#Wikidata - Lindsay McLaren; #science under attack

Mrs McLaren is the first author of a paper about the (negative) effects of the cessation of adding fluoride to drink water. Retraction Watch mentioned the aggressive attacks on Mrs McLaren by people opposed to the addition of fluoride to tab water and it refers to an article in the National Post.

Adverts bought from Google may give the impression that something is wrong with the science. Not so. Reason enough to put some positive spin on Mrs McLaren and provide her with an item in Wikidata. You may consider this to be an invite to write a Wikipedia article..
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - Learning from #Google #search

When the Wikimedia Foundation is to learn one thing from Google to improve its search, you can find the basics in the above image. When you consider it carefully, it is all about compartmentalising. What Google offers are distinct categories of results and, these categories exist in our projects as well.

• The first tab would provide our current search results. No investment needed.
• The second tab is images.. A massive amount of work is needed to make it useful but hey, we have it on Commons. So why not offer it. As people start to use it, we can tweak it, improve it 
• The third tab is videos.. 
• Maps is something we could do. We should do it in cooperation with OpenStreetMap and go from there
• News.. why not, it will be a shot in the arm for Wikinews
• We could have results for Wikidata.. It will be usable certainly when it is done in a Reaonator kind of way..

We do not need much funding to provide search in this way. We will do a better job at fulfilling our mission. What do you think?

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikidata - Mr Sundar Pichai

I heard of a dispute about the facts of Mr Pichai's study by Wikipedians. That was yesterday so I hoped that some of that discussion would transpire at the item for Mr Pichai.

Mr Pichai's item is indeed in need of serious attention. The stated place of birth should be more specific and, his education has the same school entered twice for no obvious reason. He was born in India but Wikidata has him as an "Indian American" for whatever reason.

The information when you Google Mr Pichai is much better. When Google and Wikidata were to compare each others records, the Wikidata item would certainly be flagged as problematic.

As a lot of Wikipedians have invested serious attention to Mr Pichai, comparing the Wikipedia article will expose the weakness of the Wikidata entry. I am not particularly interested in Mr Pichai, I leave it for someone else to sort this out.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - #Google on Morton Mintz

Mr Mintz is contrary to what Google has to say about him not born in 1946. It is impossible when the Wikipedia article is correct in stating that "in his early years (1946–1958) reported for two St. Louis, Missouri newspapers, the Star-Times and the Globe-Democrat".

This is exactly one of those exceptions where sources matter. Typically Google will have it right and in my opinion only when sources differ it becomes relevant to provide a source for the provided information.

Mr Mintz was born on 26 January 1922 and, he wrote this himself in an essay on ahbj.org. I expect that Google will pick up on this information. It is interesting to learn from where they pick this up. Will it be from Wikidata, from the source I provided above or from this blogpost.

I will be most happy when it is Wikidata. It would beg the question if Google would be interested in reporting on differences it is aware of. For me such flags will improve our quality rapidly. Concentrating on differences will have a huge impact and not only at Wikidata.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Google - thank you for pushing #mobile #phone support

Putting your money where your mouth is is a wonderful thing. Google just did that again. Not by serving notice that support for mobile phones is important but by giving it teeth.

Recently it did it with Fi. A new product that will shake up an industry.

From now those websites that are not providing proper support for mobile phones are out of luck. Google does it where it hurts them most; it is in their ranking.

When you "google" (the verb), you will see those web sites first that are ranked the highest. Websites that do not function properly on mobile phones will go the way of the dodo as their ranking will plummet; they will not get the same results and providing quality support for mobile phones is how damage may be repaired.

Wikipedia is said to have a problem here. It is not exactly a mobile friendly website. For that it has a special subdomain and, that does not count. So all the things we know that make life better for the one area where we are growing.

It is no longer a zero sum game. We will be hurt in our prime objective when we do not ensure that Wikipedia and all the sister projects. We rely heavily on the Google ranking. It is no longer a matter of personal preference and making noises to stop progress in its track. It is about the very essence of what we do: sharing in the sum of all knowledge.

