#Wikidata - #featured item; László Krasznahorkai

Mr Krasznahorkai will be this weeks Wikidata "featured item". It shows off how much information may be available for the subject at hand. Indeed, a lot of great work went into including and linking all the work Mr Krasznahorkai produced over the years. Adding information like that is a labour of love.

Mr Krasznahorkai is a celebrated writer. It shows in the many awards that were bestowed on him. All in all there are 21 listed among them the Man Booker International Prize.

For many of the awards like the Vilenica Prize, it is just a matter of harvesting the data and add it to the right items; easy enough. For others like the "Hungarian Heritage-Award", it is a bit more involved because it does not exist as a Wikipedia article in English. The article on Mr Krasznahorkai in Hungarian however looks promising. Many more awards are available there.

By harvesting awards for Mr Krasznahorkai, the information on the featured item becomes even better. The best thing is that in the process all the other items for people who are known to be awarded will have better information as well. Obviously, data from English Wikipedia is overexposed as more people do know that language and it is rather rich.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikipedia - Maintaining the #Akademy award

Lydia challenged Wikipedians to update the information about Akademy. The conference in 2014 and 2015 have come and gone by now. The most interesting part of the English article is the information about the awards. There are three of them; one for best application, one for best non application and a jury's award.

Awards are important and Lydia has two main points:

• the most important one is collective celebrating successes in a community
• the other one is being able to communicate to the outside about the achievements

At Wikidata there is enough to celebrate. I would welcome a Wikidata award for 2015 for the reasons stated above. Sjoerd and Amir would be on my short list. <grin> If nobody reacts in time, I may even announce the award </grin>. Then again, why not steal a page out of the KDE book and have multiple awards?

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikipedia - list of awards of Jimmy Carter

President Carter is not special in having a separate Wikipedia article with his awards. As a list in an article is rather boring it makes sense to have that separate article.

With distinguished people like Mr Carter, the list is long and it tells a story of recognition. Most but not all of the awards are already known in Wikidata but surprisingly the quality of the information is not always that great. It says: "International Mediation medal, American Arbitration Association, 1979" and it is hard to find anything on that medal except in this list. There is no doubt that Mr Carter received the medal, it is just that there is no other source available.

Both Mr Carter and the American Arbitration Association will be able to acknowledge the existence of the medal and, the AAA will be able to inform us about any and all organisations and people who were honoured in this way. For them it is one way to get extra mileage out of the PR that is so often the reason for an award.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - the Forough Faroukhzad Award

When I wrote about the Radcliffe fellow Mrs Mehrangiz Kar, I mentioned that recognition came to her in the form of many awards. One of them was the Forough Faroukhzad Award. This award was only known as a string of text. I asked an Iranian friend if he could identify a few more people who received this award. He identified a few more for me and consequently, this award became incrementally more relevant

When you concentrate on the people of the Radcliffe college or alternatively the winners of the Forough Faroukhzad award, you make them better connected. It gets you to other universities or other awards. It may show you where those who teach were educated or it may show you nothing at all because the data is just not there.

A Dutch scientist published in a journal that dementia has a one in three link to heart and circulatory issues. It is highly likely that such knowledge may spur people to take better care of their health. The scientist does not have an article or an item. The organisation that reports on it funded the research. It has a high impact on research on this issue in the world and it is hardly known outside the Netherlands by people who are not working in this field..

The Hartstichting also issues awards and it makes it obvious why the persons involved are important. I can read Dutch, not Iranian. We need friends from all over the world making the connections. Giving us a view that brings a new perspective.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - What is a Radcliffe fellow?

Mrs Mehrangiz Kar is a Radcliffe fellow. It is just one of the things that is to know about her. I think this fellow thing is a fancy way of saying that she was employed at Radcliffe college..  When you read the article about her, there are several quite relevant awards mentioned.

Registering awards, any and all awards, is a way of establishing relevance. Several of them so far did not merit their own article and therefore they are just registered as text. When you look close at all the Radcliffe fellows, you get an idea what they have in common. The same is true for people who received an award.

Every so often for their own political reasons, people will deny what is in their face when they look at it. The merit of the organisations that are of foreign origin is easy to dismiss.. "Gross interference", "not patriotic" is easy to utter and when the nation is said to be equal to the current incumbent.

The point of Wikipedia and Wikidata however, is not to take a point of view. Articles are there to be read, to inform. They may be the basis for an informed opinion. That is fine, that is what they are there for.

PS The point of Mrs Kar is that there are so many awards, relevant awards in the Wikipedia article that lack weight because they are not backed up with more information.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Sydney Hollander award

Some awards merit extra attention. One of them is the Sydney Hollander award. It was awarded to people and organisations that were instrumental in bringing an end to segregation in the United States. The award was brought attention to "best practices" and reinforced them. The first recipient in 1946 was the Baltimore Sun. It received the award because it finally ended the practice of indicating what race was desired in the "help wanted" section. At the time there was an argument if they deserved the award in the first place. Later the award proved to be a catalyst in bringing further changes to the Sun. After the award was received, the Sun began to cover the black community and interview notable people of colour.

