What data is wrangled is obvious when its presentation is considered

When you watch a game, you want to know the score. When you have a favourite author, you want to know all his/her publications and when you hear about a place you want to know where it is. Easy.

Such data may be included in a repository like Wikidata and, in essence the data is still simple. You still want to know the score, the publications or the location, the question is how do you get the data in a format that makes sense.

People are really good at understanding data when it is in an agreeable format.. These are three format for the same data; a scientist in Wikidata. This is how Wikidata presents its data and imho the data is really hard to understand. This is the same data in Reasonator, it is a general purpose tool that shows data and its relations. It can be used for all kinds of data, it is my goto tool to get to grips with data related to one item. Finally Scholia presents data formatted in a way that makes sense for this scientist.

Given how awful the default presentation of Wikidata is, it is obvious why everyone teaching the use of Wikidata focuses on querying the data and therefore people seek/work on the results provided in what is their default tool. I typically focus on particular subjects, today it was Dr Shima Taheri, I added a reference, some publications and genders for her co-authors. To do this I am triggered by the presentation of the data in the tools I use.

The holy grail for Wikidata is the use of its data in Wikipedia info boxes. However, people are taught to query data and that approach does not align well with the data items you find in info boxes. So when the purpose of Wikidata is in Wikipedia info boxes, presentation needs to become a priority.
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

#Wikimania - James Heilman on #quality and #language support

James Heilman presented at Wikimania 2016. I have not been to Wikimania and even the people who went to Wikimania may not have listened in. James had a lot to say about quality and the power of having information in "other languages". The talk is powerful and the arguments are compelling. At this time only 48 views of the talk on YouTube,

Thanks,

     GerardM

#Wikimania and #Wikidata #dogfooding

Being critical is one thing, showing how a difference can be made one item at a time is how to make a difference. At the latest Wikimania many interesting and relevant presentations were made. So far Wikimania talks were missing at Wikidata and as I have been watching several talks, I have added these talks largely using the Ted talks as a model.

What you find are only some of the talks, it is easy to add more and by adding the YouTube Video ID it is possible to see the presentations directly from the Reasonator.

So when you want to add your presentation, it is easy.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia NL - my #Wikidata presentation - #WCN2014

Wikidata nl conferentie 2014 from Gerard Meijssen

The presentation I gave at the 2014 Dutch conference in Utrecht went well. Sadly, for whatever reason I found that it is not yet on Commons. That can be remedied.

When I present, the slides include the main points so when people doze off, they can always find what it was all about. This presentation is very much my view on Wikidata. I presented in Dutch and the slides are in English so that it can be easily re-used.

The points I made are:

• Knowing about Wikidata and its development is best understood thanks to the stats
• Appreciating the information included is best done through the Reasonator
• Wonderful tools exist that are sadly NOT part of plain vanilla Wikidata
• Why and how I make so many edits ... the method in my madness
• The Dutch Wikipedia COULD activate Wikidata search.. to share in the sum of all available knowledge
• Much knowledge is not known to the Dutch Wikipedia
• Wikidata already knows about much meta data on Commons thanks to the Creator templates

Thanks,

     GerardM

#Wikidata & #Commons - It is all about the #presentation

Commons is to be Wikidatified. There was an hour long chat about it. It is quite unstructured and it is all about details. At the start a reference is made to the initial document. The motivation for the whole exercise as stated is utterly disappointing:

"The Structured Data project is a proposal to store and retrieve information for media files in machine-readable format on Wikimedia Commons and other sites, so they are easier to view, search, edit, curate and use."

I could not care less that machines can read the format.. Important is that people, not machines are able to find media files in their own language, When people upload a media file, that media file should be available to the whole of our community so that the file will be actually used.

When the Wikidatification of media files is done to help PEOPLE, not machines, objectives can be formulated that are "must have" to all of us. We can have objectives where 50% achievement is a big thing. Consider an eight year old in Whatever country. They speak Whatever. This eight year old enters "phifflesticks"; this is Whatever for "horse". He or she can choose from 50% of all the media files we have about horses.. now THAT is a big achievement. It is 100% better than we are able to do today.

