#Wikidata - motivation; thank you #Magnus

I added a Baratunde A. Cola to Wikidata because he won the Alan T. Waterman Award. This month a Wikipedia article was written and I wanted to add some data to the item.

I did not because functionality that is key to me was broken. A new property was added and all the work that I had done on categories no longer showed in Reasonator. There was no willingness to consider the consequential loss of functionality and the result was a dip in my motivation.

Wikidata is important to me and I asked Magnus if he would help out and change Reasonator. He did.

Now I have added information to Mr Cola based on his categories. It matters that a category like this one reflects all the people known to have played in the Vanderbilt Commodores football team.

The issue is that at Wikidata, we have lost sight of these collaborative aspects. Everybody does his own thing and we hardly consider why. It is why user stories are so important; they tell you why something is done and what the benefit is.  In the end without a benefit there is no reason to do it.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Dutch people who died in 2015

The bot that updates the list of Dutch people who died in 2015 will update the list when details are added. This recent diff shows how relevant this is. For many people additional details were added like the place of death,

Given attention to such details is relevant if only because of the several tools that link places in this way to visualisations. :)
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Six degrees - Edmund Bacon

Edmund Bacon has two sons known to Wikidata; Kevin and Michael. By adding information to the father, fewer steps will remain between Kevin Bacon and many other items. To add information I read the article and was able to add one school and two awards.

One of these awards, the Frank P. Brown Medal was awarded to several truly great architects. I am sure there is an easy connection between some of them and Rem Koolhaas. Mr Koolhaas was the architect to the City Center of Almere where I live :)

In the mean time, Popcorndude rose to the challenge and came up with the first routine to calculate how many degrees of separation exist between any Wikidata item and Kevin Bacon. His answer for Julius Caesar is 5.

I applaud the effort, the challenge now is to make this functionality available to ordinary people like me. I want to run this routine and see how I can improve connections. After all, the six degrees of separation has it that there are no more than six.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - Erik Möller

Erik Möller or Erik Moeller for those who have a problem writing a foreign name is a longtime friend. I worked with him often particularly in those days when wearing a ponytail was en vogue among geeks.

The one thing I savour in this blog post is that I am not writing because of Erik passing away; it is only that his days at the Wikimedia Foundation are numbered. It has a bitter sweet ring to it because I know how much the WMF means to him.

We worked together on Wikiprotein and OmegaWiki. Sadly at the time the Wikimedia Foundation did not want to adopt OmegaWiki because it was too expensive at the time. In the mean time OmegaWiki still has an edge in several areas over Wikidata but in the one area that matters it does not. There is even a publication with our name on it and Jimmy's..

Erik I expect that you will have fun.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia Nederland - #Sebastiaan is leaving

Sebastiaan was project leader at the Dutch Wikimedia chapter. He did tons of great work, and made a point of registering activities with his camera. Of particular mention is his huge involvement in the GLAM area.

Sebastiaan will pursue his career elsewhere. His friendly cooperative attitude will be sorely missed.
Thank you,
       Gerard

#Wikidata - Thank you Magnus

Mr A. H. Halsey is the first person who can be put to rest now that the ToolScript works again. Mr Halsey was a sociologist, he died 14 October 2014.

Thank you Magnus, you are wonderful.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Pywikibot - #Thanks for your #help

#Wikidata - one million edits

Thanks to Magnus's tools, making a million edits is feasible. It has helped me that I have a plan. The plan is to gain functionality from the data that is included. Functionality that is available today, functionality that is not a mirage of what the future may hold.

The most important tool is Reasonator. It shows best what information exists for an item and it includes up to 500 items that refer to an item. It is so important because it provides me with instant gratification; you see things grow as they happen. The automagic is great; maps, timelines, the higher "classes" they pop up when they become applicable.

Very important is Autolist [1] and Autolist2 [2]. They are tools that add loads and loads of statements one at a time for me. It is important to restrict updates to the subclass or instance they should operate on.. For instance when adding "female", the item must be "human".

One aim of Wikidata is to be able to have information available for info-boxes of a Wikipedia. To make this possible it is a requirement that for each article there is an item. Creator is the tool that can create these missing items.

Obviously, all the harvesting needs to be done again for all those new items.  Toolscript makes this possible. I just have to figure out how to do this.

