#Wikidata - Tiberius, Modestus and Florentia

Tiberius, Modestus and Flotentia are three Catholic martyrs. There is a Dutch article by that name and Kian has it on its "problems list".

Lists like these "lists of possible mistakes" are necessary. At best they are an evolutionary step between having no awareness and being aware of issues. It would be wonderful when there are workflows for fixing issues in a way that prevents them from reappearing on such a list.

For these three martyrs new items were added and they are linked to the item for a "group of people". Joseph Guislain is in the Dutch article also a museum in Ghent. It is easy enough to add an item for the museum and link him to the person. But will it fix this issue for Wikidata?

Workflows for the issues that we face would be wonderful:

• when done, an item should disappear from a "to do" list
• it should be more obvious what it is that will fix an issue
• when we identify martyrs or whatever, we should involve people who are into the related subjects

Magnus has many tools that have people fix things. They are workflows we could adopt and by doing this make them even easier to use.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikidata - giving a #category an application

Many #Wikimedia categories have interlanguage links. Obviously the content of all these linked categories do not have the same content. Someone has to add the articles, sometimes it gets done and sometimes it doesn't. Often articles just do not exist.

When the facts that are implicit in what a category is about make it to all the items in all the categories, typically you have a superset in Wikidata. It does not stop there; items in Wikidata may be included that are not in any of those linked categories.

This is all theoretical unless ... unless you can query Wikidata and use the results. Much data has been added to Wikidata based on the content of categories and queries have been used to identify missing items this is done using AutoList2. This is one application; it is used by some of the "advanced" users of Wikidata.

What is even more interesting is showing what Wikidata things should be in a category. This is done using Reasonator. At this time for over 690 categories statements are included that define a query. This query is already complex enough that the Wikidata functionality will not be able to express the results..

These queries could be of use to "advanced" Wikipedians because it is a basis for identifying articles that have not been categorised or articles that still need to be written in their Wikipedia. For everyone else it is just interesting; this information exists and it is readily available. It is one way of learning that Wikidata knows for instance about 121,922 politicians.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #priorities

Wikidata is relevant because it is used. The primary use case that makes Wikidata relevant are the interwiki links. Wikidata gained relevance as more Wikimedia projects used Wikidata for its interwiki links.

There are ambitions to add more relevance to Wikidata. This is done by giving an application to the data that is included in Wikidata.

• external sources are shown based on Wikidata information
• automatically generated text for "humans" in English
• automated descriptions
• presentation of information in Reasonator
• query in WDQ, Autolist and Autolist2.
• automated descriptions are used in "Wikidata search" on many Wikipedias

Particularly for humans, this works rather well. This house of cards relies very much on one premise; that we know what a Wikidata item is about; is it a human, a house, a settlement or a record label?

For most of our items Given that we do not know what an item is about. For me it is a priority that as many items get identified for what they are as soon as possible. This makes it possible to make a statement that a person is a journalist, an engineer or whatever. 

There are issues with this approach. There is this potential for false positives and at the same time it provides us with possibilities as well. Once false positives have been recognised as such, they can be used to identify other items for what they are. Once the right identifiers have been set as well, it becomes easier to remove the wrong identifiers.

The biggest issue however is with our community. Not everyone shares the same priorities and insights and this is made worse because many people Wikidata only know the standard functionality. For them "Widar" is playing a game. They are not aware that the bulk of the edits are done with Widar or by bot and that the interface they use is inferior. These people have good intentions but they have no clue.

Add to this that communication channels do not really function and what we have is quite messy. 

It will not really improve until we share more of our priorities and listen to each others arguments and work together towards solutions. As it is there are too many perspectives and, conflicting priorities aplenty. Consequently there is plenty frustration shared by all.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikidata - a bug busted

Automated descriptions is the single most important productivity enhancement for Wikidata. Nothing else comes close. Most items do not have descriptions and many of these fixed descriptions do not exist in my language. Automated descriptions are not fixed and improve as more relevant statements become available.

I was getting depressed when they became absent after an update of Wikidata. How would I know what "Jodhpur" to choose when I want the Lok Sabha electoral district? I found how much I rely on this feature and how crappy Wikidata is without it.

Magnus came to the rescue and I have updated my "common.js".  It now says:

mw.loader.load('https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Wdsearch-autodesc.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

It works again for me. It can work for you as well and it will work for all of us when this functionality is available to all of us.

Please make it so!
Thanks,
      GerardM

More #Wikidata tools

Many articles, particularly in the smaller Wikipedias are not linked to any other article. Getting these articles linked to other articles is often something that is done best by someone who understands the language. Finding these "lonely items" is what you do with the lonely items tool.

It takes some effort to link from Telugu or Hindi. If you do not know these languages, Google translate is probably your best friend to make an educated guess.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The battle of Verdun in #Wikidata

In a previous blog post I wrote about dates and my wish for entering and displaying dates in the Islamic calendar. As a result there were several interesting reactions.

For some people it was news that Wikidata supports dates. The question put to me was: "This Q130847 has geo coordinates but no date". As this refers to the battle of Verdun, I replied by adding the start and end date to the Wikidata item for the battle of Verdun.

