English Wikipedia awards, a Wikidata user story

I noticed that Yahvinder Malhi received the Roman Magalev Prize on Bluesky. There is an English Wikipedia article for both Mr Malhi and for the prize. I looked it up, Mr Malhi is not known as a prize winner on the article for the prize, it is however on the his personal article as a text reference.

So why not have a tool that produces a list for all awards on a Wikipedia where Wikidata knows about an award AND an award winner where both have a Wikidata item and the award winner is not on the award article. Easy obvious and it will improve the quality of articles about awards.

This can work two ways.. Why not have a tool that produces a list where awards known at Wikidata are not linked on the article.

Technically it is not that hard. It is just a few queries that are to be run on a regular basis. It is the user interface where it becomes tricky. How will a user know that something was fixed.. How will we run it for all the Wikipedias.. Will we be smart and recognise red links..

Another tool could be where we indicate to Wikipedias with an article for an award when a change happened for that award.. particularly new award winners for the current year.. It could be a list where editors are triggered to revisit their articles.

Thanks,

       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

Gender balance at @Wikipedia, deletion; a rear guard action.

 A recent Wikipedia Research article aims to prove that the English Wikipedia deletion process is not biased. For some that is a loaded question because it  centers on the question if Wikipedia is equitable.

As so often the article is all about English Wikipedia and it has its own bias. English Wikipedia does not serve half the public of the Wikimedia Foundation and much of the other half does not read English. The gender balance in English Wikipedia is however improving; the percentage of articles about women is slowly but surely increasing.

At issue in the article is whether the English Wikipedia deletion policies effectively harm gender and race biases. Obviously there are more biases; you may be male and white but when you are not from an Anglo-american background chances for Wikipedia recognition are slim. When you care to research this, check out Wikidata, it includes a super set of what Wikipedia includes and it is biased in this way as well.

When a Wikipedia article about a scientist is deleted, it does not follow that its Wikidata item is deleted and given enough identifiers, it is likely that its related subset increases over time tilting the "notability" balance. Even so, many important scientists are "scientists in red", an example is Prof Emily Fairfax her prominence is for instance in her explaining and demonstrating that beavers feature prominently in the fight against forest fires. 

When English Wikipedia defends its own policies, it follows that they rely on the base assumptions in those policies. When those assumption are questioned, their arguments are lost. Given that English Wikipedia represents a subset of "the sum of all knowledge" that is included in Wikidata, it follows that much of Wikipedia can be understood from such a perspective. 

Wikidata has no "red links"; when a relation exists for an recipient of an award, there must be an item for both the award and the recipient. Wikipedia has one link in black to the "SIRS Lifetime Achievement Award". while Wikidata has a link to all recipients. They are linked to identified publications and other awards and consequently the Scholia for the award is really informative. 

Based on information like this improved information is available that must wait for a Wikipedia volunteer. English Wikipedia is a victim of its success, it cannot fully maintain its information. The same can be said for Wikidata. It is however a superset and it does not necessarily require a mastery of English.

With new technologies becoming more relevant, there is an avenue to improve the quality of any Wikipedia, inform people based on the data in Wikidata and improve on the quality of the information that we provide. 

Thanks,

     GerardM

Analysis of a Wikipedia article

For professor Gerhard Gries there is a Wikipedia article and as a consequence there was a Wikidata item. Actually there were two; they have been merged. Many articles have been attributed to professor Gries and a Scholia template was added to the article.

Professor Gries has his own lab: the "Gerhard and Regine Gries Lab". There is no article for his wife and, there was no red link. There was no Wikidata item for his wife but there were 59 links indicating her as a missing co-author. She has now 68 articles linked to her as an author or co-author. Regine Gries is now a "woman in red".

The article states in two places that he is a "Fellow of the Entomological Society of America" (2019). It is in the text and it is in a Wikipedia category. Relevant are two additional lists; the website of the Entomological Society of America and the result of a query at Wikidata (shown in a Scholia). All these lists are incomplete, the fellows of 2022 are not yet included on the SoA website; they can be found in a different place. The Scholia has been added to the category article on the English Wikipedia; in effect you will find several "fellows in red". 

Three additional awards are listed, awards that have no category on the article. One is for the "Fellow of the Entomological Society of Canada", its reference may be found here. Another one is for the Nan-Yao Su Award and finally the Gold Medal of the Entomological Society of Canada had to be added to Wikidata. There are always more "award winners in red" to be found or to be added.

Every list, every category in Wikipedia is likely to be incomplete. What we do not know may be relevant. With data on missing articles available in Wikidata, there are more more options to make Wikipedia more inclusive.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Scaffolding in Wikidata - the Christiaan Hendrik Persoon Medal

Professor Brenda D. Wingfield is another scientist who won an award Wikidata knew nothing about. This time the Christiaan Hendrik Persoon Medal. The Wikidata basics for an award are its name, the conferring organisation and a website with details. A bonus is when there is a link to a person, an organisation the award is named after..

The Persoon Medal is a South African award, its conferring org is new to Wikidata as well. In an article about Prof B.D. Wingfield, all the other recipients are named as well; there are only six in a time span of 53 years so it was not hard to add them all.

The objective is to make connections. For both the award and Prof Wingfield, connections shows best in a Scholia. One of the more frequent co-authors is a Michael J. Wingfield.. He is a co-recipient of the Persoon Medal, a co-member of the Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and, a duplicate of Mike Wingfield and yes, he is the spouse of Prof B.D. Wingfield as well. He is at this time Q73879566 in the Scholia waiting for papers to be attributed to the earlier item.

