Wikicite from the ground up: attending a symposium on "rewilding"

 

Professor Dr Liesbeth Bakker has as a role to establish the science behind the rewilding practice. Professor Bakker has been appointed as the Special Professor of Rewilding Ecology at Wageningen UR in April 2020. Because of the Corona pandemic, her maiden speech is for now replaced with a one time symposium on the subject. Anyone can attend, it is wildly popular and you can attend to this one day event as well. 

Rewilding is being practices on a large scale, it did not happen overnight, there is a large amount of scholarly work that will be the basis of what Professor Bakker will consider in her own research.

What I can do for the occasion is make a Scholia for the conference? I can add more citations to papers, I can attribute papers to scholars. The bottom line for citations is that they are an invite to read more papers, to get to a better understanding of what is considered. Providing a better understanding of rewilding is the role Professor Bakker. When the public is to understand subjects like rewilding, ecology Wikipedia is the first place people go to. Its references can now link to Wikidata but from there it is still a huge step to a Scholia for a paper and better understanding of a paper.

When the subject matter of rewilding is to be more inclusively covered in Wikidata, it follows that the ecology of Wikidata has to play its role. It consists of items, properties and qualifiers. It has its data with  bots and users all iterating on. Applying this ecology for a purpose is a challenge.

As a paper like "Wild Steps in a semi-wild setting? Habitat selection and behavior of European bison reintroduced to an enclosure in an anthropogenic landscape" has no references in Wikidata, there is not much in its Scholia. Compare that to this paper where references exist to all the cited papers. Wikidata provides a rabbit hole that can help bring context to subjects, authors and papers. What to do for rewilding is very much a collective challenge.

Thanks, GerardM

Be #Excellent - science in Europe / Holland - #wetenschapper2030

At the "Wetenschap 2030 / Evolutie of revolutie" conference in The Hague it was all about excellence. Confusion set in when the question was raised: what is excellence.

Two big Dutch science funding organisations invited young scientist to consider scientific practice in 2030. It was a great gathering, more than half of the public were women, one prominent speaker told them she had two children and we were reminded that a more diverse team is a more successful team as shown in a recent paper.

One of the introductions set the tone. In science itself there is no room for all of us. It would take exponential funding, funding that is not available. In a few panels the subject of the daily practice was discussed and indeed, it is cut throat. Many people do not share expertise, results; there is no common good, everything to win in a rat race to move up the ladder towards tenure. Some say these practices are on the way out, others indicate that it depends on the field you research.

And then there is this guy from Europe who says, only excellence will get you funding from the EU..

What helps; scientists that may indicate what their primary concern is to be, what they want to be evaluated on; education, research.. Counter intuitively, such focused reviews have the effect that results outside the track benefit as well. In this way it is the university itself who finds excellence and improves its processes.

Another perspective on excellence; what value does research offer. Not to the scholars, nor the universities but to the ones bearing the burden of the costs and expect results. Are these results truly the best that can be achieved, does it reflect cooperation, are the numbers reproducible and the papers readable. For Europe to fund; the proposal must have merit.

My take away message; all those scientists that do not collaborate, back stab and think it acceptable because that is the way it is done, they do not deserve my taxeuro going forward towards 2030. The good news; thanks to Open Science and everything related change is underway but we are not there yet. Important: it does not follow that getting funding is a sign of quality, there is too little money to go around for all proposals with merit.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - Speakers at the #Cochrane Colloquium 2018

All the speakers announced for the Cochrane Colloquium 2018 have a presence on #Wikidata. Cochrane is a vital organisation; it debunks much of fake science by researching published papers. It asks for volunteers to help with this effort and its mission is to "promote evidence-informed health decision making by producing high-quality, relevant, accessible evidence".

Cochrane and the Wikimedia community collaborate, there is a Wikipedian in Residence. There have been editathons where articles were updated based on evidence (not sources) and consequently there is ample room for collaboration at the Wikidata level as well.

All speakers have been added to Wikidata and Mrs Sue Ziebland a professor at Oxford University, was new. This was not the case for many of her papers; they identified one author as "Sue Ziebland". Daniel Mietchen was so gracious to link the papers to the person and thanks to the Scholia tool Mrs Ziebland gets a lot of depth.

So what could a Wikidata / Cochrane collaboration look like? With a positive spin, all the positive authors according to Cochrane get a Wikidata item and, like Daniel did for Mrs Ziebland, the publications are linked to the person. When Cochrane provides links to its database, we can even see why a specific paper is so relevant. This will help Wikipedia editors because evidence-informed health decisions can be made and determine disputes in articles.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#Wikimedia talks - The long tail

Many talks about Wikimedia products and issues are given at a Wikimania. However it is not uniquely Wikimania where Wikimedia is the big thing; there are the conferences held by chapters. Many chapters like the Dutch chapter, have a tradition of recurring conferences.

