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 Otherwise the article is likely out of date.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

One line in a Wikipedia article; a prize is name after her

The ESHG refers to Wikipedia articles for its award recipients. The award named after Leena Peltonen-Palotie currently has 6 recipients, three have a Wikipedia article and when I am done writing this blogpost, all will have a Wikidata item. 

This award currently has no Wikipedia article, it has a Wikidata item and consequently associated information can be shown in Reasonator or in a Scholia. 

I added the 2024 recipient because awards without recipients is not really informative. I came across the inaugural 2013 recipient because of another award she received. All six recipients had an Wikidata item and only one did not have publications associated with him. However, a merge of two items solved that issue.

It is wonderful to see prestigious organisations refer to Wikipedia articles. I do notice that we are still at a stage where Wikipedia information is not valued enough to mine it, curate it and finally share it with all our audience. We could share the knowledge that is available to us.

Thanks,

     GerardM

Edwin G. Abel aka Ed Abel

Professor E.G. Abel came on my radar because he is a recipient of the Daniel X. Freedman Award. He has a Wikipedia article as "Ed Abel" and the information of the award has him as "Edwin G. Abel".

I looked into the Freedman award because of a criticism on the Wikipedia article of Professor Montegia. The superior article of Prof Montegia is criticised because it is an orphan. It now has a Scholia template and that links the 105 scholarly papers known in Wikidata. Its timeline does include the Freedman award linking the Professors Abel en Montegia.

I doubt it is considered enough to remove the orphan template. I have added a redirect for the Freedman award to the issuing organisation. Maintaining a Wikipedia list is not one of my ambitions.. It could be a Listeria list like this one..
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Vikram Patel and missing awards

Mr Patel received many awards; for one of them you see illustrated what the award looks like. This award was missing in the Wikipedia article. Another award, the Chalmers Medal by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, was mentioned but there is no information about other award winners.

Other awards for this society had their own item but no enrichment had taken place. They are now at least linked and award winners with a Wikipedia article are now also linked.

Linking people through awards, through their employers, their education provides an entry point to a subject like "Tropical Medicine and Hygiene". When this is a subject that matters to you, Mr Patel is the first one listed to have received the Chalmers award; this award started in 1923 so you can add all of them to Wikidata or write Wikipedia articles to these notable people.

When you consider notability, would it not be an argument to use against the Wikipedia deletionists when there is plenty of information at Wikidata?
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Rachael E Jack; Spearman medal winner

On Facebook I mentioned a 2016 blog post about the Spearman Medal. I checked for missing entries; they were the two 2017 award winners, Mrs Claire Haworth and Mrs Rachael E Jack.

Adding award winners to Wikidata is something I do regularly. It always starts with a search. Mrs Jack was known as "Rachael Jack" on Wikipedia and by drilling down into the ORCID information I found confirmation that this is indeed the same person.

Mrs Haworth is known to ORCID as well, and through a link to a profile, there was a confirmation that it was the same person; the award winner of the Spearman medal.

Typically I do not spend that much time on red links. What I wanted to know is the value of the network. Given the titles of publications known at ORCID, some of the publications of Mrs Haworth could already be found in Wikidata and were linked.

Thanks to all the work done on scholarly publications, scaffolding information for Wikipedia articles become available.. These two ladies are notable if only because of being recipients of the Spearman medal.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - I fucking love #science

When I am on Facebook, information from "I Fucking love Science" is always a nice read. Mrs Andrew received the Stamford Raffles Award. It is why I found her article.

When you read the article, it is heavy on Mrs Andrew's problem of being taking seriously because she is a woman and there is also a lot about the accusations of plagiarism. The problem is that plagiarism and the unlicensed use of intellectual property are quite distinct. Given that IFLS is about reporting on science, there should be no argument; they do not claim the ideas they report on as their own..

It is better to split the information about Mrs Andrew and IFLS; it brings clarity and it invites additional information about the reach of IFLS and the reason why she was awarded the Stamford Raffles Award.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata vs #Wikipedia - Rukmini Maria Callimachi

Mrs Callimachi did not only win the Polk Award, she is both a journalist and a poet and did not only win journalism awards. One of the awards, the Michael Kelly Award is hidden on the Wikipedia article of Michael Kelly. 

