#Wikimedia project - #PlantsAndPeople

#Wikidata is a great to encourage collaboration and reporting for Wiki projects. The results of projects like the Black Lunch Table have been encouraging so for; reports for articles in multiple languages, gender ratios were possible because of the Wikidata link.

A new initiative is PlantsAndPeople. There have been editathons in the past and more are planned. It is about both people and plants so the kind of questions that may be asked will be quite interesting. For instance how many taxons were described by the people in the project and how many people were honoured in taxon names.

At this moment the people who are the subject of editathons are added. This list will grow slowly but surely and only once it is done, it can replace list in Wikipedia. It will take quite some time to get there because it makes sense to add additional data as well. This is the best way to quickly improve the quality of the data involved. So far quite a number of mycologists and ethnobotanists have been added. A question has been raised in Wikidata about people named in taxons and a picture that should be in Commons is waiting for someone else to transfer it.

When you are interested; join in the fun.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Catalogue of paintings in the #Louvre Museum

#Wikipedia has an article by that name. It is the result of a lot of work based on the catalogue of paintings of the Louvre done by Jane. Her aim was to have a list with all its painters. She published it as an article on the English language Wikipedia. It has its Wikidata item and from the Reasonator page, you can get to its "concept cloud".

This concept cloud shows all the painters on the list that have a Wikipedia article AND have a Wikidata item. The list does contain red links and the painters may exist in Wikidata. For instance a Russian painter may have an article in Russian, a Dutch painter an articles in Dutch.

When Jane works on her painters, she knows them by her "JaneID". One random painter is Jules Robert Auguste. He is known by seven identifiers already, one of them is the Wikidata identifier.

When all the painters Jane knows have a Wikidata identifier, she does not need to maintain her own identifier any more. When someone adds data to a painter in Wikidata, the information about him or her will become richer for everybody. All it takes is to add a Wikidata item. When a painter has its work in the Louvre, he or she is notable by default. I suppose that any painter Jane considers notable is notable because he or she is part of a Wikimedia project.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata project - Actors from #India

#Wikidata becomes useful when there are many items that are connected. Lists and categories connect items because they imply that statements on all items are shared.

Lists and categories can be defined with properties that can be used to run a query. Important is that the inverse is true as well. A Wikipedia list or category implies that particular statements are true for the items that exist on a list or in a category.

A category like "Actors in Hindi cinema" indicates:

• "instance of" "human"
• "profession" "actor / actress"
• "language" "Hindi"

It does not imply that these actors have the "nationality" of "India". This is implied by the category "Indian film actors".

Thanks to WDQ, it is possible to know which actors who play in Hindi movies do not have the Indian nationality. This query makes it possible for people who care about Bollywood to consider the nationality of the 224 actors who fit this query.

This describes actionable information of a project. Your project can be done in the same way. You add data using AutoList or WD-Fist and Reasonator will display the information in an attractive way. These are tools that provide you grip on your projects. Wikidata provides you with information that may exist in any or none of the Wikipedias.

Thanks,

       GerardM

For the love of #Statistics - Get the numbers, right?

In statistics, results depend on the data they are based on. The data is selected in many ways but it starts with the questions: "what is it that we want to know" and then "when we have this information what is it that it tells us".

Consequently, when it is the considered opinion that Wikidata will be mainly be used by bots, its page views are not relevant. When Commons is considered to be the repository for use in WMF projects, we do not consider downloads and other usage from outside the Wikimedia Foundation.

When we change these assumption, we will evaluate existing data differently and end up with statistics that will be different. Our own reports show where our assumptions result in a problematic representation of how things are. The "Report card" for instance does not include Wikidata as one of the biggest projects when we measure individual contributions.

An increasing number of Wikipedias are using Wikidata to find information be it Wikidata based, Commons based or even Wikipedia based. Initial reports are that people like it. We don't know how often this functionality is used. We do not know to what extend people are adding statements or labels in order to improve the disambiguation. We do not know how many people reach Commons and find an image they are looking for and download for their own use.

We do not know to what extend Wikidata provides the only results when searching a Wikipedia. We do not even know what people are looking for and fail to find.

Statistics are meant to be actionable. It is not that hard to change the existing software and identify that pageviews were the result of Wikidata based functionality. It makes sense to do this when the data is considered useful. The best motivation to do this is when statistics are given added importance when the results are actionable.

