#Wikidata Tool - The #Awarder

The Awarder is a tool I use everyday to add people known to have received the award to Wikidata. Its use is straight forward:

• find a list of award winners, a list that includes the person and the year it was conferred
• copy the source text into the awarder
• identify the wiki the data is from
• identify the award by its Wikidata identifier.
• open the results in "quick statements" for processing. 

Easy. When done properly the result is as good as the information from the Wikipedia it came from.

There are a few points. Some lists, like the one on the John Wesley Powell award, have the year on a line and the data is implied for the following text. The results is ten people identified. There are a few red links in there for instance for "George M. Hornberger" and Awarder has identified him so that I can click on a button to find him in Wikidata. As I did not, I added him in Wikidata for later processing. Awarder does not identify organisations as award winners so I had to add the identifier for for instance the "California Department of Transportation". John Galetzka is the award winner for 2016. He is a "black link" so I identified him in the tool with brackets and as a result I could add him as well.

For fifteen award winners it is now known that they won the award. Slowly but surely it adds to the relevance of these people in Wikidata and the missing award winners become easier to identify for the implied notability.

Thanks,

       GerardM

PS thank you Magnus for a great tool

#Wikidata VS #Wikipedia - the issue with input, output

I was told that I should not talk about quality because "on the basis of my work I did not give a good example". Basically I was told to stop what I am doing. As I have written a lot about quality and argued how we can achieve greater quality it is not funny nor is it appreciated but the guy has a point.

With 2,304,191 edits there must be a lot that is wrong in what I have done. No matter how careful I am, the percentage of errors that is to be expected means that with 6% there must be at least some 138,252 errors that I introduced. The problem is that depending on your outlook this is acceptable or it is not. When in stead of me 100 people did the same work, the result would have been the same; together they would have introduced around 138,252 errors as well.

I totally agree that we need to bring our errors down. There are three steps where errors have their origin; input, process and output.

• My input is based on the Wikipedias; their content all have their own issues. They all operate on their own little islands; there is no or little coordinated effort to make the quality of the information we provide a collective ambition.
• My process is based on identifying what I want to work on; typically awards, often the enrichment of data around one person. For tools I mainly use what Magnus provides; they provide superior usability. Reasonator makes Wikidata statements intelligible, it provides superior disambiguation and automated descriptions. Awarder adds both the year and the person who received an award. It allows me to effectively cover a lot of ground. They are the tools I use most, others like PetScan are also invaluable.
• There is too much output I generate and consequently I do not care for individual edits. I justify them all for the process, the routines I follow. I added "Claudia Wills" based on the information in the article of the eponymous award. Like other notable birdwatchers, Mrs Wills does not have her own article and I added her to complement the information on the award.

We share in the sum of knowledge and when the quality of what we provide is to improve, our movement has to become dedicated to the quality of all our information. The typical Wikipedian does mostly care about his or her own project and that is fine; we do not need all of them in an effort to improve our overall quality. The effort I propose can be hidden from view.

A Wikipedia article contains many links; they are blue, red or black. All the blue links are implicitly linked to Wikidata items. Many issues become evident when they can be compared with the links in articles in other Wikipedias or Wikidata. Some Wikis have additional links and they can be mapped to red links and black links. This prevents problems when articles are written with the name suggested in this link.

Once articles on a same subject in many Wikipedias are linked, all kinds of additional functionality become easier; one that is close to my heart is when a new award winner becomes known..
Thanks,
      GerardM

#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

#Wikipedia - there once was a lady from #Estonia

Once upon a time there was a Wikipedian from Estonia. He decided to write about a fellow countryman, Kersti Kaljulaid. When your Estonian is as good as mine, it is not a name you remember or a person you are likely to have come across.

At the time this was the same for the English Wikipedians; she could not be notable because there were not enough sources in English.. So for all the good reasons the article was in danger. Our Estonian Wikipedian said: "wait a week". A week later Mrs Kaljulaid was the president of Estonia.

I have taken the liberty to add additional data in Wikidata. Mrs Kaljulaid received two awards and others award winners have been added. No sources for them in English either. To be brutally honest, incidents like this prove why English Wikipedia is only a subset of the sum of all knowledge. Because of this insistence on English sources, English Wikipedia can not cover the sum of all knowledge. People who seek reputable information on foreign subjects will not find it.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Comparing #Wikipedia using blue, red and black links

There are reasons to compare Wikipedia articles on the same subject in multiple languages. When you just want to read, you may find additional information in another language but as you can imagine, the content should be largely the same. Consequently, the links in an article should go to articles that are about the same topic.