It is great to know that our software is at a stage where it is quite good at supporting mobile phones. I am grateful for the forward thinking of the WMF to get us here. The next step is to bring it to all our projects and pages.

For old fogeys like me, we could have https://en.of.wikipedia.org so that we can live in our past.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Google - Would you use your #trickery for us?

After the shock and awe of yesterday's announcement, There has been time to think. Google showed a real interest in Wikidata. It created a new tool to help improve the quality of its data. But the real expertise of Google is in determining the probability of facts. It is part and parcel of its ranking algorithms.

It would be as awesome when Google would indicate those statements it deems to have a less than even chance of being true. The combination of such a list and the new tool would make the efforts of the people seeking sources all the more relevant. When statements are debunked, it has a potential quality effect to all the associated Wikimedia projects. Given that it is probable that most statements are fine, it makes for more concentrated effort and consequently its effects will be noticed.

While we are on this line of thought, given the data of Freebase, Google could indicate based on its algorithms how probable its sets of data are. Everything that is highly likely should be a candidate for import in Wikidata. The other reason for importing data into Wikidata anyway is that it is an invitation to all the Freebasers to join our ranks, increase our expertise and together be awesome.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Google - What it does with #Freebase is beyond awesome

In an e-mail Denny Vrandečić announces an astounding bit of news. It effectively says that Wikidata can have all its data if it wants it.

It then goes on saying that it is not expected for Wikidata to accept all this data and follows with an announcement for a tool that is to source data. This news is best read as it was announced..
Thank you Google!
        GerardM

Freebase was launched to be a “Wikipedia for structured data”, because in 2007 there was no such project. But now we do have Wikidata, and Wikidata and its community is developing very fast. Today, the goals of Freebase might be better served by supporting Wikidata [1]. 

Freebase has seen a huge amount of effort go into it since it went public in 2007. It makes a lot of sense to make the results of this work available to Wikidata. But knowing Wikidata and its community a bit, it is obvious that we can not and should not simply upload Freebase data to Wikidata: Wikidata would prefer the data to be referenced to external, primary sources. 

In order to do so, Google will soon start to work on an Open Source tool which will run on Wikimedia labs and which will allow Wikidata contributors to find references for a statement and then upload the statement and the reference to Wikidata. We will release several sets of Freebase data ready for consumption by this tool under a CC0 license. This tool should also work for statements already in Wikidata without sufficient references, or for other datasets, like DBpedia and other machine extraction efforts, etc. To make sure we get it right, we invite you to participate in the design and development of this tool here: 

 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Primary sources tool 

I hope you are as excited as I am about this project, and I hope that you will join me in making this a reality. I am looking forward to your contributions!  

[1] https://plus.sandbox.google.com/109936836907132434202/posts/bu3z2wVqcQc

Denny Vrandečić via lists.wikimedia.org

#Google - Let us #share in the sum of all #knowledge

Dear Google, in our own ways, we share the aspiration to share in the sum of all knowledge. We are really happy to share everything we have with you. Our licenses are designed to share widely.

Dear Google, could you please help us make sure that our Labs webservices survive your bots? What we do not want is for your bots not to run. What we want is for our webservers to serve our own needs first and use all the spare capacity for you. As it is our software dies.

We really want you to have our data and, there are several other ways whereby you can get all out data any way. For this reason please help us with our software so that we can continue to share the sum of all our available knowledge with you.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikipedia - Municipio de #Prescott (#Dakota del Norte)

Prescott is a township in Renville county, North Dakota. It has 28 inhabitants and such is its notability that only the Spanish and the Vietnamese Wikipedia have an article. Pictures can be found thanks to Google maps..

What is really funny is that all the localities of Renville county can be found in the Spanish category. It is not hard at all to add all of them to Wikidata. It is funny to see all those Spanish names when Reasonator presents information about Renville county.

A message to the researchers of Wikipedia; Rambot did not add all the places of the Unites States. Wikidata is actually more inclusive than the English Wikipedia. Who knew ..
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia: Mr K. Kunhambu and #Orkut

Mr Kunhambu was a member of the Lok Sabha, the parliament of India. He was of interest to me because Wikidata did not know what party if any he represented. It turns out that the Wikipedia article does not provide clarity either.