This is why we want these numbers and improved statistics. This is why we need the WMF statisticians to share this journey with us.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#OmegaWiki works and so can #Wikidata

OmegaWiki provides functionality that is on the agenda for Wikidata. The OmegaWiki community has ALWAYS wanted to be a Wikimedia project.

What it already provides is:

• links to Wikipedia articles in other languages when the article does NOT exist in the preferred language
• links to a commons category associated with a concept
• a picture painting the thousand words associated with the concept

Yes, it is quite shocking; it also provides multi lingual dictionary support. OmegaWiki has even been described in a book on the development of lexicography.

Both OmegaWiki and Wikidata are "right in front of us" and, the functionality described above is imho "right for us". The challenge we face is to do something that is "shockingly rare"; meet halfway.

The road towards such a meeting could be:

• Adopt OmegaWiki by the WMF in a labs kinda construction
• Create the logical requirements of OmegaWiki data in Wikidata
• Convert the OmegaWiki content to Wikidata technology
• See how it fits in the big picture
• Make it fit in the big picture

We do not need much talk and, the amount of work needed is relatively minor. The benefits are legion because even when all the OmegaWiki data is not used in the end, the lessons learned will be.

Thanks,

      GerardM

The Dutch #Wikipedia mills project is complete

The Netherlands, like Spain are well known for their windmills. As we take pride in them, all of them have their own articles and they have all been illustrated with photos as well.

 
De Lelie in Aalten

As all the complete windmills and watermills are done, it is time to reflect. Over the course of three years 1200 mills have been documented, 12 new mills were completed in restorations. The final push was helped by the well known mills photographer Willem Jans who was willing to help out with missing pictures. Willem got the Wiki virus because he also helped with the lighthouse, the watertower and the Wiki loves Monuments project.

It is not that there is nothing left to do; there are always the mills in Belgium and it is rumoured that there are even more mills in the UK and Spain.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The #Wikipedia Ambassador program

This program is open for experienced Wikipedians from everywhere particularly if you want to reach out to professors and students in universities.

Currently it is very much wedded to the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative. At this moment it is very much a US based project but the intention is that it will spread to other countries, other languages.

Once you are an ambassador, you can even add a userbox to that effect on your user page :)
Thanks,
       GerardM

The integration of #OpenStreetMap and #MediaWiki needs project management

One of the most eagerly awaited software projects is the integration of OSM in Wikipedia. Having support for high quality maps will provide such an obvious improvement it is actually a no-brainer. When you consider how much effort has gone into bringing maps to Wikipedia; the German chapter investing in it, the time of at least two developers over the years and maps integration as Google Summer of Code projects ...

नीरज अग्रवाल

This year, another student wants to make his mark on the map of the Google Summer of Code. Neeraj Agarwal. Neeraj is from India and if there is one country that will poses a challenge to get all its villages, towns and cities on the Wikipedia map, it is India. Not only because of there being so many of them but also because of there being so many Wikipedias in the languages of the Indian subcontinent.

I had a word with several people interested and involved in the Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap integration and for me it is clear that many people want this but that all the effort is not managed into one cohesive effort. An effort that brings the many interested parties together, an effort that priorities what needs to be done. An effort that coordinates what it takes to get a product out.

At this stage we need the effort of Neeraj, we need our bugmeister to assess the existing code, we need to get an initial product out. Once we have it out, we can make it pretty.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Monuments and the Dutch #Wikipedia

When the Brits and the Ruskies invaded the Netherlands in 1799, they fought and lost the battle of Bergen. Much of the fighting was close to the ruins of a church that was fired during the Dutch Revolt.

This church is earmarked as a monument, and given that Bergen is a really nice town, it stands to reason that more monuments can be found in that area. At this moment I have a map of Bergen with one monument..

On the Dutch Wikipedia there is a heritage project that evolved from a mill project. The members of the project are ambitious and want to have articles and pictures of all Dutch monuments. They want high quality data and they want to put all monuments of Bergen on the map as well.

When you are that ambitious, it makes sense to involve the Dutch chapter and, learn how we can do this effectively. Yesterday there was a meeting of interested people brain storming, planning how to make this a big thing .. This story will be continued..
Thanks,
GerardM