The Sydney Hollander award had its end in 1964 because it was recognised that desegregation was now covered on a higher level. The need for the award was no longer so urgent.

Arguably, when Wikipedia is to document the history of the United States, an award like this and the achievements it celebrates deserve attention. One issue may be the lack of sources. There is not much to find on the Internet, there is not much to read in the Wikipedia article.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#SignWriting #Symposium - including #Wikipedia

For a second year now the Signwriting Foundation organises their online symposium. For those who do not know, SignWriting is all about writing sign languages. This has been under development for over 40 years and it was founded by Valerie Sutton.

When a language can be written, it may have a Wikipedia and, it has been wished for for a long time. The problems are many. The characters have to show, the text is written online for it to be truly a Wiki.

In a presentation on this years symposium, Yair Rand informs us about a keyboard that has been developed to bring the reality of Wikipedia for a sign language even closer.

If there is one thing the people at SignWriting org teach us, it is that perseverance matters. With an input method, a Wikipedia in the American Sign Language is that much closer.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - #portal to all #knowledge

The Dutch Royal #Library donated, yet again, a wonderful collection of material to #Commons. This time 3100 images were uploaded using the GLAM-wiki uploadtool for the first time.

When you read the announcement, it is really interesting to find what is known in Wikidata and by inference in Wikipedia. One fun fact is that the old image for Mr Schoemaker has his name in a way that makes more sense in Dutch.; schoenmaker means, shoemaker or cobbler.

When you visit Wikidata for the subjects mentioned in the mail, you find not that much information but often a rich source of external sources. Some of it is really informative and well worth a visit. For Wikipedia articles, we provide badges for excellent material. It highlights quality where we find it. Maybe something like this can be done for external sources as well.

Having attention for the external sources we link to makes Wikidata more of a portal to all knowledge. It would extend from what Wikidata already is: the portal to all available knowlege in the Wikimedia Foundation.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - what William O. Douglas Award?

#Wikipedia has an article about the William O. Douglas Award and, it is totally disappointing. When you Google for it, you find another William O. Douglas Award, and yet another William O. Douglas Award and maybe yet another...

The last one was awarded to Hillary Clinton in 2014, a fact that until now escaped the attention at both Wikipedia and Wikidata. There is no problem in having items for any and all awards. There is a minor problem when an article is incomplete in the way the Wikipedia article is.

Then again, it is probably an article nobody sees or reads. Arguably, such statements of facts (the award exists and is conferred by) probably have an easier life at Wikidata.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Inge Genefke, and #torture

Torture is a crime where the victim is expandable, without any rights, someone who is not given much consideration. When Amnesty International asked for physicians to assist those who had been tortured, the Danish Inge Genefke responded to this request. She started locally and then founded the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims.

An award was named in her honour, the Inge Genefke Award and expanding the information on all these subjects, including the award winners is easy enough.

When you care about a given subject, like torture, and you want to expose the forces of good or evil, you can at Wikidata by adding information. It is all part of sharing in the sum of all available knowledge. It is all part of caring about what information is available in our world.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - collaborating on data #sources II

#Freebase had a vested interest in the MacRobert Award. Its recent laureate is Artemis Intelligent Power,  As Wikidata continues to update its information, Freebase will become increasingly incomplete and as a consequence of less relevance to the people who use its data at :BaseKB.

When you do not know about the MacRobert Award, read about it. When this is the first time you hear about Artemis Intelligent Power, read the BBC article about it.. News like this gives us hope for our future.

We can support :BaseKB with our data, we can support any other source who is interested in what Wikidata has to say. It all starts with acknowledging them as sources and it all starts that quality has everything to do with it.

It is all in being open to quality. It is all to being open to reevaluating quality.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - collaborating on data #sources

x

#Freebase's data found a home at :BaseKB and that is a great opener to an alternate approach to the Freebase data for Wikidata. This proposal has many parts that makes for great cooperation between multiple sources.

• items always have a link to its source(s)
• statements always state its source
• an indicator for the status of a statement is added

Linking to external sources is something Wikidata does a lot. It allows us to have a look at the source itself. When it is the origin of the data, it follows that the statements from that origin have to be exactly the same. When they are not, it should be indicated with a status.

When a statement differs from a source, we have identified something that needs work. In essence. such statuses have a function in a workflow as well. Because this is where intervention makes a difference. 

• we set the flag for people to investigate the difference
• we can flag the source itself that we found an issue 
• we can find alternate sources to find what is likely correct
• we can find corroboration in literature
• we change the statement when needed and set a flag to indicate the status

In this way, we spend our human capital wisely. We do not blindly spend time on "approving" any and all statements. We do it only where we know some research is needed. 

As far as I am aware, you can not copyright facts. We compare our facts against facts known elsewhere. We include our missing data where we may and we always investigate differences. We signal the work we have done and, in this way we not only improve our quality, we also provide a path to the sources we work with for them to work on their quality.

In this way we spend the time and effort of our community wisely and, we optimise the amount of information available in Wikidata. In this way everyone is a winner.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikidata - the failure of the "primary sources tool"

I add data all the time. My tools do not see data that is waiting to be curated.  So I add data.