One bit of good news is that MediaWiki does support the Islamic calendar, as a consequence the issue of using the calendar got a new dimension. I was also asked if other calendars like the Balinese calendar could be supported. In principle MediaWiki should support any calendar however, I would prefer to start with the support of calendars that MediaWiki supports in Wikidata.

The bug for support for the Islamic calendar in Wikidata was given the I18N label in Bugzilla. I hope that our language team will take an interest in supporting calendars in Wikidata

As it is fairly obvious that the battle of Verdun is a battle, I added "Instance of" "battle". When you look where battle links in Wikidata you will find many more battles that are linked to the concept of battle. I added a few more battles that I just happened to know.

When you look at the info-box for the battle of Verdun, you find many bits of information that we should be able to support in Wikidata. It would be cool when we can.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Ramadan 1434

Not that long ago #Wikidata gained the functionality of adding dates as an assertion to an item. It is really nice because it is now possible to indicate when a person was born or died.

At this moment we are in the last week of the month of Ramadan, in the year 1434. When you check a calendar forthis month, you may notice that Ramadan is partly in the month of July and August 2013.

When you are adding assertions to Wikidata relating to Islam or Arabic history, you will find that many sources use the Islamic calendar and not the Gregorian dates. As a consequence you have to convert them to Gregorian before you can enter them into Wikidata.

To solve this Wikidata could accept Islamic dates. It just takes some programming. With a little bit of help from Google you can find PHP code like I did. It will probably provide basic functionality. I cannot tell.

The question is, is there someone who is willing to write the code in Wikidata so that it will provide support for Islamic dates? I am sure there will be all kind of issues to resolve.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#MediaWiki has <ref>; but look at it in #Hebrew

The #mwhack11 is an important meeting to squash bugs. As the Language committee has its meeting and as there is a large group of translatewiki.net developers, there was a dedicated session on "right to left" issues.

Some five bugs were squashed. They were the known bugs, the bugs that were documented. There were bugs that had so far not been given the attention they deserve; one bug kills the wish to actually use references in a Wikipedia article.

When you do <ref> some source </ref> you will get another entry in this nice reference section at the end of the article.

You can find the complete <ref> tag in the screen shot. For your convenience, it has been highlighted in blue. From a usability point of view, it is atrocious. It is so bad that even Mr Michael Everson himself was shocked.

Now there is a bug for this issue and there is a chance that the Hebrew community will overcome their reluctance to include sources in their articles. One lesson learned is; there is a relation between localised technology and the quality of a Wikipedia.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Bringing a #Toolserver tool to the next level II

The #SVG translate tool is developing nicely; my pet peeve has been sort of solved. It now uses the Toolserver User Screening Control which is a tool that allows for checking if a user exists on a Wiki.

At best TUSC is a crutch;

• it seems not to be aware of SUL
• it introduces a new user with a new password
• it clutters your talk page with some necessary gibberish
• the upload is done by a bot anyway

The origin of all this is that the Toolserver is not a Wikimedia project with all its save guards. Add to this that while Wikimedia has SUL, it does not provide authentication services for Wikimedia movement projects like Toolserver. When MediaWiki were to support openID, we would not need additional passwords and have implicit authentication outside of the Toolserver.

This software already exists for MediaWiki for years.

The upload functionality however does work. Now for an invitation to do more localisations; maybe the template can provide information to find more untranslated SVG graphics.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Bringing a #Toolserver tool to the next level

#SVG translate is a lovely tool, it does work as advertised and I can use it in my own language (click here when it is not yet available in your language).

It is good, it is a big improvement and there is room for improvement. The work flow of an SVG image goes something like this:

• find an SVG image with translatable labels
• find the tool to translate the label
• translate the labels
• check out the SVG with the newly translated labels
• upload the SVG to Commons

As the time it takes to translate is quite minimal, translating more images is an easy option when the other parts of the work flow are equally efficient. When the tool is aware of images waiting to be translated and prompts you, why not do another one?

This would work well when there is a magic formula to evoke the upload wizard. A formula can be found because a translated image is after all a derivative work. All the information of the original applies and the only thing left is to credit the translator. With the upload wizard ready at the end to make all the translated images available it would be heaven.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Bilder einer Ausstellung

#MuseScore wowed me at #Fosdem. What it does is provide you with a way to provide all kinds of functionality with a music score.

When you have a video with a synchronised score, it becomes possible to do karaoke on the piano or the guitar. The format is some kind of XML and the output needs to be rendered. The rendering is not rocket science; it needs to be done and from then on it just needs to be used.

Just think the fun we can put into our articles when people can read about music and just play.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5 has become a reality. I have been looking forward to it. I want to use it. I even went for a monment back to Vista just to install it...

As I am running Ubuntu, Firefox is the default browser but the update manager/ does not have the new Firefox available for me. I expected that Firefox would work the same but so far it has not. I would love to see the same usability on Ubuntu.
Thanks,
        GerardM

First Vista then Ubuntu

My old laptop died. The bottom of the screen was black. It died some time ago when I was in New York. That was fortunate because laptops are much cheaper in the US. So I bought a cheap new laptop and was still under the legal limit of what I could import.

