#Wikidata - Debunking #controversy in #science

I really wonder what an organisation would do that hands out "one of the scientific world's most respected environmental prizes" does when one of its luminaries becomes controversial.

The Volvo Environmenta Prize was awarded to Mr Ray Hilborn in 2006. Mr Hilborn and his science has become controversial because of the conflict of interest he has with the fishing industry. Greenpeace has documented this quite publicly.

Together with Mr Hilborn, Mr Pauly and Mr Walters were awarded the Volvo Prize. They are all known for their work on fisheries. The obvious question is now whether the work of Mr Paul and Mr Walters are tainted in the same way. This is one reason why controversies like this are so important.

When a specific line of work in science has been debunked, it becomes important to undo the damage and reevaluate the work in a field. One of the more obvious ways to make this point is for the Beijer Institute to address this issue in one way or another. When the science of Mr Hilborn is unsound, it follows that his work does not point to a sustainable future and that he does not deserve the Volvo Environment Prize.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Sorrow

Yesterday I was at the mosque for prayers. After the prayers everyone was informed that the police had been around. They urged people to immediately call when people are behaving in a suspect manner, when suspect packages are seen.

To put this in perspective, 70% of the mosques in the Netherlands have had to deal with attacks against the people or the building in the last ten years. Another perspective is in the burning of a mosque in Sweden last week.

Yesterday I went to the hairdressers.. The barber told me that his uncle and aunt had been killed by ISIS. It happened since I was there last. Their children were with another aunt..

Yesterday some crazy people killed 12 people at the office of Charlie Hebdo. The papers, the news is full of it. It is awful.

All of this is what makes terror. The people who threaten to burn mosques are terrorists. The people of ISIS who indiscriminately kill people are terrorists. The people who burn mosques are terrorists. The people who killed the people at Charlie Hebdo are terrorists.

I am angry and upset. I will however not be terrorised.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia - To bot or not to bot II

In a mail it was announced that the Lsjbot finished adding plants to the Swedish Wikipedia. Several classes of subjects have so far been added and it had quite a surprising effect on the vitality of the Swedish Wikipedia:

"We are also gladdened by the hard numbers. Reader accesses show a healthy increase even from our already high number. And a trend of a slight decrease of editors has now turned into an increase. We can not say for certain why and it could be temporary but we believe the botgenerated articles has a part of this positive development".

These hard numbers referred to fly in the face of all the pundits who claim the opposite. Evidently, Wikipedia works best when it does what it is meant to do; share in the sum of all knowledge. There is no sharing when no information at all is provided for "esthetical" or whatever reasons.

We can argue about the best way of providing additional information and, it is good that a door is kept open for Wikidata to play a role. In the end both for all the Wikipedias and for Wikidata it is about priorities and I agree with Anders that the quality of the data is key in this. In addition the priority of Wikidata should be much more centred on what we do it all for; making information available to people not so much machines.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Reasonator - Malungsgrynnan är en/ett Ö

Malungsgrynnan is an island in the Kalix archipelago in Sweden. According to this Dutch category, there are some 259 islands.

It is quite interesting that the Dutch Wikipedia knows about these islands while the Swedish Wikipedia does not. Information has been harvested and information about all these islands can be seen in Swedish and any other language thanks to Reasonator.

The best part is that this information, any information available in Wikidata may be fully available in your language as well.. Just add the missing labels.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Taxonomy, where there is nothing ...

When you do a "Random item", you can hit a species out of a genus like the Neotrichoporoides. This is a genus that is the "parent taxon" to sixty species. On the Swedish Wikipedia they have a category with all sixty species.

In "Widar" we have the technology to add a statement for "parent taxon" to all those sixty items. For all these species, it is their next step up for "Reasonator" to show their taxonomy.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Arboga, a stad in #Sweden

Arboga is a municipality in Sweden. Like many others it once enjoyed town privileges, thus it is entitled to call itself stad. As you can imagine, there has been a constant change in the size and the relevance of these places. All the pertinent facts are maintained by the Swedish authorities and, it is possible to update the items of the Swedish municipalities in this way.

Much of the data about these municipalities has been harvested from the English language Wikipedia. Research on the quality of the data indicated that 96% of the data is correct. People from the Swedish community had hoped for 98% and, their aim is to raise the reliability of the information on Wikidata to 99,8%.

As they started their project, they found that the "communcode" or "towncode" was missing. This information is critical if automated updates from the Swedish authorities are to be considered.  There are 2190 towns and communes and automated updates is what makes it feasible to realise the 99,8% reliability objective.

Setting this up is doable. The big question is who will maintain it once it has been set up. When you consider this problem for all countries and when you expand it to other domains, it becomes obvious that this needs serious consideration.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Dick Cheney, a #politician of the #USA

Surprises like this is why #Wikidata is such good fun to work on. You have a sense of endless opportunities. I got to Mr Cheney because I noticed the father of Al Gore. I wondered if it was known they were father and son. To my amazement I noticed that it was not even known that he was a Vice President of the United States. As a consequence of adding this information I noticed that Mr Cheney and Mr Quayle were not known as Vice Presidents either.

I am sure there are enough people to lavish some TLC on these gentlemen in Wikidata.

When information like this is lacking, it is obvious that information about ministers from Sweden or Madagascar may not exist at all. It probably takes people from those countries to lavish their TLC to the people that matter to them.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The need for a mass merge in #Wikidata

At the Swedish #Wikipedia they created many new articles of animal and insect species by bot. According to a mail reporting on the progress, close to a million articles were created.

This has been a huge undertaking and this success has been repeated by running the bot on the Cebuano and Waray Waray Wikipedia as well.

The problem is that for instance on the English Wikipedia many of these taxons already exist and already have their own Wikidata items.

Two Wikidata items have just been merged, they are about the Hersilia, a genus of spiders. As an item has been created for each "taxon", I am quietly confident that over 100.000 duplicates exist in Wikidata. Probably more.

This probably means that the best approach to creating new articles with a bot is by first introducing the data to Wikidata. It is not nice to have to merge so many items. In this case the data in infoboxes can be compared. This will likely indicate when the subject of the items is identical.

This is a nice puzzle involving a lot of data.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikiportait does Sweden... sort of

This years Gothenburg Book Fair had #Africa as its theme. Activities around the theme were organised by the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI).

The Swedish Wikimedia chapter had a presence at the book fair and they took 410 pictures of authors.



Lars Aronsson asked the NAI on behalf of the Swedish chapter to make their book fair catalogue "Afrika har ordet"/"Africa speaks" available under the CC-by-sa license. They have agreed to do make this source of information on 65 African authors available. They are now even considering to make the photos that they have made available as well.

The authors that are not on the NAI or on the chapter photos could be asked to provide us with a multi lingual Wikiportret project. The need for such a project seems obvious. There is a need for a developer who is willing to take on the internationalisation of this project.

There are many great authors and certainly when they have an article in any of our Wikipedias, we want to have a great picture that is freely licensed.
Thanks,
      GerardM