With #DBpedia to the (data) cleaners

The people at DBpedia are data wranglers. What they do is make the most of the data provided to them by the Wikipedias, Wikidata and a generous sprinkling of other sources. They are data wranglers because they take what is given to them and make the data shine.

Obviously, it takes skill and resources to get the best result and obviously, some of the data gathered does not pass the smell test. The process the data wranglers use includes a verification stage as described in this paper. They have two choices for when data that should be the same is not; they either have a preference or they go with the consensus ie the result that shows most often.

For data wranglers this is a proper choice.. There is an other option for another day, these discrepancies are left for the cleaners.

With the process well described, the data openly advertised as available, the cleaners will come. First people akin to the wranglers, they have the skills to build the queries, the tools to slice and dice the data. When these tools are discovered, particularly by those who care about specific subsets, they will dive in and change things where applicable. They will seek the references, make the judgments necessary to improve what is there.

The DBpedia data wranglers are part of the Wikimedia movement and do more than build something on top of what the Wikis produced; DBpedia and the Wikimedia projects work together improving our movement's qualities. With the processing data generally available this will become even more effective.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Comparing datasets, bigger or better or it does not matter?

When Wikidata was created, it was created with a purpose. It replaced the Wikipedia based interwiki links, it did a better job and, it still does the best job at that. Since then the data has been expanded enormously, no longer can Wikidata be defined by its links to Wikipedia as it is now only a subset.

There are many ongoing efforts to extract information from the Wikipedias. The best organised project is DBpedia, it continuously improves it algorithms to get more and higher grade data and it republishes the data in a format that is both flexible and scalable. Information is also extracted from the Wikipedias by the Wikidata community. Plenty of tools like petscan and the awarder and plenty of people working on single items one at a time.

Statistically on the scale of a Wikidata, individual efforts make little or no impression but in the subsets the effects may be massive. It is for instance Siobhan working on New Zealand butterflies and other critters. Siobhan writes Wikipedia articles as well strengthening the ties that bind Wikidata to Wikipedia. Her efforts have been noticed and Wikidata is becoming increasingly relevant to and used by entomologists.

There are many data sets, because of its wiki links every Wikipedia is one as well. The notion that one is bigger or better does not really matter. It is all in the interoperability, it is all in the usability of the data. Wikipedia wiki links are highly functional and not interoperable at all. More and more Wikipedias accept that cooperation will get them better quality information for its readers. Once the biggest accept data as a resource to curate the shared data the act of comparing data sets is improved quality for all.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Language barriers to @Wikidata

Wikidata is intended to serve all the languages of all the Wikipedias for starters. It does in one very important way; all the interwiki links or the links between articles on the same subject are maintained in Wikidata.

For most other purposes Wikidata serves the "big" languages best, particularly English. This is awkward because particularly people reading other languages stand to gain most from Wikidata. The question is: how do we chip away on this language barrier.

Giving Wikidata data an application is the best way to entice people to give Wikidata a second look.. Here are two:

• Commons is being wikidatified and it now supports a "depicts" statement. As more labels become available in a language, finding pictures in "your" language becomes easy and obvious. It just needs an application
• Many subjects are likely to be of interest in a language. Why not have projects like the Africa project with information about Africa shared and updated by the Listeria bot? Add labels and it becomes easier to use, link to Reasonator for understanding and add articles for a Wikipedia to gain content.

Key is the application of our data. Wikidata includes a lot, the objective is to find the labels and we will when the results are immediately applicable. It will also help when we consider the marketing opportunities that help foster our goals.

Thanks,
      GerardM

@Wikidata - #Quality is in the network

What amounts to quality is a recurring and controversial subject. For me quality is not so much in the individual statements for a particular Wikidata item, it is in how it links to other items.

As always, there has to be a point to it. You may want to write Wikipedia articles about chemists, artists, award winners. You may want to write to make the gender gap less in your face but who to write about?

Typically connecting to small subsets is best. However we want to know about the distribution of genders so it is very relevant to add a gender. Statistically it makes no difference in the big picture but for subsets like: the co-authors of a scientist or a profession, an award, additional data helps understand how the gender gap manifests itself.

The inflation of "professions" like "researcher" is such that it is no longer distinctive, at most it helps with the disambiguation from for instance soccer stars. When a more precise profession is known like "chemist" or "astronomer", all subclasses of researcher, it is best to remove researcher as it is implied.

Lists like members of "Young Academy of Scotland", have their value when they link as widely as possible. Considering only Wikidata misses the point, it is particularly the links to the organisations, the authorities (ORCiD, Google Scholar, VIAF) but also Twitter like for this psychologist. We may have links to all of them, the papers, the co-authors. But do we provide quality when people do not go into the rabbit hole?
Thanks,
      GerardM

There is much more to read; introducing the "one page wonder"

Given that our aim is to share in the "sum of all knowledge", realistically we will not have it all at our disposal to share. It is also fairly likely that we will not know about all subjects.

