Red pill and blue pill - Wikipedia is it a binary choice?

As far as the English Wikipedia is concerned, there is no red nor a blue link for the 2024 awardees of the Brewster medal. Its information ends in 2021. The German Wikipedia is up to date. There are no articles for Renée A. Duckworth and for Juan C. Reboreda on both Wikipedias, the German has two red links.

When you maintain information like this, there are three options. You can include an awardee in text or as a link and as luck will have it the link will turn red or blue. This is complicated because a link may have homonyms. With a red link you will only know an homonym issue once an article is created, with a blue link you may know immediately.

The Wikimedia Foundation solved a similar problem a long time ago for another type of link, the "interwiki link".  The solution is Wikidata. It works because there is only one identifier for every topic and every article needs a link to a Wikidata item to have a more global relevance.

Thanks to the ongoing development of Wikidata, there is the Wikibase. We should do a similar job for the red and blue links. It will do away with the false friends problems in Wikipedia. It will improve quality for each Wikipedia and it will improve the quality of Wikidata. Any data related updates that are not strictly local will remain at Wikidata because that helps us in the sharing of the sum of all knowledge.

When a new a link is to be added in any of the 333+ Wikipedias, it starts with disambiguation.. Is the subject already known in any of the other Wikipedias? If not a new Wikidata item will be created and extend options in any future disambiguation. If it is, available information and references are available from the start and consequently a Scholia, a Reasonator or any other generated view of the information may become available dependent on the policies of a Wikipedia.

Implementing such a Wikibase is not really problematic because all the blue links still refer through the local Wikipedia article to Wikidata. The red links are the more tricky bit. They are opened up once they are linked to a Wikidata item. 

With such a Wikibase in place, we can start doing the smart things. The Brewster medal, Q612041, could have a red or blue link to all the awardees. When they don't the article is to be reported for maintenance..

Cool?

     GerardM

Fellows of the Royal Zoological Society of NZW and .. #ChatGPT

Wikipedia knew in a text about a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales. Unlike many other awards it does not have its own article, there is no category for these fellows, it has a paragraph in the article about the fellows.

Wikidata did not know the award. 

The list of fellows on the RZS website is formatted in a "last name, first name" format. There are too many fellows so converting it by hand is inconvenient. As so many people are enamoured by ChatGPT, I gave it a spin. ChatGPT does NOT process websites for me. So I copy pasted the list and asked it to change the order of the surname and the first name. 

I asked it who had a Wikipedia article. It could not tell me but it gave me a list of fellows who likely have a Wikipedia article. For many of them I added the award in Wikidata and for some fellows  I added a new Wikidata item. For many of them I linked publications and this results in a nice Scholia for the award. 

It would be really cool when there is a Wikimedia AI that will answer questions like: "for the people in this list change the order of the name and check if these Australian award winners have a Wikipedia article or a Wikidata item". Maybe start with a tool for editors and then open it up to the general public. 

Given that Wikipedia is multilingual, what would be the effect of the data for the answers being all Wikipedias AND Wikidata.. Given that Wikifunctions is language agnostic, why not have functions that are a front end to such a Wikimedia AI?

Thanks,

       GerardM

The story of African award winning scientists using Wikifunctions

You can find the winners of the Alan Pifer Research award on the English Wikipedia. One of them, the 2011 recipient is Mr Kelly Chibale. there are several ways to be informed about him. There is Scholia and Reasonator, both derive from Wikidata and then there is the Wikipedia article. All four provide information, one is unstructured and exclusively in English. The good news is that parts of it have a structure making it easy for tools to analyse and convert to data. 

A person can read an article, find and add an award not in Wikidata and choose to add the awardees or use "Awarder" to do it with less effort. It is good when it is done but analytical tools could do a better job. There are many tools that produce information in a nice layout like Listeria.. Problem is that it is not maintained by Wikimedia and it is not necessarily multilingual. 

And then there is Wikifunctions. It is developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. It could do all the things that Listeria does. Having a function that does only list all the honours and awards for someone like Mr Chibale would be great particularly when there is a function that brings to the light all the award winners for any award. An article about an award can be minimalist, and still include stuff that typically goes into an info box.

With functions available like this, it PAYS to engage in Wikifunctions for the specifics of a language for a function. It is impossible to include all awards in any language but with some imagination, we can expose information once the necessary functions are available.

Thanks,

      GerardM