I find I am actually wasting my time.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - failing the #Freebase community

#Google in its infinite wisdom assumed that as Wikidata has a bigger and growing community, it will go beyond what Freebase could do. It had the power to end Freebase and it did in the expectation that the two communities would work together. An assumption that is quite reasonable.

When you work together, you share resources and you have respect for each others achievements. Wikidata may have the bigger community but Freebase has the most data and for whatever reasons the data from Freebase was not accepted at Wikidata.

The consequence is that the people who rely on this data now lost their source. It was lost because the service at Freebase was discontinued. It is therefore great news that the last Freebase dump has a new home at :BaseKB.

Some of the Freebase data is waiting for "approval" hidden in Wikidata. It is part of the Primary sources tool experiment and if you care to "curate" this data, you have to first enable a gadget. When this is not done, it is likely that the same data will be added because there is no other way to learn that the data is waiting to be approved. To add insult to injury, when data is added in this way, it does not report Freebase as the source..

This would not have happened when Wikidata was true  to the Wikimedia mantra of "sharing in the sum of all knowledge". I urge the powers that be at Wikidata to consider the following remedial steps:

• add Freebase as the source of data imported from Freebase
• report on the process of "curating" Freebase data
• when a link between Wikidata and Freebase is known, add missing statements
• add data from Freebase where there is none at Wikidata, data can be merged later when need be
• consider tools that allow for the selection of data based on its source for further curation and conversion
• invest in tools for people working on the inclusion of data from the "Primary sources tool" and from other sources
• compare data from sources and report on where there are differences. This is where time of our community is well spend
• consider a tool where the statements of Wikidata are easily available to Wikipedia editors. It may help them with additional information and it will help us in them curating this data

Most important, Wikidata is of particular importance because it links articles from Wikimedia projects. This is where it shines. The quality of its statements is debatable but improving. By including the lovingly maintained data from Freebase, we may expand our community and we do expand both the quantity and quality of the statements. 

Finally Wikipedians love their sources and they are important. When Wikipedians can easily compare the information that is in statements and in the text, we will find them more involved when there is more to curate. Given that Wikipedians get involved in this way, the sources are implicitly known through Wikipedia. This is yet another argument to make haste by including missing data, available from Freebase and other sources.

Thanks,

      GerardM

A #Wikidata and a #Wikipedia perspective

It may seem as if there is this divide between Wikipedia and Wikidata and, there is and there is not. It is just a matter of perspective. When you look at a Wikipedia article, there may be many links to other articles and, all of them are Wikidata items as well

The relation between Wikipedia articles is described in text and, the relation between Wikidata items is defined in statements. As Wikidata becomes more complete, more and more of the links in an article will be defined in Wikidata as well.

Consider for instance the article on the Gruber Prize for Women's Rights and compare it with its Reasonator page. You will already find a large overlap and, you will find in the link to its "concept cloud" all the article links in Wikipedia articles in any language.

What you might want is yet another perspective; a list of all the links in an article combined with the statements to the corresponding articles. This would be relatively simple to cobble together. The next step would be an option to add missing statements.

The point of such a gadget would be to engage Wikipedians. They could add statements one at a time adding the relations that they have already defined. It would be an obvious next step once links and redlinks have additional functionality possible because of Wikidata. However, it would work already as a gadget.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - appeasing the #Wikipedia crowd

To understand #quality, you have to make assumptions. For Wikipedians, quality is in the source. This source is a statement somewhere that a given fact is true. This makes sense in the text based Wikipedia.

One problem Wikidata faces is that many Wikipedians are sceptical about the quality of the information at Wikidata. "There are no sources" is the oft repeated mantra. Who checked the fact, who approved... Why should we trust the information? This resulted in a culture at Wikidata where "because of the Wikipedians" things that should be obvious are no longer obvious. When the Freebase data is imported, it is not imported it is kept in purgatory, waiting for someone to say OK.

The consequence is an epic fail when you use tools to add information. Data that is in purgatory is not seen by the tools and consequently it is added again, without the sources and without the additional qualifiers known in purgatory.

Google and the Freebase community spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on making this information right. It was used by Google in its products and WHY do we need to doubt its quality? Why should we think ourselves superior just because of the uneasy sentiments of Wikipedians?

The results are an epic fail because;

• the newly added information is not seen in tools
• there is no way to automatically compare it with other sources and thereby verify it
• it demonstrates mistrust where it is not needed.

When we want to import data from external sources, it makes sense to verify its quality. However, it is best done at the gate, before information is added to Wikidata. When a source is of such a quality that we want it, we should import it. Just like we did for all the settlements in China, Just like we are doing all the time from incomplete data from many Wikipedias.

We should do better and when we forget about Wikipedians for a moment, we know better.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikidata - more great statistics

When you want to know what Wikidata data is about, you find it in the statements "instance of" and "subclass of". The illustration is part of a set of new statistics by Zolo. It concentrates on these instances and statistics and a big surprise is that there are still so many more items without one (32.6%). The statistics by Magnus show that only 19.07% of all items have no statement.

