#Wikidata - User versus bot updates and #Scholia

These are the aggregated subjects that are associated with all the papers for the winners of the Fields Medal. Given that there are some 60 award winners for the most prestigious award in the field of mathematics, this is not a representative reflection. That is not a problem, that is an opportunity.

I added one paper, "Singularities of linear systems and boundedness of Fano varieties". Given the title, I added "Fano variety" and "Linear system" as subjects. This made no difference in the Scholia tool and after some five minutes I asked what was happening. I was told that it takes a large interval before the data in the Toolserver get updated.

Typically, information about papers are added by bot. Not so much for mathematics but still. Mr Birkar for instance has only two papers in Wikidata at this time and for the other paper no subjects are given. When you add data by hand, instant gratification or instant visibility is important as it is a potent motivator.

The best reflection of work done in Wikidata is not given by Wikidata itself. It is either by tools like Scholia or Reasonator or it is by query. When query does give instant gratification, it has much of its potency because of the instant gratification.

Tools have one important benefit over query; it provides a standard layout for the information. Queries are potent and many people contributing content to Wikidata use it in tools like Petscan. But in reality, the typical difference between one query and the next are only in the qualifiers.

At this time the best user experience is given by tools. It often suffers from a time lag and this is of little relevance to bots. For humans though it is different.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Histography - History explored with #Wikipedia

If you have not seen Histography yet, go and see it first. It is really great fun. Chances are that you do not get back to this blogpost :). Histography is a wonderful user interface created as a final project in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

There are several things that peek my interest; it says: "The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events." They may have written their own software, they may have used Wikidata for it. Suppose that the software is freely licensed and suppose that it uses Wikidata.

Straight away it becomes a potential user interface for all kinds  of tasks. It may use labels from other languages making it multi lingual. It may show the items where there is no such label in a different colour inviting you to add labels, It may even invite you to write a Wikipedia article in that language.

Histography is a wonderful approach. The beauty is not only in what it does, it is also in what it can do.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Howard Baker; White House chief of staff

Mr Baker died; according to the Wikipedia article about him, he fought in the second world war, he became a US senator, senate minority leader, senate majority leader, White House chief of staff and finally ambassador to Japan.

Obviously Mr Baker is notable. He is notable because of the positions he held. For Mr Baker, they are events in his live. They have a start date, an end date and when he moved on, the position was taken over by someone else.

Reasonator will show these events in a timeline when dates have been used as qualifiers for these events. Wikidata knows implicitly that Mr Baker is associated with all these roles. This is not made visible and consequently the data in Wikidata do not become information.

Wikidata is pondering an update of its user interface. It does not take much to improve on the existing interface. What I would like to see realised is that the necessity for Reasonator will go away. When this is realised, Wikidata becomes a power house of information in stead of mostly a data store.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Who is Howard N. Potts

Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of kevlar died. The death of someone notable is often a reason to flesh out the Wikidata item with relevant statements. For Mrs Kwolek none of the awards she received were mentioned.

Once these statements were made for Mrs Kwolek, the available information about those awards was added. The category "National Medal of Technology recipients" contained 125 recipients Wikidata did not know about. The "Lemelson–MIT Prize" was named after Jerome H. Lemelson. Similar information for the "Howard N. Potts Medal" is not available.. Who is Howard N. Potts?

Tools like AutoList2 and Reasonator make it easy to add information and to have the instant gratification of well presented information.

It will be wonderful when WikiData adopts these features in the user interface that is being designed.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Johann Sebastian without clutter

When there is a lot of information available, it is easy to fill a screen with so much information that it confuses more than that it informs. At the same time information is there to be shared and not making it available is not an option either.

The latest iteration of the "Reasonator" brings us pop up windows that provide all that extra information. It will direct you to Commons, to Wikisource, to Wikivoyage and Wikipedia when applicable. There is another neat trick; when an item is "red lined", it will urge you to add a label in Wikidata.
Thanks.
     GerardM

#MediaWiki global preferences

At the #Wikimedia Foundation, there are several teams of developers. They all do their best for the Wikimedia projects and sometimes, they hit a blocker and that functionality is out of scope for them. Out of scope because it is something that is in scope for another team.