One problem with "blue" links is homonymy. You write a subject in the same but they are not the same; John Doe is one example. Finding these issues, issues that are surprisingly common, can be done by a bot using the Wikidata identifiers for the linked articles.

When there is no article to link to, there is no implicit link to Wikidata. There are two options; we can fake a link by accepting the red or a "black" link as synonymous or we can link a red or a "black" link to Wikidata. The latter is precise and has additional benefits.

When all links are associated with Wikidata items, it is obvious what links in what language are missing or are additional. They are of interest because they may imply potential information to be added to articles or they may point to errors even vandalism. Another benefit is that it helps establish a baseline for a NPOV or neutral point of view without a need to understand the language.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - Blue, red and black links

Lists in Wikipedia, like this list of award winners of the Tony Kent Strix award on the right exist as blue, red and "black" links. At the moment only an article in English exists about the award and based on past experiences it is likely that other award winners are known in other Wikipedias.

Based on the information in the article, it was easy enough to add the missing information in Wikidata for all the "black links". When you now compare the information in Wikidata with the Wikipedia article, it is feasible to link fixed text to a Wikidata item. This makes it feasible to trigger a warning once a blue link is possible based on new  Wikidata information. In this way a link to Jack Mills is already likely.

When we can compare the information in an article with data in Wikidata, there is an additional way to compare the information and prevent errors and vandalism. Wikidata is after all superior in its use as a tool for disambiguation.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Rina Spigt en een prijs van de #VARA

Two years ago I blogged about the J.B. Broekszprize and the VARA. It mentioned a Mr Hof and the fact that it is assumed that this Mr Hof received the award in 1995.

Mrs Spigt was awarded the prize for a radio series about Mary Zeldenrust-Noordanus according to the Dutch Wikipedia article. She is the only one for whom it was not known in what year she received the award.

The best way of finding out? I asked her. Mr Spigt is on Facebook. It is an effective way of digging up some facts.

I always illustrate a blogpost so I googled for images and found this image of Mrs Spigt with her father. Another fact established. I did ask Mrs Spigt if she wanted additional information in Wikidata. A picture is welcome for instance. When you do ask, you may get confirmation about facts. Maybe not sourced in the Wikipedia way but nevertheless correct.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - Funding #Wikieducation is problematic

How can you not love WikiEducation.. It has a great reputation bringing the editing of Wikipedia to curricula. When you check out their Twitter account, their blog, their results they do an awesome job.

You can once you realise it is instrumental in maintaining the existing bias that favours English and English Wikipedia. Realistically you cannot even blame them for it because they define their operations as limited to the USA and Canada.

Still there are problems.
* People assume that the example of using university students to write articles is to be followed. For most of the Wikipedias there is too little content. The type of articles is not what is needed, more basic articles are needed.
* The Wikimedia Foundation has a huge bias for the English Wikipedia and consequently the 70% of the word population who do not speak English are underserved and less than 50% of the traffic of the WMF is English Wikipedia.

The solution is not to defund Wiki Education. A solution will only come once the WMF acknowledges that they have a diversity problem, a problem they do not acknowledge.
Thanks,
      GerardM

PS Does Wiki Education support French?

#Wikipedia - Sister projects in search results

The Wikipedia Signpost informs that the discovery team extended the results for search on Wikipedia. New is that English Wikipedia now includes results from
Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote and  Wikivoyage and that is indeed welcome news.

There is one puzzling part in the information; "Wikidata and Wikispecies are not within the scope of this feature." It is puzzling because including Wikidata search results is where search has been augmented for years in many Wikipedias including the English Wikipedia by the people who added this little bit of magic Magnus provided.

As you can see in the screenshot of the search for Wilbur R. Leopold, an award was conferred on him and the origin of this factoid is the article on the award. Thanks to Wikidata, information is available for Mr Leopold. There are so many references in Wikidata that have no article in a Wikipedia or any other project that from a search perspective it is probably the next frontier.

When wiki links, red links and even black links can be associated with Wikidata items, it becomes even easier to add precision to the search results. Adding these links is the low hanging fruit to improved quality in Wikimedia projects anyway. 
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - John P. A. Ioannidis and his awards

I am a self confessed award junkie. They are imho important because they are an indication of who is notable and who is less so.

Three awards are associated with professor Ionannidis in Wikidata. One award was also conferred on Hans Rosling and this gives me added confidence in Mr Ionannidis and other recipients of the Chanchlani Global Health Research Award.

Professor Ionannidis throws cold water on much of the practice of scientific practice and consequently on its practitioners. One of his papers has the title: Why most published research findings are false and it is inherently a challenge as well to what we write in the Wikipedias and Wikidata.

