#2015 - A new year, more #deaths

Death, like taxes, cannot be avoided. Currently #Wikidata knows about 12211 deaths for 2014. At least two people are already known to have died in 2015. As you can see in the screen shot, The ToolScript needed one more category for it to function for 2015.

I  documented many of the deaths of 2014. Currently there are 565 known deaths left to do. It leaves me with an issue. Will I continue documenting the deaths of 2014, or will I move on to the new year..

• One big group of people in there are Ukrainians who were killed in the war that is raging there. You will not find the Russians, the fact that they are mortal there is apparently a state secret. 
• You will not find many people from the Netherlands, they do not categorize those who died and consequently both them and us miss many people who died.. There must be an applicable policy for that <BIG GRIN>
• You will find many people notable in languages or scripts that I do not easily read. Registering these people is important because that is essential for the diversity that is so important to Wikidata

I expect that I will move over to 2015 if only because it results in Wikidata knowing about the death of notable people days even weeks before the BBC reports their death.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikipedia - #Russia and the #USA

Yesterday I wondered when Russia will become the champion users of Wikipedia. Today I noticed a presentation with the numbers.. Traffic to Wikipedia from the USA is down by -8.6% while the annual growth of Wikipedia traffic from Russia is +10.3%. A difference of almost 20%.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikipedia - #Russia #rules OK

English Wikipedia is still the biggest. The Russian Wikipedia however is growing much faster. It replaced the Germans, the Spanish and the Japanese to become the second biggest Wikipedia. When it continues to grow like this it will overtake English Wikipedia.

There is one question in the back of my head... When you consider only the traffic from the USA for the English Wikipedia, and Russia for the Russian Wikipedia, how will they compare ? How long will it take for Russia to overtake the USA as the champions of Wikipedia.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - The #Ukrainian - #Russian #War 2014

Soldiers die in the Ukraine. With depressing regularity they appear in the ToolScript I use to find people who died in 2014. I think many of them can be found in this category.. Currently there are 294 entries.

The Ukrainian Russian war is just one of the wars that are happening today. Sadly most other conflicts are not documented with the same quality of detail. Consider the cultures of Iraq and Syria that are being wiped away including their people. All the "little" wars in Africa. These conflicts are huge in their impact on people and cultures.

We hardly know them.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Joep Lange, HIV researcher

Mr Lange was on his way to a conference in Melbourne about HIV. He and several other HIV researchers died because his airplane was shot out of the air over the Ukraine.

Mr Lange was a professor at the University of Amsterdam. He was considered to be a „World’s Top AIDS Researcher“.

I am appalled that Mr Putin considers the Ukraine responsible because "it happened over Ukrainian territory".. That is a bit too simplistic and obvious an excuse.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - the order of the Red Star

Mr Anatoly Kornukov died. He was a Soviet and Russian general, he was a fighter pilot. His story is quite interesting, it includes that he was in charge of the downing of the Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

Mr Kornukov was highly decorated and, among the awards he received was the "order of the Red Star". It is easy to add it for Mr Kornukov but that leaves out the 9,242 other recipients of this award.

As you can imagine, the category on the Russian Wikipedia for recipients of the order of the Red Star knows the most. It takes a little more effort to have AutoList2 add all the missing recipients.

It takes a while for all of them. You can see how many are already done here.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Mr Ashot R. Tonoyan, a MP from #Armenia

Mr Tonoyan died today according to the article about him on the Russian Wikipedia. The article has it that he was a member of the National Assembly of Armenia from 2008 until 2012.

There is even a category with many of these Armenian politicians. Surprisingly, this Russian category is aware of more of them than the Armenian category.

After a bit of tinkering, the Reasonator will know about all of them. Most of them will become known as Armenian, politician and all of them will become a member of the National Assembly.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #Russia; member of the State Duma

There is great information about the current members of the State Duma. It is available on the website of the Duma. It is available in Russian and English. The only thing in the way of a claimed copyright is that you refer back to the website.