Another frequent co-author, Bernard Slippers, is known from a different context. He is both a member of the South African Young Academy of Science and the Global Young Academy. Given some personal connections it was easy to ask if by chance Prof Wingfield is his doctoral advisor (he is the primary, they both are).

The point of scaffolding is that it provides the structures that enable finding the data, preferably in a context. Given that most data is static, the static representation that is Listeria is really powerful. When you group them like I did for African science or Young Academies, you get the satisfaction of understanding what work is done/has been done on a subject. The icing on the cake is when you enable collaboration. I am grateful for Robert Lepenies to pick up the lead and inform other young academies for what Wikidata may mean for them. I am grateful for Daniel Mietchen for improving on the queries I use; they now show the number of publications known for each scientists and a link to the tool that enables attribution to that scientists.

My role is a simple one. I add data. Data that connects, gives relevance but most importantly data that may be picked up in queries, lists by others. The scaffolds are made by others, relevance only happens when others pick it up. My point: there has to be something to pick up.
Thanks and happy new year,
          GerardM

#Wikidata - Naomi Ellemers and the relevance of #Awards

In a 2016 blogpost, I mentioned the relevance of awards. At the time Professor Ellemers received an award and it was the vehicle to make that point in the story.

Today in an article in a national newspaper, Mrs Ellemers makes a strong point that the perception of awards is really poblematic. What they do is reinforce a bias that American science is superior. It leads to a perception by European students that it is the USA "where it is all happening". A perception that Mrs Ellemers argues is incorrect.

NB Mrs Ellemers is the recipient of the 2018 Career Contribution Award of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Wikidata re-inforces this bias for American science by including a rating for "science awards". This rating values awards by comparing them. This rating is done by an American organisation and the whole notion behind it is suspect because the assumptions are not necessarily / not at all beneficial for the practice of science.

How to counter such a bias? As far as I am concerned there is no value in making a distinction between awards and "science awards" and biased information like this should be removed. Just consider, when European science is considered less than American science... how would  African science be rated?
Thanks,
     GerardM

#GenderGap - The Gineta Sagan Award (and others)

The Ginetta Sagan award is conferred by Amnesty International USA. It is an annual award, the last recipient according to Wikidata when I looked at it received it in 2014, English Wikipedia has the award as part of the article on Ginetta Sagan and has information including 2017 (when you read the texts, you will find how notable these people are and, by inference the people without an article).

Arguably, there is a lack of balance between the number of men and the number of women having an article in any Wikipedia. This is known as the "gender gap" and the "women in red" project works to great effect to improve that balance. There is no lack of fine notable ladies who have no article.

I am really happy to present two queries. The first query shows women who won an award with no article at all (2502 results). The second shows women who won an award with no article in the English language (29083 results).

Let these women be an inspiration to you.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - #Skills and tools needed to add #awards

Adding awards to Wikidata is one way to signal notable people who could do with some tender loving care, maybe even an article. Typically it starts with someone who was awarded. This time, three fine ladies: Kay Davies, Alice Rogers and Sarah Cleaveland.

Mrs Davies received the "Croonian Medal and Lecture", an award conferred by the Royal Society. The award was already known as the "Croonian Lecture" and the Wikipedia article contains a long list of recipients. The website included a few recipients and consequently the award was positively identified.

Thanks to Reasonator, I easily navigated from Mrs Davies to the award, I noticed how few recipients were known and using text from the article in combination with the Awarder tool I started adding 250+ recipients within ten minutes. Other awards like the Harveian Oration are still missing in Wikidata.

Mrs Rogers received the "Kavli Education Medal", only four recipients so far. The name Kavli in combination with awards proved a bit ambigue; finding the correct medal was the one challenge. One recipient was missing a Mrs Margaret Brown, easy enough to add her as well. The mother of Mrs Rogers was said to be a very accomplished mathematician of Bletchley Park fame but details are lacking.

Sarah Cleaveland received many awards; of interest are two because they are not linked. She was the first woman to win the Trevor Blackburn Award in 2008. The other, the Leeuwenhoek Medal and Lecture in 2018, got my attention. It did not have many recipients and again, the Awarder tool made it easy to add many missing recipients. There are several red links, I did not add them this time.

When I am to add the Trevor Blackburn Award, I first have to find it. It is mentioned on several Wikipedia articles but the award and Mr Blackburn are missing. Google helps me find the website of the award. With Mrs Cleaveland there are 13 recipients. The first thing to do is add the award, link the organisation that conferred it and the web address for the award.

When you then start looking for recipients, Reasonator immediately provides an updated view. No need to query for its recipients they are obvious. Just to show that you can, I added another fine lady; Mrs Karen Reed.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia - Why the deletion of a George Polk Award winner?

There used to be an article for May Ying Welsh. She received the George Polk Award in 2011, wrote a script for a film she directed Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark, a film that was well received.

The article is gone. But it is not because there was no notability. May Ying Welsh remains notable at Wikidata because she won the Polk award, wrote and directed a movie.. Structural need is why many people are added.

I could ask to see what the article looked like. But what is the point? My point is that Wikipedia fails itself and its audience because of a self imposed lack of information. A message that is not allowed to be raised on the Wikimedia mailing list.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Just another award; the 2018 Newberry Library Award

I read it on Twitter; Mrs Carla Hayden received the 2018 Newberry Library Award. There are many awards that do not keep track of all the awardees. Personally I found only one other award winner. I asked on Twitter for more information and a friend found several more.

This is one of the awards that I want to keep track of. So I added a Listeria page on my user page. Every time the underlying data changes, Listeria will pick it up.

In the mean time, Mrs Hayden, congratulations.
Thanks,
       GerardM