At Wikidata a wholesale import is happening of papers, science facts and its authors. This is a great idea, particularly when papers that dismiss much of the nonsense papers gets a prominent place. The result will be that the Neutral Point Of View gets an other twist; it balances what we include with actual science.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata vs #GeoNames - the first to throw a stone

Wikidata has some vocal people vilifying GeoNames. They insist that no data from GeoNames is included in Wikidata because "the quality is so bad". In my last post I wrote down assertions about Wikidata. One of them is that "Never mind how "bad" an external data source is, when they are willing to cooperate on the identification and curation of mutual differences, they are worthy of collaboration".

I wrote an email to Markc Wick, the founder of GeoNames and with his permission I can publish our mail exchange.

Hoi,The import of data from GeonNames into Wikipedia has been controversial. People say that the quality of the GeoNames data is not "good enough". It resulted in the deletion of thousands of articles from the Swedish Wikipedia. I am not Swedish, I did not follow their discussions but the problem is it sours collaboration with other parties because "their data might not be 100%".
This happened in the past, I care for the future. In Wikidata we do link to GeoNames (example Almere [1]).
There are several ways in which we can help each other and potentially even benefit from a collaboration. Wikidata is licensed with a CC-0 license and therefore GeoNames can have all our data and do with it as they please.
My initial proposal is for a comparison of the shared data. The data where GeoNames differs from Wikidata is potentially problematic. Concentrating on these differences together will improve both our and your data.
Would you be interested?
Thanks,
       GerardM
       Gerard Meijssen

His answer is everything I could hope for:

Hi Gerard
Thanks a lot for your email. A couple of weeks ago I have started to parse the wikidata extract and look for the matching attributes. Unfortunately I got interrupted and have not yet looked at the result of the parsing. I will continue as soon as I find the time.
The goal is to add the wikidata identifier to the alternatenames table with pseudos language code 'wkdt'. What I have noted so far is that sometimes the geonameids in wikidata go the wrong concept. For instance going to the city feature when the article is speaking about the administrative division or vice versa. This is one of the things I would like to check before adding the wikidataid as alternatename. GeoNames also has links to wikipedia.
I don't think wikipedia should import all geonames features, not all of them are relevant enough to justify a wikipedia article.
Best Regards 

Not only is there an interest to collaborate; Marc is checking the links in Wikidata referring to GeoNames and as can be expected he finds issues. As I asserted, this is to be expected and collaboration is the only way forward for optimal results.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata some assertions

Wikidata is no different from any community, there are differences of opinion. Everybody has his or her own perspective but there are assertions that can be made that have a more universal resonance. 

The assertions below represent the underlying arguments I use in my blog posts and in the discussions I take part of. They are the ones I feel are not necessarily "political" or have a negative impact.

Thanks,

       GerardM

1. There is no data store without problems, this includes Wikipedia and Wikidata.
2. The data we hold is best understood by applying set theory. The data in Wikidata consists of many subsets; probably the most valuable subset for the WMF are the interwiki links.
3. The error rate in each subset can be assessed and is by definition different from the overall Wikidata error rate
4. The absence of data often indicates a bias in the data Wikidata holds. A good example is the lack of data relevant to the global south.
5. Given the huge influx of data from Wikipedia, the biggest imports have been from English Wikipedia and it is one reason for the existing biases in Wikidata.
6. An absence of data prevents the application of tools. Tools may suggest writing a Wikipedia article, tools may compare data with other sources.
7. Concentrating on the differences between Wikidata and any other data source is the most optimal way of improving the quality of existing data in either data set.
8. Having an application for the data in Wikidata is the best way for improving the usefulness for a subset of data.
9. Each contributor to Wikidata works on the data set(s) of his/her own choice, these data sets interact in the whole of Wikidata. This may raise issues and this can not always be avoided.
10. Examples of problematic data must be seen in the light of the total of the data set they are part of. Statistically they may be irrelevant.
11. Never mind how "bad" an external data source is, when they are willing to cooperate on the identification and curation of mutual differences, they are worthy of collaboration
12. Wikidata improves continually and as such it is "purrfect" but it will never be perfect.

#Causegraph, an other way of looking at #Wikidata

Causegraph is a tool to visualize and analyze cause/influence relationships using Wikidata. If you have not seen it yet, give it a spin.

Randomly looking at the galaxy of relations, I found a Charles Frédéric Bassenge, he is in Wikidata because he is the father of Pauline Runge. He is in Wikidata because she has an entry in WikiTree. What amazes me most is the quality of the data for the father and his absence in WikiTree. 

Causegraph works on the basis of there being a direct relation between two persons. For Jacob Palis, the doctoral students and doctoral advisers are included and not the other TWAS award winners.