When you google for a given subject, it is as likely as not that you will drown in too much data, too many false friends or find nothing at all when there is nothing to find in "your" language.

Increasingly, what we know about in the Wikiverse is linked to a Wikidata item. Pictures may depict a subject, articles may be written about a subject and all of them refer to a Wikidata item that may have labels in any language. Items that may even have links to references.

When we are to find for Wikipedia readers more to read, we need a mechanism, a place where we can link a subject to external resources. Resources like the Internet Archive, "your" library. the papers we know in WikiCite but to the free versions of these papers. The page will show the label in "your" language and  a picture. It links to all the pictures depicting the subject as well.

Putting the "one page wonder" in production is easy. It is all on one page and is fully internationalised. The localisation is done at translatewiki.net and when people want to make it useful in "their" language, they will add the missing labels for the Wikidata items.

With the "one page wonder" in place it becomes interesting:

• Is "your" local library known to us and do we get your permission to find it for you. How do we supply "your" library with a search string?
• The Internet Archive's wayback machine may have content in "your" language but can you navigate its English only user interface. 
• What other organisations do we want to partner with to provide you with more to read
• Will we be able to show local pictures, a Dutch cow looks different from an Indian cow..
• What other issues will there be..
• Oh and yes, we can include the Reasonator, queries and what have you.. we just have to think about what to show.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Translatewiki.net the @Wikimedia movement infrastructure most people even do not know

Just consider this, there are more than 200 functioning Wikipedias and this is only possible because people localise the MediaWiki software in over 280 languages. It makes translatewiki.net, the website where all this work happens a strategic resource to the Wikimedia movement.

Internationalisation (i18n) and localisation (l10n) are an integral part of software development. It is an integral part of a continuous process and it requires constant attention. The day to day jobs are well in hand. The localisation itself is a community effort and with developers continually expanding the software base a continuous effort is needed of the translators to keep up with their language. This is hard and for many languages it is a struggle to keep up with even the "most used messages".

Managing this effort is a continuous effort, it is essential to maintain the i10n and the localisation optimally. It follows that it should be obvious what messages have the biggest impact first on the readers and then the editors of a Wikipedia. What should be in the "most used messages" changes over time and when it is considered strategic, such maintenance is to be considered a Wikimedia/MediaWiki undertaking. 

Translatewiki has always been an independent partner of the Wikimedia Foundation and it has always been firmly part of the Wikimedia movement. Given that partnerships are a key part of the strategic plans of the WMF, the proof of the partnership pudding is very much in how it interacts with a translatewiki.net. TWN does not need to be part of the WMF organisation for it to fund TWN, it is clearly a quid pro quo. The WMF should even encourage TWN and other partners to collaborate for their i18n and l10n and enable this for strategic purposes, strengthening these partners globally. 

Thanks,

     GerardM

How to value open data and why Wikidata won't go stale

The data in Wikidata is data everyone knows or could know. A lot of awful things could be said of its content and quality and all of it misses one important point. It is being used, its use is increasing, it is increasingly used by Wikipedias and that provides an incentive to maintain the data.

What Wikipedia indicates is that most data is stable, not stale. A date of birth, a place of birth so much remains the same. When we bury data in text, it is always a challenge to get the data out. When we bury data in Wikidata it just takes a query to bring it back to life. Who was a member of multiple "National Young Academies, Similar Bodies and YS Networks" for instance; you do not find it in the texts of those organisations but you will increasingly find it in Wikidata. Once the data is in there, it is stable and available for query.

As GLAMS make their content available under a free license, their collections gain relevance as the collection gains an audience. Just consider that only a small part is available to the public in the GLAM itself and on Commons it is there for all to find. Commons is being wikidatified and those collections become available in any language gaining additional relevance in the process.

The best example is what the Biodiversity Heritage Library does. It is instrumental in the digitisation of books, it makes them publicly available and gains the collections they are from an audience. Volunteers prove themselves in this process and both professionals and the wider world benefit. From a data perspective the data is new because only now available.

When a publisher mocks Open data, it is self serving. It is in their interest that data is inaccessible, only there for those who pay. There are plenty of examples of great data initiatives that went to ground and obviously when the data does not pay the rent, publishers will pull the plug. It is different for the data at Wikidata. It is managed by an organisation that has as its motto "share in the sum of all knowledge". The audience the WMF has makes it a world top ten website, it is not for sale and it is not going anywhere. As long as there are people like me who care about the availability of information, the data at Wikidata may go stale in places waiting for another volunteer to pick up the slack.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Statistics or how many researchers are a #physicist

At @Wikidata most "researchers" are given this "occupation" out of convenience. We do not know how to label them properly, there are too many, so as all scholars must be researchers we make them so.