Presented like this, when it takes Wikidatification to make this happen, there is a clear objective, It is obvious why we should do this.

When Wikidata and the Wikidatification of Commons is to be well presented. It needs appealing objectives. Objectives that provide sufficient reasons to allow for the stress and upheaval that is needed to make this happen. Obvious objectives enable clear goals for instance

•  all the subjects that children learn about in the first two years of primary school have labels in the language of the child
• the number of downloaded images is measured and the downloads are to increase by 100% in a year
• new files are given tags that enable finding and using these files
• tags are added both manually and automatically
• tags are gaining more labels in the languages we support

What we do is for humans. This needs to be obvious. When it is, a chat is not about retaining categories and templates. In the end they are not relevant at all. Finding pictures of a kitty, a doggie or a horsie is.

Thanks,

      GerardM

Magnus on #Wikidata in #Cambridge - part II

2014-02-27 Wikidata talk Cambridge from Magnus Manske

You probably could not make it to Magnus's presentation about Wikidata. That is the sad news. The good news is that the slides of his talk are available for all of us to see.

The presentation is well structured, it explains clearly what Wikidata is about and the tools ecosystem gets its attention. When you present, you have to fit the information in the allotted time frame; it follows that there is more to show, more to explain. Much of this can be found by reading Magnus's blog. In addition to this there is always this blog. As always, questions remarks suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Magnus on #Wikidata in #Cambridge

When you happen to be in the neighbourhood of Cambridge on 27 February 2014, you have the option to attend a lecture where Dr Magnus Manske will give a presentation on Wikidata. According to the information, you may "learn more about all its functionality, how it works, and how it will change the future!”.

For the rest of us, we have experienced how Wikidata has developed and how Reasonator makes information out of Wikidata's data. There is a lot to all the tools that Magnus developed, tools like WDQ, AutoList WD-FIST.

Being a fly on the wall in the Plant Sciences Lecture Theatre, Downing Site is an ambition. However, I will happily report about the developments of both Wikidata and the tools that Magnus is famous for.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#DBpediaAmsterdam - my slides

Wikidata & DBpedia from Gerard Meijssen

These are the slides as I used them at the DBpedia conference in Amsterdam. As you may infer from the furious pace of new functionality becoming available in the Reasonator, there was no time to add the hyperlinks.

The most important ones are:

• wikidata.org
• dbpedia.org
• reasonator.info
• page view statistics for Reasonator
• relevant Wikidata statistics

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

#divcon - The #Wikidata presentation

Diversity conference 2013 berlin from Gerard Meijssen

I had the privilege to explain how Wikidata can be leveraged. Wikidata is different in so many ways. There are potential benefits for any language, any special interest and any platform. The easiest win is by providing information about subjects that cannot be found in an other way. However, the biggest benefits will be realised when the data that we include is as good as we can make it.

Thanks,

       GerardN

It is all about #presentation

The edit screen of #Wikipedia' is similar to the standard screen of #Wikidata: it is ugly and it does not present the data well. Look for instance at the two screen shots. The same data about the "office held" by Mohammed V of Morocco is available in both screen shots.

The screen shot above is the standard screen of Wikidata for Mohamed V. The screen shot below is the same data formatted by "reasonator".

There are issues with the reasonator. When you compare the data you will miss the second term in office as Sultan of Morocco. There are other bits of information that are formatted in a weird way. But that is not really important. What is important is that proof of concept tools like the reasonator and the geneawiki motivate me to enrich an item with statements.

PS I really got into the reasonator when I learned how to add a picture.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Lua template wanted for use of #Wikidata in #Wikipedia

Denny said some magical words to me;

• you can convert a list of Wikipedia wiki links to links to Wikidata using Lua. 
• you can check if there is an article on THIS Wikipedia
• you will show the Wikidata data when there is no article

He even said that it is not hard to do and provided this as a pointer.

I am preparing a Wikidata workshop and I would be REALLY pleased when this list was available doing all the song and dance mentioned above. There are so many other lists that could benefit from this as well. 

I am convinced that such functionality will motivate people to write stubs and articles on subjects that are important to them. I am also convinced that it is a powerful incentive to create data that accomplishes things like this.