This article is about how Wikidata and English Wikipedia can help each other. The Wikipedia article lists seven awards and this makes it easy to add other award winners for them as well.

Thanks to Magnus' awarder, this is fairly easy but some awards hide out as part of an article and the award has to be added in Wikidata.  It may be one reason why later awards are missing. The religious award she is said to have won, it is a different award with a similar name. The award and the organisation that confers it had to be created.

The point, we can compare data at a Wikipedia with what we have on Wikidata. They should match. When they do not, there is an issue. Copying the data from Wikipedia is easy and it is the obvious thing to do. When Wikipedians decry the quality of Wikidata, they should reflect on why this is the case. When we collaborate, we will slowly but surely improve our quality. In the final analysis our aim is the same; share in the sum of all knowledge.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia vs #Wikidata - the George Polk Awards

Some Wikipedians consider Wikidata inferior, so much so that they agitate towards a policy that bans Wikidata in "their" Wikipedia. They are welcome to their opinion.

I do bulk imports from Wikipedia and all the time I suffer the consequences. Some three to four percent of their data is wrong for all kinds of reasons, reasons that are manageable with proper tooling.

The George Polk Award is an award for journalism and it got my attention again because the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists received it for their work on the Panama Papers. I noticed that many people listed who had been awarded the Polk Award did not have articles in Wikipedia, that many of the link in the list of award winners pointed to the wrong person and that many award winners did not even have a "red link".

I am in the process of checking all the links and adding the date for the award. I found many issues among them a civil war general and many others false friends. I am adding items for the people who do not have an English article and, I have to check each of them because several do have articles in other languages. It is a lot of work and it is not as useful as it could be because Wikipedia hates Wikidata and we do not collaborate, we do not work together.

There is a Listeria list of winners and slowly but surely it will contains the information that is similar to the English Wikipedia list article. Similar but not the same;

• the false friends will not be there, 
• there will be no red or black links
• people who won the award twice will be missing

Why do this, why spend so much time on one big list? Well, in this day and age of "fake news" we should celebrate journalism but having all this information in Wikidata allows for all kinds of tools as well. We can check for false friends, we can check if the articles on the award winners include the award but also if there are "winners" who are not known in this list and in the source available for the George Polk winners..

I am not a Wikipedian and truthfully I hate the endless and senseless bickering that is going on. So let me work on the data, make it available to tools. Now you Wikipedians, you may choose not to show Wikidata data in your infoboxes but you will not make your errors go away without collaboration. Yes, you can quote a source but when your data is not in line with what the source states, having a source does not do you good, effectively you provide fake information.

My request to the reasonable people at Wikipedia and Wikidata, let us work together and see how we can improve quality. Lets link wiki links (blue, red and black) to Wikidata and improve the quality of what is on offer first.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia - Ischia International Journalism Award & the Polk Award

When people win awards, they often win multiple awards. Harrison Salisbury won several awards not only the Polk Award. The Ischia award did not have a date associated with it. I used Awarder and the data from the Italian Wikipedia because that was most convenient.

There was no article for Mr Salisbury in Italian and consequently there was no date associated with him. Mr Salisbury is represented with a red link. It indicated 1990 and it was an easy manual edit.

As you can imagine, that red link could link to the information about Mr Salisbury on Wikidata. Showing this information to those who are interested in writing a Wikipedia article in Italian does provide pertinent information, information that should coincide with the new article. By comparing the information in Wikidata and in existing Wikipedia articles you know that the article is likely to be correct.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia; Héctor Rondón did not win the #Polk Award

This is Héctor Rondón, he pitches for the Cubs. He did not win the George Polk award, Héctor Rondón Lovera did.

This is a common mistake, it happens all the time and it is where Wikidata may make a positive difference to Wikipedia.. It just requires a different mindset to see why this is the right solution at this time. There are some loud Wikipedians that abhor Wikidata. This is an easy and obvious method that will improve Wikipedia and there is no sane argument why this would not work.