To put things in perspective, with one million edits only the surface has been scratched. There are some 15,259,555 items to operate on.. However, the effect is noticeable in the auto descriptions and in the Wikidata search results.. There are fewer items that have nothing to describe them.
Thanks,
     GerardM

[1] Categories with human that show what Wikidata thinks should be in them. Currently 337 of them
[2] Females on the Chinese Wikipedia that are not known as such. There were 1873 of them...

A barn star

#Appreciation is a good thing. Today I received notice that last year I had made my first edit on the Dutch Wikipedia ten years ago. Apparently it had to do with the genus Hoodia.

It is wonderful that people take the effort to make others feel appreciated. It is how a community maintains itself, it gives a sensation of belonging.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Reasonator - bugs and a different kind of awesome

Unlike Pallas Athena, Reasonator did not rise fully armed out of the head of Zeus. It has developed incrementally and every now and then it has its moments where bug manifest itself. It is software and, Magnus does a splendid job at terminating bugs.

The typical workflow is as follows:

• build a feature
• test in test
• promote to live environment
• bug Magnus with a bug (reiterate process)

This works well enough. Typically the environment Reasonator operates in is stable and bugs are obvious. Sometimes there are issues. Issues like a major re-write of functionality and an upgrade of the Labs environment. This is when the unexpected happens and bugs have an impact on functionality.

At this moment the update process kills Reasonator. But as the show must go on, it is better to do away with updates for some time until there is a bug fix. At this moment the daily backups are not available in the new Labs environment. The problems with updates cannot be limited to only one day.. BUMMER

The good news is that one bug has been found and fixed. It was late so it was time to sleep. Today it will be time to test. When things turn out to be fine, the update process will run again and both Reasonator and WDQ will provide near real time results from Wikidata.

It is when all the small things that happen every day that amount to so much start to show up again.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikidata - the seventeen townships of Boone county #Iowa

There are multiple Boone counties and this is about Boone county in Iowa. Recently there were some issues with the reliability of the data used by Reasonator. Data was missing; it did not show. For several days we have been getting the data right that should show in the "Category:Townships in Boone County, Iowa". Seventeen townships should show up. Initially none showed up.

Now several days later, the migration of Wikimedia labs has happened. The dump of Wikidata finished but it did not find its way to where it was expected to be, the IP address for the proxy for the changes to Wikidata had changed, the incremental backups of Wikidata have been suspended during the move and, life goes on regardless.

The big thing in all this is the migration of Wikimedia labs. It is under way it has been well prepared and a lot of TLC is given by Coren and the other labs staff to the people who want their tools migrated. They are doing an impressive job. The incremental backups are one of those jobs that were created on the fly and gained unexpected relevance. At some point in time they will be running again at their new home.

Some of the missing townships did not even show when everything was supposed to be good. Further analysis indicated that they have to be both a township and be in Boone County, Iowa. Now that they are and do, they show up all right.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #bots help place objects on the #map

The Sanandaj airport "is in the administrative-territorial entity" of the "Howmeh Rural District". Information like this is harvested by a bot from a template in Wikipedia. It checks that the lowest level of such an entity is registered. When for instance a "province" is registered in stead of the "county", the province will be replaced. In this way we make good use of the available information and the information provided gains in relevance.

For some countries it is the first time this functionality runs. It will make an impact on Nepal and Iran for instance. On other countries it will be at least a second run. The USA for instance will see changes to many if not all counties, townships and cities.

When the complete administrative or territorial structure for a country is available, the Reasonator will bring the best out of the available information. This will show even more clearly when categories and lists include the statements that run the relevant queries. The result can be compared with the content of the lists and categories. This makes for a tool that helps people complete the information provided in their Wikipedia.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - bots at work

When you roam through Wikidata using the Reasonator, you will find a lot of qanats. They are water works of a different kinds and they are equally important. These water works prevent starvation.

For many of them there are articles in the Wikipedia in Persian and, the only thing known was that they were qanats. I asked a friend and he told me that it was known in what "administrative-territorial entity" they are. As you can see in the screen print, that one is in the Kahak District of Iran.

The only problem was, Reasonator did not show it. Adding the fact that the Kahak District is part of Qom County proved enough to show 221 items, all qanats. My friend will add the other (missing) counties to districts. It will not only enrich the information about qanats but as relevantly also about Iran itself.