The thing that caught my eye was a reference to an Orkut community.. It is not unreasonable to expect that many more references to Orkut exist. Orkut is a Google product that is "at it ends of life"; its communities will have to find another home elsewhere.

I wonder what we will do with all the references in our projects.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - କବି ପ୍ରସାଦ ମିଶ୍ର

In my ongoing project to document the deaths of notable people in 2014, a friend helped me with Mr କବି ପ୍ରସାଦ ମିଶ୍ର. He knows Odia, a language that Google translate cannot help me with.

It was obvious that when you only know someone as Mr କବି ପ୍ରସାଦ ମିଶ୍ର, nobody will find him if they do not know that this can be transliterated to Kabi Prasad Mishra. As this transliteration was added, we can now Google for this gentleman and find more information about him.

Subhashish asked my help in turn for a transliteration for Mr Герич Ігор Дионізович. This person is Ukranian and to be honest, I do not know how to transliterate his name into English.

Plenty of opportunities left in Wikidata :)

Thanks,

     GerardM

United we stand strong, divided we still are

This is a #map of Elburg, a municipality in the Netherlands. It shows its monuments and when available it will show a picture for them thanks to Wiki loves Monuments. There is a pop up for every individual monument and it shows a wealth of information.

According to the Wikipedia article, there are 293 monuments in Elburg alone. The information is rich; it includes descriptions, geo-locations, external sources and a link to Google Maps. This is a great choice because it allows you to see all the monuments while virtually travelling through this small town.

When this information becomes available in Wikidata, it becomes possible to find translations for many of the data items in use. The monuments in the Elburg can be found with a query like this one. The existing list article can be defined like this. For all the 293 items a new Wikidata has to be created and populated with the existing data.

This blog post indicates that it can be done. The problem is that it requires a retooling of Wikimedia loves Monuments. To the people who worked so hard to build the existing tooling the message is: it is the work you did that makes it possible to have quick results in Wikidata in the first place.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Battle of the sexes, the #Wikidata story III

#Freebase is a rich resource. It boasts to have 39,296,842 topics and much of it is linked to #Wikipedia. Freebase has been around for a considerable amount of time and, there are great applications that make use of the data.

One of these applications informs you if a name is typically male or female. I would not expect the name Roxy to be used by men but it is.

The information for many of the people involved is linked to Wikipedia. Consequently it is relatively easy about the sex of someone like Roxy Walters and update Wikidata. At this time no statements have been made for Roxy Walters.

The only potential problem is that Freebase is using the CC-by-sa license and that makes it incompatible with Wikidata. Given that you cannot license facts, Google may decide either to change the license for Freebase or ignore when Freebase is used to update Wikidata.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The best #news from the #Wikimedia #Language #Engineering Team

The #Internet is the #Browser. Consequently when the best browser experience becomes more inclusive because of the support for the languages the Wikimedia Foundation provides it is quite something. The Chrome browser is now able to support 62 languages with input tools. Supporting additional scripts starts with providing the Wikimedia Language engineers with another keyboard mapping.

Once language communities find out that their language is supported as well, the use of this functionality will surely sky rocket.

The Wikimedia Input Tools will enable more people to communicate on the Internet in their own language. It is an obvious precursor for the provision of knowledge in that language, that script.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The #Chinese #Wikipedia is not only #Simplified

#Wikimania 2013 has come and gone. China and the Chinese Wikimedia projects have had their day under the sun. The statistics show the Chinese Wikipedia is doing exceedingly well; it is growing 62% annually at the moment.

What we know as the Chinese language is defined by what is written because there are multiple languages that use the same script. To make it even more complicated this written language exists in two scripts: the traditional and the simplified script.

The Chinese Wikipedia can be read in both the simplified and the traditional script. The default script is the simplified script and for those who want it, there is an option for readers to choose for the traditional script.

I wonder what Google finds when its bots crawl the Chinese Wikipedia. They will obviously find the simplified content, but do they find the same content in the traditional script? When Google cannot find the content in the traditional script, people will not find information in Wikipedia when they google for information.

