the value of what they reject. Typically what is rejected is the overall effect on completeness and fidelity for our public. One easy win is when all references with a DOI are all known at Wikidata. It provides a basis necessary for a check for retractions and for later publications citing our reference. Quality information evolves and we can and should have a tool that enables such considerations.

PS Is America still the best place for our movement given its shortcomings as a functional judicial system?

Thanks,

      GerardM

Today's laurels are tomorrow's compost

There is a congratulatory article because "in the AI era, Wikipedia has never been more valuable". That may be however, it is valuable now but will this remain the same? So probably one Wikipedia is mined for information to be used by an AI. The information contained in this Wikipedia will evolve over time and this information may consequently end up in the results of the involved AI.

The question becomes, how will we remain relevant and up to date. Relevancy is in multiple parts, how do we remain a challenge for our editor community, how do we remain the "go to" place for our public and how do we remain a source for the bots feeding the AI.

My suggestion is predictable. Leverage the sum of all the knowledge we have in all our projects and maximise cooperation with any and all compatible organisations.

We can share all the awards and recipients of awards known on our projects. Our academic references should all be known to Wikidata and we could and should update these in collaboration with ORCiD and CrossRef. We would have up to date portfolio for the scientists we have Wikipedia articles of. We would know for scientific articles their citations and what cited these articles. Our editors would be enabled to improve the quality of our work. 

Yes, the AI engines would be better informed but hey, our intention is to share the sum of our knowledge. They are welcome to it.

Thanks,

      GerardM

Missing award recipients in both Wikidata and the Wikipedias

Professor Fei-Fei Li is one of the recipients of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. It says so on the English Wikipedia and it is confirmed on the website of the prize.

There are nine Wikipedias with an article for the award and there is Wikidata. When the 2025 awardees are known on a Wikipedia, "2025" should be available in the text of the article. Otherwise the article is likely out of date. The recipients should be known on Wikidata AND there should be an "award received" for the award with a date of 2025.

When you check Wikidata for this award using "Reasonator", you will find that Wikidata is in need of an update. It is by accident that I learned of this award. Updates are an hit or miss affair, this would be improved when a bot produces a list of all the awards that are in need of updates. When a bot produces this list for every Wikipedia for all the known awards, it enables people to do this maintenance work. 

Obviously 2025 is this year and it will have the most mutations. A similar job can be run for other years but it is less likely to bring many additions, more likely these list will become reduced in size over time.

Thanks,

      GerardM

English Wikipedia awards, a Wikidata user story

I noticed that Yahvinder Malhi received the Roman Magalev Prize on Bluesky. There is an English Wikipedia article for both Mr Malhi and for the prize. I looked it up, Mr Malhi is not known as a prize winner on the article for the prize, it is however on the his personal article as a text reference.

So why not have a tool that produces a list for all awards on a Wikipedia where Wikidata knows about an award AND an award winner where both have a Wikidata item and the award winner is not on the award article. Easy obvious and it will improve the quality of articles about awards.

This can work two ways.. Why not have a tool that produces a list where awards known at Wikidata are not linked on the article.

Technically it is not that hard. It is just a few queries that are to be run on a regular basis. It is the user interface where it becomes tricky. How will a user know that something was fixed.. How will we run it for all the Wikipedias.. Will we be smart and recognise red links..

Another tool could be where we indicate to Wikipedias with an article for an award when a change happened for that award.. particularly new award winners for the current year.. It could be a list where editors are triggered to revisit their articles.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Automated updates for Wikimedia projects

 

I revisited my Wikipedia user page. On it I have several subpages that are regularly automatically updated when things change on Wikidata. One of them is about the "Prix Roger Nimier", I had not looked at it for years. I updated Wikidata from the data on the French Wikipedia and to make it interesting, I added the Listeria template to my French Wikipedia user page. It updated and the English and French article are nearly identical. The difference is in the description.

There are many personal project pages that are automatically updated from Wikidata. The point that I wanted to make: topics are not universally maintained. As I had another look after a few years, I found that many have had regular updates. The quality however is not that great. From a Wikimedia perspective, it seems that we have not one audience but many. When we allow for automatic updates, we will be able to share the sum of all our knowledge with a much bigger audience.

Thanks,

       GerardM