What I would like to see is to have all the villages, cities and what not be as well covered for Iran as it is for China. China has at this moment the best coverage of its administrative system.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Reasons to be cheerful

#Wikimedia #Labs had its issues lately. There were problems with file systems, with tools that failed. There was not much that could be done about it.

The good news is that Labs does get attention. Support is given on IRC and the feeling I got was that there was a gentle progression from the big issues to the smaller ones.

Widar was not working for me. As things had become quit, there was room to look at the code. There was an easy way to make it more efficient, to make the code perform better.

Such attention is a gift. It helps me and other users of the tool. Such service is a reason to be cheerful, to be grateful. It also makes labs a pleasant environment.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The Tech #Barnstar

Yesterday, the #Wikimedia #labs had a problem; it was being hammered by what looked like a DDOS attack. It proved that the script that provided the Wikidata search functionality needed to be optimised more than a bit.

The software was killed but soon after that a modified version went life. Definitely a reason to be cheerful, also a moment to be grateful. I would like to present this Tech Barnstar to

• Magnus for writing the original software
• The Ops / Labs team for having to deal with a nasty situation
• Legoktm for modifying the software that has the approval of the Ops team

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikidata gadgets - mouse over

I am tickled pink when writing on my blog has an effect. Yesterday I wrote about the "mouse over" gadget. Check out this bugzilla bug. It is now very much likely that it will become part of standard Wikidata functionality.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Thanks for all the fish

Milosh is leaving the movement. It takes me aback. Last time I met him was at the Amsterdam hackathon, we discussed several things that might help our shared dream of more linguistic diversity in the Wikimedia movement.

• Wikidata is to be opened to any and all languages that are recognised as a language. This includes artificial languages and dead languages. Some people may find it controversial that we consider Wikidata to be a project in its own right and, the connection to Wikipedia incidental.
• Wikisource should be one project like Commons and Wikidata. It would be best when all the instances of Wikisource are merged. Wikisource as we know it, is very much a workbench. Important is that people know how to use the tools. It makes no difference what language your user interface has, what matters is the language of the text. This can be any language
• When the work is "done" on Wikisource, it should be advertised, it should be marketed, it should find a public. That is very much something best done OUTSIDE of Wikisource. 

Ah well, these things make sense, they will improve linguistic diversity and they will create an environment that will even stimulate the creation of more Wikipedias. The question is how to find the energy to make this happen.. The Dutch are known for their windmills, just like the Spanish. We will miss Milosh for this fight.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Thank you Domas ! - #Wikipedia stats are here again

As our projects mature, the amount of data they generate grows. The infrastructure needed to manipulate data grows as a consequence. The result is that hardware solutions provided by some of our finest reach the end of the line. Domas has provided us with hardware where the raw data of our traffic was stored. A whole infra structure of statistics depended on it.

This included the official Wikimedia statistics. This is where the need for a Wikimedia data solution became all too obvious. In moments of very heavy traffic, the old server could not cope and finally it just run out of steam. With the new solution, we will have more consistent data and we have more of a growth path. Obvious because the WMF is now in control of the whole chain.

Finally a word of thanks to Domas. As a result of his generous gift we have a lot of statistical data starting at a time where statistics did not have the priority it has today.
Thanks,
       GerardM

With #agile #documentation can be a product

The #translatewiki.net community provide essential services to the software they localise. Without them the usability in other languages is gone.

The code will not make things obvious because localisers do not read it. To get the message, it can be vital for the message to be documented. This prevents misunderstandings and consequently "user errors".

For all these reasons we are happy to say thanks to Aaron Schulz for documenting the FlaggedRevs messages. This software is quite abstract and this will make the life of our localisers so much more easy.

Yes, it may be that you can do with less documentation with agile. However, when processes rely on the availability and the quality of documentation, documenting means serious business.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Presenting Sue's barnstar

Sue, the #Wikimedia Foundation director presents her own barnstar to deserving Wikimedians. Guess what, she speaks English and wants to present her barnstar to people of all projects and all languages who deserve recognition.

As I am in the Office for a week, I have been given the honour to present you "the program" and explain what else Sue gets out of it.

What Sue does is test the software and it works for her best when it is fully localised. She is looking for people she does not know personally and therefore is looking for people from the community to make suggestions to her. Sue likes it best when there is a story attached to the suggestion.
Thanks,
      GerardM