It is probably easy to find the answer to this question when you know Chinese. Please let me know :)
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Font support by #Google and #Wikimedia

The quality of the Amiri font has been recognised by the Wikimedia Foundation for some time; it has been provided in the Web Fonts extensionn for some time and recently in an other bit of "read the whole article to get to the good news" it became part of a Wikimedia supported jQuery library for web fonts.

Google has also recognised the Amiri font; they make Amiri available through their "early access" program. Google supports multiple (freely licensed) Arabic fonts as web fonts. The biggest difference for me between the two programs is that the WMF library has your server provide the fonts while the Google offering has the fonts provided through the Google infrastructure.

Both Google and WMF support fonts for many scripts. The question is what they will do when the font has technical requirements that are more than usual.

Recently the Tuladha Jejeg font for the Javanese script was given a free license and the Wikimedia Foundation will assess if they will include it in their Web fontd extension. There may be a technical problem; it makes use of the SIL Graphite technology. The question is to what extend do browsers support this technology.

When Google is serious in supporting the rare scripts, the opportunity to support the Javanese script through the Tuladha Jejeg font may be reason enough to put some extra effort in enabling support for SIL Graphite.

<grin> One may hope for Google to do more good, we know they can</grin> <seriously> For the WMF there is hardly another option when they are to support Javanese </seriously>
Thanks,
      GerardM

Levels of competence for #Arabic in #Wikipedia III

Tools like #Google #Chrome use an engine to do the rendering for them. For Chrome it is Webkit. It is responsible to connect two items that are in separate HTML elements and make sure that the rules for the Arabic script are addressed.

What started as an observation in MediaWiki became a Chrome bug and is now a Webkit bug.

Webkit is used in multiple browsers.. This makes a fix relevant for Apple's Safari browser as well. The one question left is what will it take to bring a fix in production within those browsers in the near future.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Levels of competence for #Arabic in #Wikipedia II

It does matter what browser you use. Google's Chrome browser is the reason why the Arabic Babel templates.

If you use Chrome to browse Arabic websites, you want to add your vote to fix this bug. You vote by marking the star that is at the bottom of the page.

I am really pleased how quickly this issue was analysed. It is now for Google to support its users who use languages in the Arabic script.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Font subsets III

#Google web fonts is important. A major player makes freely licensed fonts available for general use. They allow people to be more expressive because the right font adds to the message. They allow people to contribute to existing fonts and make new fonts available.

Both Google and the Wikimedia Foundation invest in freely licensed web fonts and because of this, an opportunity for cooperation exists. The Wikimedia Foundation supports all languages in all scripts particularly for use in its projects and Google supports the world with its Google docs where people can use web fonts in their own documents and in their own language.

As the two organisations complement each other so well, it would be great when they share their web fonts. Wikipedia can become more expressive and for Google docs usable fonts can be associated with the languages that they support. A combined outreach of Google and the WMF will make web fonts even more visible and it will make the effort of both organisations even more relevant.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Font subsets

A font with all the characters for the Latin or Cyrillic script is big. Over a mega byte big. This is considered too big for use in a web font particularly when mobile devices are targeted as well. For this reason, moves are under way to split mega fonts in subsets.

At SIL they are working on font subsets. Their criteria is to include all the characters used in a given "region".  In this way they explicitly target a range of languages. It does reduce the size and one font can be used as a web font for all these languages. When they are to be used on Wikipedia, it will still be necessary to identify the specific language and have the language associated with a particular region.

Typically a font does not include all characters anyway. It is created with a language in mind and when another language needs extra characters, it is tough. Many languages do use the same subset of characters and when a font is identified as complete for one language, it follows that it is complete for all other languages as well.

SIL needs a way to subset its existing fonts. Google in contrast provides many fonts as web fonts that provide subsets of the Latin script. As it is not made obvious if these fonts support languages like German, French or Dutch, it is not really attractive when English is not your language.

Both Google and SIL provide solutions. The key question they do not explicitly answer is: does it support my language.
Thanks,
      GerardM