At this time Wikidata did not know that members of the Duma are politicians. A process is underway to make them members of the Duma in the first place (357 and counting).

It is important to know who represents the power that is inherent in a parliament and, it such information should not only be available for the usual countries like those in the "West". We should know about the Chinese, Russians, Iraqi, Indonesian, Filipino, Lybian .. parliamentarians. These people make a difference, they get in the news for good and bad reasons.

They are all notable.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - Heroes of the Soviet Union

On the Russian Wikipedia, there are 10898 entries in the category for heroes of the Soviet Union. Only 9740 of them have a Wikidata item. With the Creator tool it is easy to add the missing 1158 items. It gently adds them one at a time.

Adding statements for over 10.000 heroes is a bit too much for the AutoList tool. There are several edits to make. First, all the people are a human and then they have to receive the recognition in Wikidata for the hero they are.

It is much better to use a bot for this. What clinges it is that many people on the Russian Wikipedia have a template with much more information than just this one award. Things like dates of birth and death, places of birth and death. Other awards they have received..

The Russian Wikipedia is a really rich resource and it will be wonderful when more of its information is reflected in Wikidata.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - an old soldier from Russia

My interest in Mr Styrov is that he died in 2014, on January 26 to be precise. In the info-box on the article that is dedicated to him, it is just one of several facts. Among them there is the rank of Rear Admiral he held in the Soviet Navy and the many awards he received. Among them is the order of Lenin.

With Mr Styrov added as someone who died in 2014, we are closer to the point where Wikidata knows all the people. When we are, we can make a report that will signal the latest people who are known to have died in the last year.

This can be of interest to people who want to know things like:

• Do we know that this person who has an article on our Wikipedia has died
• Fellow country men who died and do not have an article on our Wikipedia
• What person are notable enough to have an article on our Wikipedia

When such reports become available, the data in Wikidata gains a purpose. Some may see it as getting Wikipedia to use the data by the back door, but isn't it there to be used?

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikidata - the queen of Olympic figure skating

With three gold Olympic medals for figure skating and being the world champion ten times, Mrs Henie is an undisputed queen of figure skating. She followed up her career as a skater by becoming an actress. She married into money and a museum in Norway is named after her and her husband.

It is quite funny that with the Olympic games in Sochi taking place, there is no reflection on what is happening in Wikidata. I could not find how to indicate that Mrs Henie was an Olympic champion and consequently the results for speed skating are not available either.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - The State prize of the #USSR

When Wikidata is to be relevant, it has to include sufficient data that is sufficiently structured. The question is very much how this relevance is to be achieved and as a consequence it has an impact on what data to add.

When Mr Kalashnikov died, a lot of effort went into adding to the Wikipedia articles about him. His Wikidata item gained many statements as well. This is great because as Mr Kalashnikov died recently, we know there is a lot of interest about him.

One of the awards he received was the State Stalin Prize. Obviously he was not the only person to receive it and, the English Wikipedia has a category with them. But so does the Russian Wikipedia and it contains many more people.

The Stalin Prize became the USSR State Prize. Its Russian category again is the most complete. Using such categories we can use "Widar" to enrich the items for the winners of awards.

When you approach what is in the news with attention to specific details, it will make Wikidata more informative. It is the best that we can do given that there is no data that indicates what people are really looking for in Wikidata.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Mikhail Kalashnikov

All that is too complex is unnecessary,
and it is simple that is needed 

A friend asked me some advise, he wanted to know how to add some awards Mr Kalashnikov had received. I challenged him to write something about it. I am happy to publish it. :)
Thanks,
      GerardM

Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov is best known as the inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle. He died on December 23, invoking a host of volunteers working on his Wikipedia entry in numerous languages.  

Moreover Kalashnikov is an interesting subject for Wikidata: he received +50 decorations, awards, medals and other honours which allow us to perform queries or populate infoboxes.  

But there is more to the Russian small arms designer. The 6 books he wrote, his participation in WW2 and basic information about his family are not added to Wikidata so far. 