What is really good is that it is regularly updated. It would be even better when it was a Labs tool. This might enable real time updates .. <grin> there is always a wish for more and better </grin>
Thanks,
       GerardM

How #Wikipedia gets into @Africa

This is a map showing how fiber is getting into Africa. The blind spots is where the Internet does not go. The red lines is where the future for the Wikimedia lies.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#Wikidata - Premio Almirante Álvaro Alberto

The Premio Almirante Álvaro Alberto is named after admiral Álvaro Alberto da Mota e Silva. They are both notable for their own reasons.

The award was mentioned in an article on the German Wikipedia for César Camacho. The award was not known to Wikidata and was added. The website of the conferring organisation gives me the impression that it is the "National Council for Scientific and Technological Development" and part of the Brazilian ministry of sciences. When you look for it in Wikidata, it is embarrassing.

The admiral is probably a child of his time. He was military and also a very relevant scientist. As a military man he held the rank of vice admiral and as a scientist he was twice the president of the academy of scientists. He was also very much involved in the Brazilian nuclear program.

When you consider the notability of Brazil, it is astounding how little is known in Wikidata. Many politicians have been added for Brazil; national senators and deputies. 

Brazil is one of the top twenty countries in the world I think, when you consider any and all of the "lesser" countries it is obvious that we know even less. When Wikipedia and by inference Wikidata is about the sum of all knowledge, there is a lot of white space where all our tools have no impact.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - #diversity of #science - Professor Govind Swarup

Professor Swarup received the TWAS prize. The TWAS Prize is an annual award instituted in 1985 by The World Academy of Sciences to recognise excellence in scientific research in the global South. It follows that when attention is given to scientists like Mr Swarup, it should be easy to link to other scientists, particularly those from the global south.

With twenty two awards Mr Swarup does not disappoint. Many of the awards are from India; one of the conferring organisations, the Indian Science Congress Association, lists 41 awards. Its rule that a scientist can now receive only one award in his lifetime indicates how many scientists are recognised by the ISCA.

Making the TWAS prize winners more complete by adding the awards helps to improve the diversity of scientists. It is not only women who have not been fully recognised it is also the scientists from the global south.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - Felix Andries Vening Meinesz and the sum of all #knowledge

Mr Vening Meinesz was an important Dutch scientist. There are a few pointers to his relevance; he was a member to several august bodies and he was awarded many awards, awards from several countries.

One of the medals is the "Alexander Agassiz Medal". When you look at the English Wikipedia article, you find no red links while many award winners do not have an article. Otto S. Pettersson for instance is/was known to Wikidata but he was not associated with the award. When you google for another awardee, it is most likely that the 1926 award winner was Jacob Bjerknes, not Wilhelm Bjerknes.. Even sources get it wrong..

In many ways, awards are rather boring. Getting all the information right is a lot of work and when it is to be written in Wikipedia articles, there are too many Wikipedias and awards for all the awards to get an article in all of them.

When awards are fed to Wikipedia articles from Wikidata like it is done for sources, it becomes a lot more manageable. Increasingly Wikidata knows about more awards for more people. What does it take to reach the necessary tipping point? Which Wikipedia will consider this first?
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - a #young face for #science

These are members of the "Jonge Academie".  They are Dutch scientists and for this academy to remain young, membership expires after ten years. Similar academies exist in several other countries. Countries like Pakistan and Belgium.

With politicians riding roughshod over scientific facts, rejuvenation of science is important. The notion that scientists are old is all too easy and it is equally easy to dismiss young scientists for a lack of relevance. Check out these Dutch scientists, they are relevant and will be for a long time.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - Bias and the King #Faisal International #Prize

The King Faisal International Prize is an international award recognising five distinct areas. They are: Service to Islam, Islamic Studies, Arabic language and literature, Medicine and Science.

When a Wikipedia is to write in a NPOV way about the King Faisal International Prize, all five categories need to be included. Just listing Medicine and Science and having the article as a "science award" ignores the scientific realities in the other three categories or prevents the inclusion of other theological or literature awards.

This is an unfounded bias and remediation is needed in order to achieve NPOV.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikipedia - another #German #Award

It is funny in its own way that the only award winner that has no "red" or "blue link" on this award page are Wikipedians; German Wikipedians. They won the 2016 GDCh-Preis für Journalisten und Schriftsteller.

Typically we do not give much attention to our achievements and as such the understated attention can be understood. At Wikidata we need to have an item in order to recognise an award winner. As there was a photo of the award ceremony, it was obvious to add it to the item for these award winners as well.
Thanks,
      GerardM