The great thing of the new statistics page is that it shows pie charts for many Wikipedias. English Wikipedia for instance for instance does not know about 1.5 million people Wikidata knows about. When you analyse this, you get into the domain of set theory. These people can already be subdivided in the following way:

• people only en.wp knows about
• people en.wp knows about as well as others
• people en.wp does not know about but another wp does
• people no Wikipedia knows about
• items Wikidata does not recognise as people

People and unidentified items are half the pie for Wikidata. In all cases they are pretty well connected to articles in whatever project and provide a perfect opportunity to provide information. I blogged about it before, wikilinks and red links are obvious targets for links to other information not only for people but also for people.

Many people have #Babel information on their user page. They thereby indicate their proficiency in a language. When a Wikipedia does not have an article, why not provide an article in a known language? When there is no article why not provide at least the information that is available? It will help an editor write a new article, it will provide a reader with at least some information.

The point is that we should share in the sum of all available knowledge because we can.

Thanks,

     GerardM

#Wikidata - an invitation to add missing #data to the #AAAS

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, confers several awards. You can read more about it on Wikipedia or on their website. It is not unlikely that the Wikipedia article is read as much as the official website. The Wikipedia article of the AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility for instance is available for improvement..For many laureates there is no article, for many of them there is not even a red link and there is only an article in English.

At this time, Wikidata is not much better. It knows about the laureates there is an article for. A few additional facts have been added but that is about it. The information is available in the most relevant languages..

When an organisation like the AAAS so chooses, they can add additional data. Data about the laureates, when the award was conferred to them and they may even add people missing in Wikidata. or they may find that  Kyoshi Kurokawa is the 2012 laureate . The benefits to the AAAS will grown in time. Japanese people may learn about the AAAS, Wikidata will become more relevant as a hub for Open Data and consequently people will become even more exposed to the AAAS.

Obviously, this invitation is open to all organisations that confer awards. It is open to people who care about such things.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Don't fence #Wikipedia in!

There is a technical discussion at Wikidata about the text used on properties. The idea is that the label used is fixed. My understanding is that as a consequence once a property is given a label, it remains that label always and, there is no way to change it both in Wikipedia and Wikipedia.

Best practise at Wikipedia is that you can override text as the editor sees fit. For instance: P570 has a label of "Date of death", when it is used in a template for people who were executed, an editor may choose to use "Date of execution" instead.

When you consider that there are over 280 languages with a Wikipedia, the notion that both the labels and its aliases in a language are unique has been demonstrated to be problematic. In addition there are Wikipedias without labels in that language. Once people start adding labels, it is not obvious that the first label chosen is correct. It is obvious that the property will not be recreated because someone made a booboo.

In conclusion, it is best when properties can be selected based on a label and a description. Internally the property identifier is used and the label is provided as a default for use in Wikipedia. In this way there are no problem for editors. The only issue left is that some developers have to scratch their head on how to do this.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - is it about articles or about information? II

Dear Wikipedians. Red links are good. They are an invitation to write more articles and, in them olden days, it was the main way to many, many more articles. The draw back for readers is that behind those articles there is nothing. As a result articles look unfinished and many Wikipedias removed the red links.

Enter, Red Links 1.1. Currently it is just a template and it should be properly embedded in MediaWiki. What it does is link to Wikidata and as a consequence it can do multiple things. It could provide you with an article in a language you can read. It could show you information in the Reasonator. In all cases it does provide an editor with data to base an article on.

We could even change the behaviour of normal links and allow for a "left click" on a link. This could provide a list of all the articles in other languages and a link to Reasonator. The beauty of such an innovation is that "disambiguation pages" become redundant because the disambiguation is in the link itself. When the Wikidata items is enriched with statements, it means that the subject may pop up in associated lists, in categories.

The beauty is that this is a winner for everyone. Readers get access to more information. Editors get access to more information to write new or improve articles. Wikidata becomes used for a task that it is ready for; link articles through links and red links.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - is it about articles or about information?

To be blunt, Wikipedians write articles in one language. Many are quite good at it. they think that their way is the only way. They scorn what others do when they do not do it in their image.

Wikidata is a centralised hub for information on everything that is in most Wikimedia projects, that includes all Wikipedias. It proved to be vastly superior to the old Wikipedia way of "interlanguage links" from its start.

From the start items and statements have been added about all the facts at a fantastic rate. It is obvious that Wikidata knows about more facts than all Wikipedias combined. When Wikipedia has an article, it is typically better presented, but when there is no article Wikidata may inform where Wikipedia does not.

Except that Wikipedians do not accept information from Wikidata. In many ways their argument are similar to the arguments against Wikipedia in "them olden days". Their call for sources is in many ways understandable but wrong. Take for instance the article on the Wateler Peace Prize, It exists in three languages, French, Dutch and English. It is an old and respectable peace prize and all three articles list the laureates. They are people and institutions. Slowly but surely more information is added about all the laureates linking them to the award. It does not take long for Wikidata to have superior information over all three articles.