Such presentations are relevant. What was presented was the current state of affairs by the "thought leaders" at the time. Many presentations have not been recorded on video or audio but quite often the slides or a paper is available somewhere.

It is easy enough to add these conferences, these talks to Wikidata. It is relevant because it allows for lists that can be generated with a bot like ListeriaBot, it enables people to find the presentations and when they find it interesting they can even see what is available. What it also does is link presentations to the people involved. At some stage you may find how often Lydia presented and where. <grin> at this time, only once </grin>.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata, its fucking amazing quality

Finding this illustration captures in many ways Wikidata. When we are to convince about quality we first have to be totally fucking amazing.

Quality is not an absolute. Quality is in being the best of the pack, in being better that what went before. Some say quality is in making no errors but for me that is a dead end. Quality is in acknowledging errors and dealing with them.

The first thing Wikidata did was bring some needed quality to Wikipedia. It brought all the interwiki in one place and it made for much better interlanguage links and it brought us time to improve on the mess that it was. The other Wikimedia projects and with two projects to go, Commons and Wiktionary it is fucking amazing what a difference it made.

Once Wikidata existed, many people feverishly started to include statements. Its progress can be followed in the statistics set up by Magnus. In a way it is similar to the wild west. Every Tom, Dick and Harry moved in and what has been accomplished is totally fucking amazing. It happened in the wiki way and some watch it in shock because there is no controlling it. Some of what has been done is good, bad and some is totally fucking amazing.

What Wikidata offers is to take much of the drudgery out of Wikipedia. Bassel for instance received the Index Award. The latest prize winners are from the batch of 2013. When this data was from Wikidata, it would be easier to update all fifteen Wikipedias when new data becomes available. It would improve quality and, would it not be fucking amazing to make that happen?

The chair of the Dutch Wikimedia chapter remarked at its annual conference: "So much is about Wikidata". Several of the presentations were about new ways collaborations with GLAM's, the potential they offer is huge. The one person with the biggest impact on Wikidata was mentioned often. It is fucking amazing to hear people from GLAM's say that Magnus's work enables them to contribute to Wikimedia.

All this is happening before your eyes. You have to see it to believe it.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#MissingBassel - #Wikidata as a tool II

At the Dutch Wikimedia conference I demonstrated how at Wikidata the data for Bassel Khartabil was enriched. The presentation shows how I added other people who have been awarded the Index award.

There are many ways to measure quality. Bassel is a member of Wikipedia. He deserves to be recognised as such because I hate to think that others like him will see an end to their life for our values. Through the index award, he is linked to for instance Malala. Given the steps of separation, how far off is Bassel from you?
Thanks,
     GerardM

#SignWriting #Symposium - including #Wikipedia

For a second year now the Signwriting Foundation organises their online symposium. For those who do not know, SignWriting is all about writing sign languages. This has been under development for over 40 years and it was founded by Valerie Sutton.

When a language can be written, it may have a Wikipedia and, it has been wished for for a long time. The problems are many. The characters have to show, the text is written online for it to be truly a Wiki.

In a presentation on this years symposium, Yair Rand informs us about a keyboard that has been developed to bring the reality of Wikipedia for a sign language even closer.

If there is one thing the people at SignWriting org teach us, it is that perseverance matters. With an input method, a Wikipedia in the American Sign Language is that much closer.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - Men at work; preparing a #presentation III - #WCN2014

The bane of every live demonstration is when the software just does not work. My intention is to show #Wikidata in action. Demonstrate the Reasonator and AutoList2. When the experience of the last few weeks is anything to go by, I have a 50% chance of a reasonable result on the day.

There are many factors that can play up. Time outs at Wikidata are no exception at the moment and when Wikidata does not play ball, everything downstream from it suffers as a consequence. It means that I may not have a recent list of recent deaths because ToolScript does not function.

AutoList2, relies on WIDaR. It relies on being able to contact Wikidata reliably. Without this, AutoList2 does not run.

The subject of my presentation is firmly solution oriented. I can always fall back on screenshots. That feels like cheating.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - Men at work; preparing a #presentation II - #WCN2014

Mr van Asselt was a prominent professor at the Utrecht University. He is one of many professors known to Wikipedia. Given that I regularly harvest data from categories, it makes sense for me to use the English Wikipedia as it has an article about Mr van Asselt.

The equivalent category on the Dutch Wikipedia knows about more faculty members and then there are categories in several other languages as well. All of them may know about even more faculty members.