These Wikipedians do not even have to notice that this is done; we can hide it from them and still do a world of good. Not just for English Wikipedia but for all Wikipedias.. Ehm, for the readers of all Wikipedias.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - just an award winner: Mr Shuming Nie

Mr Shuming Nie is the 2007 winner of the Heinrich Emanuel Merck Prize. As such he was notable for inclusion in Wikidata.

A Wikipedia stub article was created. The article makes it plain that Mr Nie was a serial awardee and when you google Mr Nie, you find for instance the picture you see above. Mr Nie is one of many award winners that are "waiting for the recognition" of a Wikipedia article. By having these award winners in Wikidata, it becomes more easy to find people like someone you care for waiting for an article.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#OpenLibrary and winners of the Herman Gorter Award

If you want to know if the Open Library is of relevance in other languages, you have to do some research. I wanted to find out if there are publications by the authors who won the prestigious Herman Gorter Award?

This award was conferred from 1945 to 2002 often to multiple authors. The first author not known to Open Library is H. C. ten Berge. He received the Herman Gorter award in 1964. There were several authors where Wikidata did not have a link yet for Open Library.

Now consider this: what if we could query Wikidata for all the authors and their publications in Open Library? 

Just a little bit more metadata about books, publications is what we need.. It is not really a big deal, only a few million additional records..

Many if not most of the books at Open Library have links to authorities like the Library of Congress. This makes it possible to link these books through the OCLC to "your library system". It knows about authors and that is what makes it possible to use tools in stead of people to enrich Wikidata and open up all that is in the Open Library for all of us.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - Three award winners of the #ASBA

The ASBA or the "American Society of Botanical Artists" started of in the USA only to become a truly international organisation. They are an important player in the revival of botanical art, they have many local chapters and they have a number of awards.

The three ladies to the right; are the winners of three awards. They now have their Wikidata entries.

I was introduced to people at the New York Botanical Garden and they indicated to me the relevance of illustrations. After that I got into contact with a lady from New Zealand who created a Google list of women scientific illustrators and artists. Her objective is to collect information for Wikipedia articles and many of them already do have an article.

The NYBG is planning future events and for its preparation they do like to include information about awards including awards about botanical illustrators. When the information in the spreadsheet is entered from the start in Wikidata, there is no need for Google lists; Wikidata can play its role in stead.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Franziska Michor and #notability

Because of Facebook I read something about Franziska Michor. What triggered me was that she received an award. Her occupation, biomathematician, does not even exist (yet) on Wikidata.

To understand what a biomathematician does, it is great to watch the TedMED presentation by Mrs Michor. It gets me to the question of notability; I was amazed that Mrs Michor did not have a presence on Wikidata. I do not know if TEDMed is part of the TED project we had and I have no clue how to add this presentation.

The problem with an ever increasing scope of Wikidata, the challenge becomes less one of introducing data but more of maintaining data. This is particularly true when you look at Wikidata from a mathematical point of view. With Mrs Michor there are several datasets that gained notability and can do with some tender loving care: biomathematicians, TEDMed talks and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Prix de Coincy and Raymond Benoist

The Prix Coincy is an award conferred by the French Botanical Society. The first time it was awarded was in 1904 according to the French article but the first botanist who is known to have received it, got it in 1906. He was Edmond Gustave Camus a red link in the French article but he has articles in several Wikipedias.

Botany is one of those subjects that have appeal; people care about plants, how they are named and consequently many botanists have articles in multiple Wikipedias. This became obvious when all the red links and black links in the article were entered in Wikidata. Like Mr Camus most already existed and just had to be associated with this award.

There are a few items that are not that obvious; Raymond Benoist is one. The French article has it that he received the award but there is no source and at that the only source for the award is the French article. Another issue is with the 1949 award; they are likely three people, one is Louis Quentin, the others Henri and Madeleine Stehlé. Nothing wrong with being bold I suppose..
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata Tool - The #Awarder

The Awarder is a tool I use everyday to add people known to have received the award to Wikidata. Its use is straight forward:

• find a list of award winners, a list that includes the person and the year it was conferred
• copy the source text into the awarder
• identify the wiki the data is from
• identify the award by its Wikidata identifier.
• open the results in "quick statements" for processing. 