It becomes superior because there are no redlinks and they are always linked. The information can be seen in any language, it just takes transliteration or labels to be always understood. It is information, it stands on its own and as Wikidata matures, it will become more obvious why information like this is solid.

Wikidata is not beholden to Wikipedians. They may choose not to use it in the articles they work on. But denying the value of Wikidata as a source of information for everyone puts them in a position where history will prove them wrong. The tragedy is that they deny it to the people seeking information and that is why their attitude hurts what the Wikimedia Foundation stands for,
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Inspired Teacher of #India

Subjects and relevant subjects taught in university are not necessarily the same. When medicine is taught in India, diseases that are prevalent in India are relevant while diseases prevalent in Europe and North America are not so much. An article in the Metro India suggests that Indian textbooks do not have their priorities right and therefore subjects that matter are not taught or researched in University.

The Inspired Teacher Award is a new award for India and as it means that professors are honoured when they teach subjects that matter, it is quite wonderful. 

As a reward it is quite special; it is not the money it is time with the president of India and top bureaucrats that provides them with a platform to have their voice heard. At this time there are no articles nor items for the individual professors, something that is bound to change.
Thanks,
    GerardM

#Wikidata - Dr B.R. Barwale, winner of the World Food Prize

The English article on the World Food Prize mentions that Dr B.R. Barwale is the 1998 recipient of that award. Google has it that Mr Barwale was born in 1931 in India.

Because Wikipedia does not know that Mr Barwale was born in 1931, he is not in a category "Born in 1931" and consequently Wikidata did not know that Mr Barwale was a human and therefore he was not automatically awarded the World Food Prize.. This was added by hand.

The World Food Prize has a website, it mentions Mr Barwale in plenty of detail. Arguably, as a source the website of the World Food Prize provides many details for its laureates. It is however like Wikipedia not a source that makes for easy automated comparisons.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - #verifiability

Verifiability for Wikidata is different from verifiability for Wikipedia. One sentence like "Mr X was born on 7-5-1959 in Zwaag, he became known for activities in Y" contain multiple statements and Wikipedia could use one source while Wikidata needs the same source multiple times. The sources for Wikipedia are nice out of the way and for Wikidata they are in your face.

Yet again there is a discussion about verifiability and to be honest, it is boring. On a typical day the vast majority of new statements come without any sources. To be brutally honest, I have never added sources and I do not intent to either. I do remove sources when I update information that is wrong and is sourced.

Wikidata is hardly the only source of linked data and it is relatively easy to compare databases. This is when the idiosyncrasies come out. It is where you have to  map data from one database to another. Once this is done, you can compare multiple sources and find how they match and mismatch.

Arguably this is more powerful as individual sources because there is little interest in adding missing sources per statement.  There is a lot more interest in finding out why there are differences between the data in databases. It leads to a finetuning of the mapping or it leads to changes in the data on either end.

Wikipedia does not need sources for each Wikidata statement. What it needs is confidence. Confidence in best practices that ensure the data is as good as we can make it.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - كيفين بيكن and the #Syrian #refugees

When you consider the size of the camps where Syrian refugees are kept, the people lose their face, are no longer seen as individuals. But exactly because of the size, there must be professors, engineers, soccer stars and actors among them. Seen in that light Mr كيفين بيكن is not that far away from any of them.

I am sure that for all them it is a "significant event" to be in such a camp. Would it make a difference when we knew for many refugees how "near" they are to Mr Bacon? Would it convince you that these people need food, drink, shelter and schooling for their children?
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - #Vara and the J.B. Broekszprize

Awards are funny. They are presented with a lot of fanfare. They show the relevance of a subject; the reason why the award is presented and the person who the person is presented to. However, it takes effort and money to maintain an award and often the needed stamina simply disappears.

The J.B. Broekszprize was awarded by the VARA at least until 1996. The award was given to people and organisations who "humanised society". It is obvious that this effort was recognised at the time and, to understand the relevance of people and organisations it is great to know about awards like this.

At Wikidata we can and do recognise awards. People are added just because they received an award. Sometimes, it seems obvious that a person like Rob Hof is the 1995 winner of the award. But it needed some research to make sure that he was. Not even the Beeld en Geluid Wiki knew about Mr Hof..

Awards point to the legacy of people and organisations. They add relevance to both and they help in understanding an era that has come and gone.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #Hillary Rodham Clinton II

Mrs Clinton has been the recipient of many awards. The current count at Wikidata is at 23 and, it is quite an impressive list.

There is one funny bit in there, you have to know Dutch to spot this loonie. Mrs Clinton has been awarded several honorary doctorates. The screen shot shows nicely that there are two items for the same thing. You may see one for the University of St Andrews and one for Yale University.

Obviously the two could be merged. One reason why I won't is because Reasonator does not show redirects nicely and I do not want to lose all that information.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - #Hillary Rodham Clinton

Mrs Clinton will obviously be a topic of many conversations. It is probably the best annotated USA presidential candidate on Wikidata. It is best looking at it from a Reasonator perspective because there is so much that you would drown in all of it on Wikidata itself.