As we aim to share the "sum of all available knowledge" with our readers, Mr van Asselt is a timely reminder to the audience of the Dutch Wikimedia conference that no Wikipedia does know it all.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia - Men at work; preparing a #presentation I - #WCN2014

This saturday I will present about #Wikidata at the annual conference of the Dutch Wikimedia chapter. As I have a day job too, I have started preparing. I want my presentation to be factual, challenging and inspiring.

The facts are simple; Wikidata is almost two years old. It started with incorporating all interwiki links. The development team is really small, it does an awesome job and typically Wikidata is available, responsive and up to the job. The ambitions are huge; the challenge is to add to the existing work load while keeping the ship afloat.

If there is to be a challenge in my presentation, it will be that our aim is "to share in the sum of all knowledge". Our aim should be to share all the knowledge we have available to us with our readers. At this time only a few Wikipedias go the extra mile and will inform that we have information available in one of our other projects. This is done by adding results from searching Wikidata and showing as much text as is available in the local language.

One challenge is to do this for the Dutch Wikipedia as well.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The #Wikidata workshop

At the #CEE meeting in #Modra, it was a pleasure to inform about the latest about Wikidata. At the conference the idea of a workshop was launched. The question posed was: "show us what is already there, show us what we can already do".

Wikidata workshop from Gerard Meijssen

There is a lot to show. There is the progress that is made by the development team, there are the many tools created by Magnus and, there are the templates used on several Wikipedias. People are impressed but for many purposes it is not good enough. This is understandable, Wikidata is not feature complete. Many things we want to do are under development.

If there is one thing I wanted to achieve is that people understand that while Wikidata is incomplete, it is already functional. There are great tools that emulate what people are looking for. There are things that do make a difference today .. Tipping points have been reached for several uses and as more people make use of Wikidata and include the data that is relevant to them, more tipping points will be reached.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Ron Woodroof, an #American activist

This weekend I will speak at the #Wikimedia #diversity conference in Berlin. The conference aims to increase the pool of knowledge in the Wikimedia projects and to enable a heterogeneous, colourful, diverse community.

There will be a focus on the imbalance in the gender participation in our projects. There is also an imbalance in how subjects are covered

Ron Woodroof was an activist who is getting more attention these days because the movie "Dallas Buyers Club" is centred around him. He is notable enough for the Swedish to have an article written in 2012 about him. In the English version he was nothing but a redirect to the movie.

Love him or hate him. Mr Woodroof is notable. He is part of an anti-culture in the USA, he died of AIDS. It will be interesting to notice how many similar stories will be told at the conference.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#mlwlux - #Wikipedia, how many people do live in #Amsterdam

At the Multilingual Web conference in Luxembourg, it was mentioned that Amsterdam has a different number of people living there depending on what Wikipedia you are reading.

It needs a solution it was said. Yes it does and letting us know is part of a solution. It certainly allows the number for Amsterdam to become the same. A real solution would be one where such data is maintained centrally and served where ever it is needed.

The Wikidata project is starting and one of its objectives is to serve as a central data repository. The people at the conference will appreciate that it is not simple; 783.364 is the number quoted on the Dutch Wikipedia while an American would say that a number like 783,364 is quite a lot more.

Anyway; we do appreciate that the numbers game and the data game is very much something we have fun with in the near future.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#multilingweb - #Arabic and #Hebrew are #RTL

Amir  asked me to ask at the Multilingual Web conference in conference to people like Richard Ishida:

"How hard would it be to allow assigning element directionality according to lang.  In HTML4 and in the current draft of HTML5, <span lang="ar"> has dir="ltr", unless specified otherwise, and I find it ridiculous". 

The usual replies Amir gets is:

• Backwards compatibility
• Many websites already use HTML-5 even though it is not a finished product. This will break them

His reply to this:

• If a document explicitly specifies that it's HTML5, it should have directionality assignment by default.
• Add an attribute to the root HTML tag, something like: <html dir="bylang"> or <html dirbylang="true">

Amir has aired his view before and an answer he gets from some "standards people" is: "It would be very problematic to do it, because most web developers don't use the lang attribute". This is rather funny because this will work only when the lang attribute is used.  And anyway at some point in time the public at large do not care really about previous versions of HTML as all the websites still in use will have moved on.

What we need is proper meta data for all languages and such data can hide very nicely inside a browser. Developers of websites do not know and want to know about all the linguistic niceties necessary to support a multi lingual web. It so many ways it makes sense to provide language support from inside the browser.

At the Wikimedia Foundation we we don't just support a lot of languages, we are also well aware of the languages we support. Ours is a world-wide community of people who have the opportunity to openly complain to us about bad support for their language and they expect that their complaint is actually read and is being taken care of.