Enhancing Kalashnikov's Wikidata entry allows us to find new connections that have not been visible before and helps anyone to gather basic information about Kalashnikov in their native tongue.

#Russian #Wikipedia presents #English #Wikipedia

A real surprise can be experienced on the Russian Wikipedia; their article about the English Wikipedia has a template that shows a nice info-box. What makes it so special is that the fourth Wikipedia in page views is using Wikidata to present its information.

An often repeated set of questions has been: "When will the bigger Wikipedias start using Wikidata for its information? When will the tipping point be reached when they will update information at Wikidata. When will any and all other languages benefit from the effort from the big boys".

When big players start to rely on Wikidata, the items they are interested in will get more attention. The resulting high quality information will become available for all these subjects on all the other languages as well. It now becomes possible that the Russian point of view will be supported by the highest quality information.

For Wikidata to support what some may consider a neutral point of view it is important that all items will gain high quality attention from all our communities.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Maybe a #squid will do

In the #Sakha Republic, the cost of using the Internet depends on the location of the servers serving the data. The rationale is that it is expensive to get content out of the rest of the world. As a consequence the local websites and forums are more popular and those websites in the local language are doing fine.

We do have a Wikipedia in the Sakha language and we do care about the availability of Wikipedia at zero costs. So the question is very much how can we reduce the costs for the Sakha people for Wikipedia (in any language).

If the ISP are willing to bring the information into their country for everyone, they may consider the use of Squid. What the Wikimedia Foundation then can consider is supporting this squid by invalidating its content in the same way it does its own squids.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Testing the #MediaWiki visual editor ... with #Russian

When you follow MediaWiki development, you will be eager to test the visual editor. A very alpha version of the software is available for testing and, at this time it allows you to enter a text in the Latin script.

That is to say; Amir found a way to enter text in Russian. He uses the Mozilla transliterator. He types Latin characters and Firefox transliterates it into Cyrillic. For Amir the transliterator is a must have feature.

Without it i couldn't write an email to my sisters, comment on Russian blogs or write in the Russian Wikipedia. (You can quote me)

I am happy to quote him and share with you how he sneakily tests the visual editor in Russian anyway. As you can see many more languages are supported in this way.

Yes, your bug reports are eagerly awaited ...
Thanks,
       GerardM

The #Russian #Wikipedia treats its newbies right

When you are new to Wikipedia, you are expected to comply with a baffling array of policies and practices starting with your very first article. To top it off, the ease of use of MediaWiki is another stumbling block.

To make things worse, there is the perennial issue of newbies that get bitten by bots and hurried admins. As we want to not only grow our editor community but also want to have more women and minorities suggestions for improvement are welcome.

The Russian Wikipedia has a practice in place that is working really well for them; they have their incubator for new Wikipedians. They have a subspace called the Incubator, this is a place for beginning editors. They usually get spotted and are invited to move with their first article to the Incubator.  They can quietly learn the policies and practices without having to protect their articles from speedy deletion and other annoyances.

A dedicated team of people who are mostly active in Incubator help the newbies. The first generation of users who went through the Incubator have had their articles moved to the main space, and some of these became featured articles...

This proven method of welcoming newbies is paying off; the Russian Wikipedia is the top 5 in traffic and it has an annual growth in traffic of 62%. They are great at welcoming women, they even built templates to fix the localisation where gender is not yet supported in the software.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The prodigal son

This painting by Rembrandt van Rijn can be found on #Commons.  The original can be found in the Hermitage.

I was looking for a picture of the "prodigal son" because my nephew returns home today from a world trip. His father and mother are happy to have him home and as he is vegetarian, I am sure a fatted calf will not be on the menu.

Anyway, the 35.95 MB file can be found on Commons, but there is no template for the Hermitage. As a consequence we can not even express how many page views the heritage preserved in the Hermitage generates. It would be good to be able to do so, it may open doors..
Thanks,
     GerardM