When you look at the screenprint, you see a lot of text that was generated based on the currently available data. When you look at it, you may find that she received a Grammy award as well. I am certain that even though the information is extended, it is not complete. There are even technical issues to be found that need to be sorted in Wikidata itself.

When you complete all the data and all the interconnections to Mrs Clinton, one thing is sure. Many more people will be that much closer to Kevin Bacon. It would be interesting to learn how Mrs Clinton compares to the other candidates. Who will bring more people closer to Mr Bacon?
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - #Amnesty International and the Dr. J.P. van Praag-award

Amnesty is one of the organisations I consider essential in this world. It is known for its work on human rights and it will tell any country where it fails in its commitments or in its actions. It is a participatory organisation and it is up to anyone to choose their levels of commitment.

Organisations are awarded for their work and I have added several of them spurred on by a friend who added the Dr J.P van Praag award to Amnesty. Typically I only add awards to people. It is easier and there are fewer false positives.

Reading the Dutch article, the question arose if Amnesty was indeed the beneficiary of this award. The text says in Dutch.. "Amnesty International (afdeling Nederland) voor haar werk voor gewetensgevangenen.". It says that it is the Dutch chapter who was awarded the award.

Given that other Amnesty chapters have items in Wikidata, it was easy to add one for the Dutch chapter and make it the recipient for the award. It follows that people tagged as member of Amnesty are actually member of the local chapter ... :)

NB I would not be surprised when more awards have been given to Amnesty, much of this may be found in articles in languages I do not read.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #OSA The Optical Society

In a previous post I wrote that I wanted to have all the awards of the Optical Society in Wikidata. I now admit that I failed.

The Optical Society has many awards and only some of them are known to Wikidata at this point. The funny part is that Wikidata knows about one more award than English Wikipedia does. It is an award conferred both by the Optical Society and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.

I did add most of the people who received an award but given that so many did not have an article it was not of interest to me to add all the missing ones. Maybe it is of interest to the Optical Society to complete information about itself and its awards..
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - the Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award

When you, like me, had never heard of biophotonics, you would never have heard about the Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award. As it is an award by the Optical Society and I wanted its list of awards to be complete I added yet another award.

The subject must be rather new because there is no image on the biophotonics article. The award linked to Mr Feld so there is room for improvement on English Wikipedia.

What I have done is add all the current winners of the award on Wikidata and Mr Tromberg, the winner for 2015. was the only one with an article. Yes, the award is still missing on the article.

NB As I complete more awards, the results of the Kevin Bacon challenge will change. It is fun.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - business as usual is not an option

"

The New York Times featured an article titled: "Can Wikipedia Survive?" by Andrew Lih. It is a good article in that it describes the current state of Wikipedia. It raises several important points and the main one is that because of smartphones and tablets many people do not contribute as much as they used to.

Articles like that describe the status quo. The issues that seem important based on the old understanding of what Wikipedia is about. The older understanding was: "To share the sum of all knowledge" the current situation is that there are 280+ Wikipedias and each is on its own to do its own thing using the MediaWiki software. There are other projects that contribute to the old motto but they were outside of the scope of the article.

When you reflect on the original objective, all Wikipedias fail. Every Wikipedia has its own content and is distinct in what it has to say. Consequently they do not share the sum of all knowledge; they are not even aware of the knowledge that is available elsewhere.

When you analyse Wikipedia, it has several components; there are accumulations of text and there are accumulations of data. There have been experiments that show clearly that it is not always necessary for a person to write the text. The experience from several Wikipedias is that bot generated content leads to more readers and more editors. This is quite counter intuitive but hey, why dispute the facts? If there is one draw back, it is with updating said texts when need be.

We know that once enough data is available for a subject information may be gleaned from raw data. Wikidata provides raw data and Reasonator among others transforms it into information. This may finally be accepted when the overly long awaited Wikidata Query engine will become available.

What this may do is several things.

• people will want to add items and statements to Wikidata
• results will pop up everywhere once the facts are in
• more software will be written to produce texts based on Wikidata data
• articles generated in this way may be cached without saving the text
• generated articles will change once more facts are known

This is not rocket science. It has been done before. The only question is does sufficient motivation to accept changes to Wikipedia exist. As Andrew Lih so eloquently asks "Can Wikipedia Surive?" the answer seems obvious. Wikipedia has to change in order to survive. This approach will help us improve content in any language.

Thanks,

     GerardM

#Wikidata - #People who died in 2015

I stopped registering the dead of 2015. I am happy with the result so far. People still die in 2015 and the number of people who are still waiting to be killed of has not increased that much.

The stress I felt to work on Wikidata is gone. I do more work in the house and when I work on Wikidata it is on things I actually enjoy.

Thanks to everyone who now registers the deaths of 2015 you make me feel happy.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - #IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award

The IEEE or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is an organisation that confers many different awards. One of them is the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award. 

Adding the known Wikipedia articles is easy, they have their Wikidata item, it is just a matter of linking the two. Making a complete list is not as easy. According to the article, the data from 1986 to 2001 is missing and, only one of the winners after 2001 is linked to an article.