Easy. When done properly the result is as good as the information from the Wikipedia it came from.

There are a few points. Some lists, like the one on the John Wesley Powell award, have the year on a line and the data is implied for the following text. The results is ten people identified. There are a few red links in there for instance for "George M. Hornberger" and Awarder has identified him so that I can click on a button to find him in Wikidata. As I did not, I added him in Wikidata for later processing. Awarder does not identify organisations as award winners so I had to add the identifier for for instance the "California Department of Transportation". John Galetzka is the award winner for 2016. He is a "black link" so I identified him in the tool with brackets and as a result I could add him as well.

For fifteen award winners it is now known that they won the award. Slowly but surely it adds to the relevance of these people in Wikidata and the missing award winners become easier to identify for the implied notability.

Thanks,

       GerardM

PS thank you Magnus for a great tool

#Wikipedia - Blue, red and black links

Lists in Wikipedia, like this list of award winners of the Tony Kent Strix award on the right exist as blue, red and "black" links. At the moment only an article in English exists about the award and based on past experiences it is likely that other award winners are known in other Wikipedias.

Based on the information in the article, it was easy enough to add the missing information in Wikidata for all the "black links". When you now compare the information in Wikidata with the Wikipedia article, it is feasible to link fixed text to a Wikidata item. This makes it feasible to trigger a warning once a blue link is possible based on new  Wikidata information. In this way a link to Jack Mills is already likely.

When we can compare the information in an article with data in Wikidata, there is an additional way to compare the information and prevent errors and vandalism. Wikidata is after all superior in its use as a tool for disambiguation.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Premio Almirante Álvaro Alberto

The Premio Almirante Álvaro Alberto is named after admiral Álvaro Alberto da Mota e Silva. They are both notable for their own reasons.

The award was mentioned in an article on the German Wikipedia for César Camacho. The award was not known to Wikidata and was added. The website of the conferring organisation gives me the impression that it is the "National Council for Scientific and Technological Development" and part of the Brazilian ministry of sciences. When you look for it in Wikidata, it is embarrassing.

The admiral is probably a child of his time. He was military and also a very relevant scientist. As a military man he held the rank of vice admiral and as a scientist he was twice the president of the academy of scientists. He was also very much involved in the Brazilian nuclear program.

When you consider the notability of Brazil, it is astounding how little is known in Wikidata. Many politicians have been added for Brazil; national senators and deputies. 

Brazil is one of the top twenty countries in the world I think, when you consider any and all of the "lesser" countries it is obvious that we know even less. When Wikipedia and by inference Wikidata is about the sum of all knowledge, there is a lot of white space where all our tools have no impact.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia - Felix Andries Vening Meinesz and the sum of all #knowledge

Mr Vening Meinesz was an important Dutch scientist. There are a few pointers to his relevance; he was a member to several august bodies and he was awarded many awards, awards from several countries.

One of the medals is the "Alexander Agassiz Medal". When you look at the English Wikipedia article, you find no red links while many award winners do not have an article. Otto S. Pettersson for instance is/was known to Wikidata but he was not associated with the award. When you google for another awardee, it is most likely that the 1926 award winner was Jacob Bjerknes, not Wilhelm Bjerknes.. Even sources get it wrong..

In many ways, awards are rather boring. Getting all the information right is a lot of work and when it is to be written in Wikipedia articles, there are too many Wikipedias and awards for all the awards to get an article in all of them.

When awards are fed to Wikipedia articles from Wikidata like it is done for sources, it becomes a lot more manageable. Increasingly Wikidata knows about more awards for more people. What does it take to reach the necessary tipping point? Which Wikipedia will consider this first?
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikipedia - Bias and the King #Faisal International #Prize

The King Faisal International Prize is an international award recognising five distinct areas. They are: Service to Islam, Islamic Studies, Arabic language and literature, Medicine and Science.

When a Wikipedia is to write in a NPOV way about the King Faisal International Prize, all five categories need to be included. Just listing Medicine and Science and having the article as a "science award" ignores the scientific realities in the other three categories or prevents the inclusion of other theological or literature awards.

This is an unfounded bias and remediation is needed in order to achieve NPOV.
Thanks,
     GerardM