Thanks,

     GerardM

#multilingweb - #i18N and #l10n testing framework

A subject for the conference about the Multilingual Web is what gaps exist in supporting a multilingual web. Obviously people who are living the multilingual web like my colleagues in the WMF localisation team suffer these gaps. Our team has been asked what to do next and one idea of Amir I love to put forward.

A testing framework for localization
I searched and I couldn't find any testing framework that is focused on localization. Many localization-specific issues must be tested, for example, grammatical correctness of generated messages, text readability in different scripts, support for encodings and fonts, etc. You can find a fuller list in Wikipedia (i wrote most of that section myself). It is possible to test all these things using the current frameworks, but much of it would be manual.

For example, i'm not familiar with any tool that would automatically or semi-automatically create screenshots of all the possible translated strings with their complete context. This would be useful for the translator, to see how to translate a message; for the developer, to see whether any message runs out of the screen or hides a button that must remain visible; and for the tester who speaks the language and wants to see whether all the generated messages are grammatically correct. Currently, a developer must do this manually;
it is time-consuming, inefficient, hard to plan and to maintain, and the fact is that the developers are hardly ever doing this.

Such a testing framework would be really great for so many organisations. At translatewiki.net we support many organisations with their internationalisation and localisation. A framework will make it easy to repeat the testing often. This will improve consistency and quality and makes for a great multi lingual experience.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Standards - A gap in plural support

#multilingweb

When you can speak only for fifteen minutes, there is so much you  do not have the time for. Issues that are relevant, things the conference is meant to address.

When I wrote about plural, a subject that is actively discussed on translatewiki.net, Niklas told me about his frustration that his inventory plural rules in various databases had not resulted in anything at all.

As the Multilingual Web conference explicitly asks to identify where standards and best practices cover our needs, this is certainly one that is relevant to us.

As the hashtag of the conference will surely find its way to twitter, this can be seen as an experiment; will people who will go to the conference see this and will there be some follow up at the conference.
Thanks,
     GerardM

PS Niklas will be at the conference as well

The web is Multilingual - #multilingweb

Presenting at the conference about the Multilingual Web will be fun. When you read what the conference is about, what they ask presenters to include in their presentations is interesting:

• existing best practices and/or standards that are relevant
• new standards and best practices that are currently in development
• gaps that are not covered by best practices and/or standards

In so many ways, what we do is implement the best practices as we know them. We are establishing best practices and are running into the gaps of the standards regularly because no other project supports the 412 languages that have an existing Wikipedia or are requesting a Wikipedia. 

It is great for us to have two people at this conference; we will learn a lot from the other presenters and from the people who attend. We expect that many best practices are set into a professional environment. Our environment consists of dedicated volunteers. The monthly update to our community of localisers at translatewik.net has 4600 recipients. Our puzzle will be to adapt what we learn for our setting.

We want to learn about translation work flow, we want to discuss what to do about languages that are not yet supported in the CLDR. Most of all we want to learn what we do not know, our blind spots. 

Thanks,

     GerardM

Reaching out to #Intel

A conference like #FOSDEM is big, some of the talks are influential and consequently it is a place where people are to learn about what is happening and how people think about technology and open source technology at that.

At breakfast we were sitting next to a gentleman working for Intel. He was very much into mobile communications so we reached out to him and discussed with him about our need to support input methods for languages like Tamil, Malayalam ... We told him that we provide web fonts.

You never know at the start of a conversation what will come out of it. What we do know is that support that is low in the technology stack has the most effect.
Thanks,
    GerardM

A #translation sprint and an intro to #MediaWiki hacking

The verdict on the records is out; the day is not done yet. The biggest thing was when a Panjabi woman was thrilled to be able to just type Panjabi in the Symbiosis computer lab.

This was a revelation shared by other people in the room for other languages. Supporting many Indic languages is available for many operating systems. Never mind how cool it is to support you with Narayam and WebFonts, it is much better to have support local on your local device. This not only provides you with the support you deserve in Wikipedia but also in all the applications you might run. You know what, installing this is not that hard.

At this time 40+ new people created a profile at translatewiki.net, many people have experienced that it is not that hard to support Free Software by helping themselves make the software available in their own language.

The second part of the day, the technical part was too short but many people got a clue what MediaWiki and its infrastructure is about. For us to be in Pune has been a privilege and, it is really cool to see the functionality we are so passionate about being used in earnest.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Hackathon #India day one

With a large group like this, with so much talent a lot can be done in one day. When the achievements of the days were presented it was quite a lot.

• Kiwix has been localised in four languages
• The new Lohit fonts were loaded on translatewiki.net and tested
• new bugs for the Lohit font were discovered and bugs were reported
• an SMS gateway for sending Wikipedia articles was tested
• an input method was created for Marathi
• the Android app for MediaWiki is now supported at translatewiki.net

Thanks,

     GerardM