Mr Hiroshi Iwai is the winner for 2015 and, to make sure that he is on the list, I searched for him. Before I added him to Wikidata, I disambiguated another using Google translate to learn the date of death of one of the Mr Iwai's

The missing data is available; it is on the official website in a PDF. It is easy to make a list of all the people who have been awarded this prize. 
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - Drs. P

Drs P or Heinz Hermann Polzer was a flamboyant Dutch author, artist. His texts, his songs are hilarious and he was well loved by many. Drs P came to my school and it was certainly one of the concerts I loved most in my life.

Today I learned that Drs P died. In order to reduce the number of degrees to Kevin Bacon, I spend some effort in his honour and added many of his well deserved awards.
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

#Wikidata - six degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon

There is this famous game where everyone is said to be no more than six steps away from Kevin Bacon. There is even an article about it.

It struck me that it would be nice to know how far away any Wikidata item is from Mr Bacon. The original game is about other actors and makes use of the IMDb but there is no reason not to use Wikidata. One reason to use Wikidata is to see how the shortest paths to Mr Bacon can be optimised.

One obvious way is to document everything there is to know about Mr Bacon.. like that he had a father. It opens up the world of architecture to Mr Bacon..

Adding information is one thing, it takes boffins to come up with a routine that finds the shortest path. I am sure they are competent, for them it may only be a matter of being challenged.. The great thing is that the combination of adding relations and boffins will make for many challenges, for instance how to link Mr Bacon to Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar with the shortest path.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - The Princess of Asturias Awards III

As I mentioned before, the Princess of Asturias Award used to be called differently.  It has awards in different areas and as you can see in the illustration, the change in names has had its effect in some but not in other parts.

It is easy to understand why issues like this arise. Most people or organisations received the "prince of Asturias award" so it is utterly confusing why it can no longer be shown. On the other hand the award is now called the "princess of Asturias award" and it makes sense to make that name change.

Anyway, it is a flaw in Wikidata that this cannot be properly addressed.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - a #banana is a #fruit

I read that Alan Bond died. He was quite famous for many reasons. He was a businessman that got caught and it is why the Wikidata description reduces him to "Australian fraudster".

It reminded me of the critique for a particular fruit to be called a fruit. This was done by using automated descriptions. The one thing forgotten in this critique is that a banana is therefore a fruit in any language. Mr Bond is only an Australian fraudster according to a text that is only there in English. Wikidata does not corroborate it. It does not mention the other things he achieved. It did not even mention that he was married..

Ah well, what to say. I am sure that when Mr Bond was still alive he would laugh wryly.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - The Princess of Asturias Awards II

Stephen Hawking received many awards. Given that Wikidata registers such things, it is no wonder given Mr Hawking's prominence that some 27 have been registered.for him.

One of them was the "Princess of Asturias Awards". It is however a grouping of awards not a single one. Mr Hawking received the "Princess of Asturias Award - concord" award. I did add this award to the item for Mr Hawking and I removed the grouping.

Some people disagreed because, the old statement was sourced. It did not matter that it was wrong, the only thing that mattered that it was sourced. Funnily enough it was pointed out to me that the source was right; it said that Mr Hawking received the concord award. It was just Wikidata that was wrong..

So I wonder what the value of a source statement is. It is apparently OK to indicate on Wikidata what it does NOT say on the source.  It is so confusing.. I am sure that when Mr Hawking hears about this he will just smile.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - the #Pope is no longer of the Roman Catholic faith?

When you are to believe some at Wikidata, the religion of pope Francis, the bishop of Rome is no longer "Roman Catholic". The argument is a beautiful one.. "Catholicism" is a religion and "Roman Catholic Church" is an institution... WOW..

It is as if all the differences in all the churches in Catholicism have been removed in one big gesture, it is as if ecumenism is finally happening because Wikidata says so..

Wikidata is immature and it can be noticed in squabbles like this. It is also a consequence of people who have no understanding of the subject matter imposing their views and talking exhaustively about the subject.

Well they are wrong. I am sure when pope Francis hears about this he will just smile.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - what to do next

I stopped documenting recent deaths in Wikidata. I find I have withdrawal symptoms. It is the kind of work that is satisfying because you see the number of deaths in 2015 ever increasing. It is a challenge to keep up. The list that I used has grown by some 200.

I hope that the English Wikipedians who used to maintain their templates chose to step in to fill the void.

No, I will not tell my wife that I have more time to clean the house. I love Wikidata too much. However, I will do other things. Things were intervention makes a difference. It is great to have the tooling that Magnus created over time. For me it is the difference between doing something in a sane way and poking in the dark.

If there is one thing  many in the Wikidata community do not get it is that the time of volunteers is not cherished. There is no support nor understanding of the issues that exist. It is really ivory towery oh, oh, oh, the data is not good enough ... Let's move on and wait for the latest and greatest to magically appear. The "paper cuts" do not happen except for the hurt. There is no support for maintenance of the data and consequently the dead of 2015 are the least of our concern.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - The Princess of Asturias Awards

When improving quality is the name of the game, the Princess of Asturias Awards has several opportunities to have fun.