The system I bought, a compac presario CQ60 came with Vista. So I started using Vista. After working with it for a few weeks, I found that I had a steep learning curve behind me and came to the conclusion that it did not really work for me. So I decided to give Ubuntu a spin as well.

Now after two weeks of Ubuntu, I have learned that Ubuntu provides me with superior functionality. The version of Vista was "home edition"; when you compare this you find that in a comparison with Ubuntu, it is cripple ware. The things that make Vista professional useful are the same things that are to justify the much higher price.

Given that I do a lot of things on MediaWiki installations, having the same operating system makes it easier. My networking is more stable, the editing of scripts is superior. I think I am going to stick with Ubuntu.
Thanks,
GerardM

A GMAIL feature request

I received an e-mail from my friend Raoul. Raoul has a new e-mail address. I changed his profile and added his new e-mail address. Now should I remove his old e-mail address?

• When I remove his old address, I lose the connection to all the mails I received in the past
• When I keep his old address, I may use it to send him new mail

What I would like is for Gmail to have a "historic" bit for e-mail addresses so that I will be able to find the old mails from my friend Raoul.
Thanks,
GerardM

Gmail is off line

Gmail is unavailable to me at the moment. The funny thing is that I only noticed this because I cannot get at my contact information. I have been happily reading my mail, sending out mail.

The annoying thing is that Google does not yet support the contact information off line.
Thanks,
      GerardM

How to present big files.

On Meta we proposed a project for the digital restoration of images. These images are typically public domain and they are often made available from a friendly archive. In the workflow of a restoration, there are several moments when a change is made that cannot be undone. When you work on restorations in a Wiki way, you have to save the work before such a change because this allows others to improve on them.

Images that are being restored may not be compressed because this introduces distortions that negate the restoration work. Once a restoration is completed, it may be compressed for use in Commons. For a normal illustration in a Wikipedia article compression is normal.

When you look at a really big picture, it can take quite some time before it is available to you; it slowly build from top to bottom. It is like watching paint dry. It makes more sense to start with an outline of the image and drill down for more details. Djatoka is open source software written by the Los Alamos National Laboratory that does exactly that. When I read its specifications, it makes me feel really entheausiastic. Have a look at this ox for instance.

So the next question is how do we make this functionality part of MediaWiki.
Thanks,
GerardM

Welcome news

Brion Vibber announced that the upload limit on file sizes has been bumped up from 20 to 100 megabytes. This is particularly welcome news for the people restoring images. The practice is to upload both the original image and the restored image. Several of the original images were just too big.

This good news comes as a consequence of the many new servers that have been installed. The question is if this will mean more reliable backups as well.
Thanks,
GerardM

Dogfood

The Finnish Wikipedia is the 14th Wikipedia in size. Its localisation is not as good as we would expect of a Wikipedia with more then 150.000 articles. Nikerabbit, the main developer at Betawiki is Finnish and he was challenged on IRC to eat his own dog food.

Nike has now started to work on the localisation and we hope/expect that in the true spirit of Open Source, he will start to scratch his own itch. When you are translating string after string, a lot of time is wasted clicking on buttons. Ajax is a technology that improves the responsiveness of programs. It would be cool if we would find that fewer clicks are needed to do the work...
Thanks,
Gerard

Farmer; tactical technology

Farmer is an extension for MediaWiki. Farmer helps with the maintenance of Wiki farms and enables changes to the configuration from a Web interface. The reason why I blog about it is because it is one of those little gems that may make a difference in making MediaWiki more popular.

MediaWiki can be found in an NGO in a box. This is an initiative of Tactical Tech, an organisation that aims to "demystify technology for non profits". The big selling points for MediaWiki are the many people that know MediaWiki through Wikipedia and the many languages that are supported by it.

Recently farmer was welcomed as an extension in BetaWiki, and the developers active at BetaWiki have been working hard at improving the messaging of Farmer. Farmer will make the maintenance of MediaWiki less challenging. With its messages translated in more and more languages, MediaWiki becomes more and more tactical technology.

Thanks,
GerardM

Is it a Wiki ?

OmegaWiki is a wiki. Some people however disagree; they consider the fixed format conclusive evidence why it is not. As the software is maturing, this argument loses a lot of its lustre. Obviously we have been saying that these people are wrong all along :)

The best argument why OmegaWiki is a wiki is because people can add/ change little items one at a time, they are not compelled to do everything at one go. As this is acceptable, our data has to be correct but does not necessarily need to be complete.

With the new terminological support; we can now indicate that a language is a language, all kinds of additional information can be added once you have stated that it is a language. Have a look at French for instance, the "incoming relations" and the annotations provide a lot of information. As the moment of writing it is not yet clear that French is an official language of France for instance.

With the expansion of existing classes, with the expansion of the class attributes information will become more available and integrated. The best bit is that as the OmegaWiki specific user interface can be translated in many language people will be challenged to ensure that the right terminology is used in translation.

With the new functionality OmegaWiki became much more wiki. It is there for every one to see, and everyone is cordially invited to have a look, create a user, add some Babel templates and have a go at it.

Thanks,
Gerard