The pain that is in maintaining lists of African governmental politicians

At the French Wikipedia, there is a category with 16 Finance ministers of Morocco. A category is an unsorted list and the French category contains a few more entries than the English category. Both Wikipedias do not have a (sorted) list.

I maintain list of African heads of state and African governmental ministers, so this is just a next list to prepare. The workflow is as follows: I create an item for a position, on the talk page I add a template that contains the data and pointers to what is missing. Typically such information can be found on a Wikipedia list, this time I have to rely on templates on Wikipedia articles.. All my lists are "works in progress" and are on my watch list.

I have added copies of the Listeria lists to many Wikipedias. The texts are in English, the data is shown in the local language. It being in English is a reason to refuse these lists in several communities.

The Listeria functionality is replaced by Wikimedia Foundation maintained software. All the list definitions and expressions exist in one place. The data is shown in a language that can be selected. When a list changes, it is reflected on watch lists. You can watch for all data and possibly for data and labels in "your" language. A project can opt in to enable the use of these lists when they don't, functionality is available to compare a list with the centrally maintained list.

Thanks, GerardM 

It is not a list when it is the result of a query

A list is a presentation of data. When a list is maintained manually, the list IS the data, when the data is the result of a query, it REPRESENTS the data.

The difference is quite important. Changing the information in a query is in the definition of the query, changing the data is a matter of re-running the query. Changing the information in a list is a lot of work and therefore there is no integrity in the data itself, it is always potluck what quality the data is.

In the Wikipedia world, Listeria is king of the queried lists. For some its use is controversial but things are changing for the better. Projects like Women in Red use Listeria a lot, their work is possible because people add notable women in Wikidata. The queries work on the basis of awards, professions, nationality enabling volunteers to write the articles they care to write. This works because once an article is written they are automagically removed from the lists.

On the English Wikipedia consensus has it that manual lists are to be preferred. However, emperically the quality of automated lists perform better {{REF}} and as data in Wikidata does not suffer from "false friends" even the support for "red links" is vastly superior.

There is no point in anecdotal evidence who is best. When the English Wikipedia has a black link for Stephen Fleming on its page for the Spearman medal first, it is an obvious start for a new item on Wikidata that is more than just a person who won the Spearman medal. It then becomes a target for lists of the special interest groups who aim to cover "their" subject matter well.

The next stage of the acceptance of lists relies on the realisation that "consensus" does not serve us well particularly when it trumps established facts. It will serve us well in politics and, in what Wikimedia projects could be.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#WeMissTurkey - six times #Listeria for best results

Reading about the history of the Ottoman Empire is a different experience on every Wikipedia. Typically most of the "humans" involved do not have an article and the spelling of the names differs. In English one title is pasha, in Catalan it is paixà and in Turkish and Bosnian it is paša. In all these languages it is part of the name of many dignitaries.

There are often multiple items for the same person thanks to these differences in spelling. Disambiguating the information together comparing the articles. The English, Catalan, Turkish, Bosnian, Greek and Arabic Wikipedia have their reasons to have an interest in the Ottoman Empire. For this reason I copied the Listeria list from my English user page to the ca.wp, tr.wp, bs.wp, el.wp and ar.wp.

When labels in a particular language are changed or when data is added, the Listeria list will update on a daily basis. So as we work on Ottoman information, the best effect will now show six times on my user page.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#WeMissTurkey - #Bosnia and its Otoman governors

We miss Turkey as readers and contributors of our project. In the larger picture, when we write about the history of the world, we have to pay attention to the Ottoman Empire. Its history ended only 96 years ago and its influence is underestimated.

Take Bosnia; many people from the eyalet of Bosnia have been really influential and many people were beylerbey of the Bosnia eyalet. Adding all these people can be done from a list on the Bosnian Wikipedia. The list is in Bosnian and paša is pasha in translation and that makes it a lot of work.. In Catalan, the same word is paixà and Catalan is a language that covers the history of Africa rather well. Many people known in Bosnian are known in Catalan and not in English.