Like many other awards it is not singular in its scope. Many Wikipedias have articles for each category. Arguably the award is not the "Princess of Asturias Award" as some Wikipedias have it.

When the award was conceived, it was named after the prince who was next in line to become king of Spain. The Prince became king and he will be most likely be succeeded by a princess. It is why the name was changed. Wikidata is not smart enough to know that such name changes take place, It is why basic information like a name can be utterly confusing.

When you add information for this award, there is all the information added in good faith on the award itself. It is redundant but removing them means that the link to Wikipedia articles are lost.

Tough. Such links are what people expect of Wikidata..
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - its tyranny of sources

Let us keep it simple; a credible source is a source that that provides good information. There are several aspects to it.

• accurate
• unbiased
• timely
• complete

A lot of research went into "proving" that Wikipedia is a credible source. Typically this was done by subject matter experts that examined a subset of articles. Usually a lot of "sources" coincided with credibility. 

The point was made repeatedly, Wikipedia is credible for its intended use.

Proving that Wikidata provides good information is different. It is incomplete; a lot of information is just not there. Twenty percent of its items provide no information. When sources are cited, it is Wikipedia that is referred to. Data like deaths in 2015 is no longer maintained. The pope, the bishop of Rome, has no longer the "Roman Catholic Church" as his faith.

Wikidata is immature and that is ok.

The approach to sources for Wikidata is tyrannical. It imposes sources for each statement and the suggestion is that this will make it credible. When you consider the sheer number of statements and the speed at which they increase it is impossible to see how that will work. It is well understood that having a source for a "fact" is one way to perpetuate a lie.

There is a better approach to proving Wikidata as a credible source. This is done in the same way as it was suggested that Wikipedia was credible; by comparing it to others like Brockhaus and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Much of the ground work is already there. We can compare to VIAF, to the GND. The point of this would not be that all our data is the same but that we care about quality and share the differences and research those. 

While we make our data as accurate as we can, we can continue to work on making our data complete. Any credible source including Wikipedia and by inference DBpedia qualifies. They qualify because they help us complete our data and do this in a timely way.

This process of adding data is iterative. We add, we check and research the differences. 

Every argument why we cannot do this or should wait denies Wikidata its credibility and worse the call to wait till the latest and greatest gadget comes online demotivates. The Wikipedia approach to sources is great for Wikipedia it just does not work for Wikidata.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikidata - Albert West died

A friend of mine mentioned that Albert West died. He mentioned it because his death would be listed on the list of Dutch people who died in 2015.  As this list is on my watch list, I checked to see if he was on it. He was not.

Nobody had bothered to add his death yet.

I have done a decent job on Mr West, I added some additional information and the fact that he died. He will be on the list the next time when the list is updated.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#English #Wikipedia and those who died in #2015

It is wonderful news and I am grateful that the English Wikipedia decided to use Wikidata in stead of its own templates. It is wonderful, they have realised that the good people at Wikidata maintain that data..

I did it with pleasure, and I am thrilled to learn that the data is of high quality and up to date. I made it so because copying dates from English into Wikidata is easiest and therefore I always did them first the past two years.

The move of the English Wikipedia to use Wikidata data has been used as an excuse NOT to use the data harvested by DBpedia. That argument is wrong for three reasons.

• they update information in real time by harvesting from the RSS feed.
• they do this not only for the English Wikipedia
• they do not rely on a poor sod who adds info by hand

PLEASE, make use of the DBpedia data and please do consider the DBpedia people as part of our world. Let us learn from what they learned and make use of what they so gladly want to share with us. Share with us on our terms, share with us using our license.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikidata - Jurandyr Noronha died in 2015

Mr Noranha died on 2015-05-10. Mr Noranha was active in the movie industry so he is known in the IMDB database.

People die all the time but with the list functionality Jura1 created a page for "Brazilian people who died in 2015" dead Brazilians have an added significance. Mr Noranha qualifies..

At issue is that while Mr Noranha is known to Wikidata, it still takes a person to make a manual statement about his final day. I have done that for a year but I find that I am falling more and more behind. I do not even make a statement for Mr Noranha to be a Brazilian.

One thing that is not motivating is that I KNOW that this information is there for Wikidata to be had. The wonderful people at DBpedia really want to share this with Wikidata. Not much happens and as it ism my enthusiasm is wavering and my precious free time that is in demand for other things as well..

So what to do..
Thanks.
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Jos Panhuijsen a #Dutch #author

Mr Panhuijsen is a celebrated author; he received the F. Bordewijk Prize in 1959.There is no article for him on any Wikipedia and to be honest, I do not care that is not my game. It is for someone else to do.

Adding Mr Panhuijsen to Wikidata however is something that I do care about. He is one of three missing authors that received the Bordewijk Prize and now he does show on the Reasonator page in the timeline and as one in a list of sixty recipients.

Adding Mr Panhuijsen, van Beek and Simhoffer makes as much sense as having red links in Wikipedia. Even more so because they will show in any and all Wikipedia when used with the magnificent list tool created by Magnus.
Thanks,
      GerardM