Thanks,

     GerardM

What is New at #Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation is no stranger to #GoogleTechTalk. The latest instalment is a presentation by Erik Moeller, Rob Lanphier and Alolita Sharma gave a presentation that just became available on YouTube.

It gives advance information on the technology that is being developed and if you are interested in what MediaWiki may provide us with in the near future, it is a must see. It also provides you with some of the latest thinking on Wikipedia.

Have a look and, enjoy.
Thanks,
       GerardM
text

Pin the tail on the donkey

#Vlora #Albania was the scene of the "Free Software in Balkans 2010" Conference. I had the privilege and honour to be asked to present about Wikipedia. The Albanian Wikipedia can use many enthusiastic new editors and with a request for a Wikipedia in Gheg waiting to happen, I created a presentation about how to create a fun Wikipedia that actually gets a lot of traffic.

Vlora free software in the Balkans

View more presentations from Gerard Meijssen.

In the mean time there was this thing, Flora and Albania would I be able to find it on the map? Would the average person shopping on the Almere market be able to find it?

Thank you Sue, Kim and Casey for your inspiration

Are you able to find Albania on a map let alone Vlora? This question I asked my public and, I invited them to help us by producing many pictures for Commons and articles on our many Wikipedias.

Vlora is a relevant town, there should be encyclopaedic articles on it and its history. I will write some more about the conference in the days to come because many of the people were just amazing.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Yesterday I gave my presentation on the MediaWiki Testing Environment. I used a few slide and I uploaded them to Slideshare..

I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Media Wiki Testing Environment

View more presentations from Gerard Meijssen.

Inaugural meeting of the Concept Web Alliance

The Concept Web Alliance (CWA) is a new organisation that aims to bring the best science has to offer together and make better science and be more informative about science.

The key to the activities of the CWA is the realisation that there is an overwhelming amount of data around, data that is available in many formats. Data that could be of use in many environments and data that would be of use when there are commonalities for the data between these different environments.

Semantic web, triples, disambiguation, authentication, death switches, multi linguality, community involvement, Wikipedia were just a few of the subjects that had my interest among the many, many subjects that were mentioned / discussed.

What made this meeting so powerful was the presence of so many influential people representing from so many countries, organisations, domains.

I had the pleasure to present a demonstration project that demonstrated how XML data can be imported in an integrated text-data environment with Semantic MediaWiki and how the data can then be exported as triples..

Wikidraft

View more presentations from Gerard Meijssen.

Tim Berners-Lee at TED

I love TED. Their presentations are awesome. They make them available on the web for everybody to see. I use Google Reader to learn when something new appears and today I was given the treat of Tim Berners-Lee.

Sir Tim talked about Linked Data, in it he mentioned Wikipedia; but it was not Wikipedia that was relevant but DBpedia, the project that extracts data from the info boxes of Wikipedia articles. In the vision of Sir Tim, it is data that is of importance, Wikipedia is connected throught DBpedia and this is how Wikipedia gets much added value.

DBpedia is not the only project that links to Wikipedia. When you look at the Wikipedia article on malaria in this way, you find another.

From a data point of view, Wikipedia is very much an end-point. You refer to it, you data mine it and it is really fortunate that this has always been allowed. Wikipedia currently does not produce data, that is apparantly something that is reserved for its future.
Thanks,
GerardM

WCN

Today the Wikimedia Conferentie NL was held in Amsterdam. It was a great occasion. It was impossible to do justice to the program; they had three tracks and to chose one presentation over the other was an injustice to what was missed.

I had the privilege to give a presentation, and as I had to do some serious travelling to be there, I considered to what extend I could reduce what I took with me. I decided that with the latest Google application I did not need to bring anything. I could rely on there being a network, Kim brought his Merakis who are still on the old functional software and assuming one functional lap top should not be a problem either.

To prove that it was indeed the Google presentation tool. I selected one of the available backgrounds. It is different. What I need in a presentation is basic. I need to show some texts and some screen dumps. I think there is some need to polish the handling of the screen dumps.

One of the nice things is that the presentation can be made available. So have a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks,
GerardM