The dignitaries of the Ottoman Empire often stayed for a short period before they moved on to another place. Getting the curriculum vitae for the top will help understand history. In true Wiki fashion we have a start and it will improve when we collaborate.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - Women in blue

Dear Rosie, I saw your presentation. You want women in blue. In it you mention 300 lists of women. That is a lot of lists. In the mean time the biggest list of women with no article in a Wikipedia can be found on Wikidata.

There has been research in suggesting subjects to people and it works. Leila Zia, one of the WMF researchers wrote about a project they did. So the mechanism is there and you know, Wikidata has oodles of women with no article in "your" Wikipedia that have enough relevance given.

So how about a generator for ideas for articles to write? Leila knows many algorithms and Wikidata knows about many if not most of the women that are on your lists.. Come to think of it, why not add all the lists in Wikidata in the first place?
Thanks,
       GerardM

Kigeli V, Mwami of Rwanda

Kigeli was the last ruling Mwami of Rwanda. He died October 16.

When a last ruler dies, it follows that there are previous rulers and, there is a lot that is of interest in the history of the mwamis. His father for instance was deposed because he refused to become catholic.

I have added the rule of several mwamis to Wikidata because such basic information is often lacking. Wikipedia articles are often stubs at best and sources are often absent.

Typically a monarch is part of a dynasty. With a new dynasty it represents often a new family but certainly a change that makes for it to be recognised as such. The article on the kingdom of Rwanda describes the role of the mothers of a king. They are yet unknown to us and consequently a lot of relevant information is missing.

When you see all those red links, it is obvious that significant red links exist in any language. When they are linked to Wikidata, information like the follow up as ruler and who is related to who becomes a task that can be done once and be done well. It is one way to emancipate information that has been of little concern to Wikipedias.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - La Galería de las Mujeres de Costa Rica

#Marketing is something the #Wikimedia Foundation does not do. It does not mean that concepts like KPI are foreign to the WMF. Take this list from the English article "La Galería de las Mujeres de Costa Rica" the women listed are "women who have broken gender stereotypes and advanced human rights principals".

A lot of effort goes into fighting for a diverse Wikipedia where both women are given proper attention. If I were a marketing man, I would say that lists like this provide pointers to people who want to help. I would be happy with a list that shows all the current people with an article and I would be ecstatic when I had a list that would show all the missing articles that would auto update.

The funny thing is that technically it is not that hard to produce. It is not even that hard to include the technology into MediaWiki but it takes a marketing man to drive the point home that you have to engage people and that it shows the quality of a Wikipedia project when we know where we are lacking and where we should concentrate.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimania - What have we learned, how to experience it

We have not all been to Esino Lario. It is where Wikimania 2016 happened. That does not mean that it is not possible to see many of the presentations. You may find them on YouTube, maybe elsewhere. The same goes for presentations of previous Wikimania's.

In the history of Wikipedia and our movement, these presentations are notable. It even makes the people who presented notable. As I have been watching several presentations, as I argued that we are really bad at recognising our own notability, I have created a list; they link to lists of presentations for previous Wikimania's. The cool thing is that they are updated regularly by the ListeriaBot. So when I or someone else adds a Wikimania talk, the talk will magically appear.

What you find is rather basic but it works. You will be linked to the presentation on YouTube, You will be linked to the items for the "author", the language used for the presentation and the talk itself. At this stage Wikidata like Commons is mostly a repository. For best effect use Reasonator. Compare Wikidata with Reasonator for the presentation of James Heilman for instance..

I am really happy to have been helped by TweetsFactsAndQueries. He helped a lot in getting the SPARQL queries in a reasonable shape. He figured out how to show only the YouTube video ID instead of the full URL. It is probably possible to show an icon instead but that is for later. What is missing are links to the presentation (the power point) and the submission paper. I have no idea yet how that is to be modelled in Wikidata.

It is important to include such data for several reasons. First it brings access to the presentations for the people who are interested. Secondly it documents what we do puts a timestamp to our thinking in time. Thirdly it documents our history.
Thanks,
      GerardM