For the WMF Localisation Team, having global preferences is a big deal. However, for this team it is out of scope. Consider for instance this scenario:

The user sets the language of his user interface and when he goes to another Wiki, he will know what the software expects of him because the language of the user interface stays the same.

Another nice scenario:

The user indicates what languages he knows in his Babel information and he will by default see interwiki links in the languages he knows.

Scenarios like these make sense on any multi-lingual project like Wikipedia or Wiktionary. When we start to make use of what we know of a user, we can be more helpful. The interfaces we build can be less cluttered. More important is that we treat people like people and ask things only once.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Translatewiki.net is working on a new main page

As #MediaWiki is no longer the only application localised at translatewiki.net, many of its community feel that the presentation and the structure should reflect this. Several people have been working on a draft for a new main page and, we think it looks nice.

There are several things that need to be resolved;

• information that used to be on the main page needs to go elsewhere
• the new main page must be localised and it has to be readied for this
• how do we target developers new to translatewiki
• does this look good in all browsers (we had IE issues)
• does this provide the best usability

Thanks,
     GerardM

Doing what I am not good at ...

#Translatewiki needs a new main page.. It needs to better reflect the state of the art for MediaWiki and of what translatewiki is about.

I have created this info about the active projects at translatewiki. I had to work a bit on the icons that I used. This info could be appended to the bottom of the main page.

What do you think, what more needs to be done ?
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Mediawiki seeks to support your language

Icons are part of the user interface and they are not localised in the same way like system messages. A fair bit of design is needed to make them look good and to give them the look that makes sense for the audience of a given language.

I am really happy that Parul Vora, the interaction designer of the MediaWiki Usability Initiative blogged about the need for your support. This way the advanced toolbar can be all Cyrillic, Devanagari or Kannada..

We are really happy with a first contribution for Chinese .. and we are hoping for many more. My hope is that your contributions will all be integrated in MediaWiki itself so that your perfect toolbar will become available on all MediaWiki installations.
Thanks,
      GerardM

User interface

Recently I have been using the PuTTY software a lot. My computer came with Windows XP and I have been using this ever since PuTTY however provides me with a Window onto a Linux server and what I have been thinking about is what do I expect of the software.

It is obvious that the command I type in are to be interpreted remotely. I do a mv when I copy, and I rm a file when I delete it. Copying and pasting is less obvious. What tripped me is how to copy text. I highlight a text and then I press CNTRL C This gets me at least a carriage return and in Windows I can paste the text.

What is nasty is that it also kills the program I am in... Now I have learned that highlighting the text is what allows me to paste it. CNTRL C is there to provide me with a KeyboardInterrupt so everything works as designed, the only problem left is knowing what the design is.

Changes in the user interface

A DefinedMeaning in OmegaWiki can have a lot of data associated with it. China borders on so many countries and seas that it is just a bit much. So it makes sense to bundle certain types of information together and keep them separately. This has a profound impact on what the data looks like. So far I was happy when we had the data on the screen but now it becomes possible to think where does it makes sense to have the data. I asked Erik if the incoming messages could be at the bottom of the page..

Well some things seem like miracles and we can have them in five minutes.. The problem with the collations is that at this moment it has to be by hand. This makes that it does not scale. With the "borders on" example however, we have a great showcase WHY we need to be able to sort these texts and also why they should be Expressions in OmegaWiki like all the other information that we hold.

Really, I could not be more happy with the progress that started to happen.. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Vietnamese

In OmegaWiki you can have many of the labels used in the data part in your language as well. For this to function, you have to select a language in the "user preferences" and there have to be translations of the words involved. Words like Estonian, Georgian or noun, verb, adjective will be shown in the selected language.

As the user interface is one of the most critical aspects for getting buy-in, it is something I often spend time on. Given that I do not speak languages like tiếng Việt, it is not always easy to find the right translations. For this language I was not able to find Gujarati. More bewildering was that I could not initially find the word Korean, it was there as korean with "tiếng Triều tiên" as its translation.

All in all I have added more than 10 translations in this latest session. I am sure that people who speak this language will have an easier time doing the same job.

Thanks,
GerardM