Nothing inherently wrong here; it is better to know them for what they also are then to know nothing about them at all. One issue though; we do not know the physicists from the chemists, from the behaviorists or any other specialism in science. We can query for physicists anyway but we will not catch them all.

Queries that show the numbers for a profession are easy enough to make. The value of such one time wonders is minimal, the results are fleeting, any moment now another scientists like Walter Hofstetter may become known to be a physicist and the numbers are no longer true. They are useful when we run queries like these regularly, save the results and present them like Magnus does for Wikidata itself.

What it takes is a mechanism that mimics Magnus's approach. We gain an insight in how Wikidata is performing over time and it provides motivation for people who care, for instance about physicists.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Statistics for National Young Academies

The Global Young Academy is linked to many national young academies. It and they represent many relevant scientists. They represent all of science and, they are interested in representing science to the public. The question: how can we make them visible.

First you add the orgs to Wikidata and then the scientists to the orgs. When you then add the same Listeria lists to Wikipedias, we will see a picture when we have one and we may notice who has a local Wikipedia article.

There are many interesting statistics possible:

• the gender ratio
• the different professions in the mix
• awards received 
• the known number of publications per person
• the organisations they are employed at

However, first things first. It is my intention to include all the current members and the alumni of the Young Academy of Sweden before Wikimania.. Second, these scholars are bright :) once they put their mind to it, they will help themselves to nice statistics based on the info we accumulate in Wikidata. They can be linked to on the Wikipedia pages.

Thanks,

     GerardM

Helping @Wikipedia readers find their read, one author, one publication at a time

Reading is what the public of Wikipedia does and in a way, every Wikipedia is an invitation to further reading. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and by definition, its coverage of a subject is limited. Its reliability is defined by its sources and they themselves are typically a subset of what may be read about that subject.

The quality of the invitation for further reading differs. How do we invite people to read a Shakespeare in Dutch, German, Malayalam, Kannada even English?

The primary partner in this quest for further reading; the local library. We can put all of them on a map and invite people to go there or to probe its website for further reading. Having them all in Wikidata with their coordinates puts libraries and what they stand for on the map. We can invite them to use services like OpenLibrary or WordCat, the bottom line; people read.

In this people first approach, the user interface is in the language people want to read their book in. It follows that the screen may be sparse. When it is to be a success, it is run like a business. We have statistics on libraries, people seeking, books found and a perspective in time. It is about people reading books not about transliterating books. Our business model: people reading. Funding is by people, organisations who care about more reading by more people. The numbers entice people to volunteer their efforts making more books, publications available in the language they care about.

To make this happen, the WMF takes the lead enabling and maintaining such a system and partnering with any and all organisations that care about this, organisations like the OCLC and the Internet Archive.

We will succeed when we make the effort.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Competing with the PayWalls? Hell no!!

Competition is about business models and, the business models of the Wikimedia Foundation and publishers are utterly different. At the WMF we do better when people read more. The business model of publishers is that people pay before they read. When people like our service, they share their data, their money enabling us to do more.

Notions of "professional results" for our readers are outside of either business model. Terminology like "professional results" are interesting but to some extend they are a fringe benefit.

When a professional adds 278 ORCiD identifiers to Wikidata, he and all his colleagues benefit professionally because he did put in the effort. It follows that Roderic Page is a member of our community and his professional work benefits us all. These 278 scholars need to have their work known at Wikidata and when Roderic and others want to work on other scientists as well, they may.

There is no point is competing with paywalling publishers. Whether people do need to use a document that is behind paywall it is of no real concern to us. When we point to a free version of a paywalled document we do a better job because more people read. The business model of a publisher is of no further concern to us, our aim is for people to read.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Daniel Pomarède or a method to include an interesting paper in @Wikidata

I read about an interesting astronomical phenomena, this is where you find the abstract. Daniel Pomarède, one of the authors is open in ORCiD about his work. I found that he has a presence on Wikidata by searching for his ORCiD id: "0000-0003-2038-0488".

Marking Mr Pomarède for an update is what it takes to give the article I think is interesting more of an audience. In the process there will be more to read about this part of astronomy.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Hey @GlobalYAcademy this blogpost is for you II

As I have added all global young academics in Wikidata, an update. What I like best about this academy is its global reach and the spread among the sciences. I am happily pleased that you may be found in ORCiD, Google Scholar and VIAF.

The most vital of them all for Wikidata is ORCiD; when your data "can be seen by everyone", we can retrieve your data, import it in Wikidata and make a "Scholia" for you. This is the Scholia of one of my favourite young academics. The import process (SourceMD) is broken at this time and this is my backlog of jobs to run.

Running a process for you will import co-authors and papers we do not know about. Given your global spread, it follows that your co-authors will have a similar global spread and this is an anti-dote to the Anglo-American bias we have in Wikidata and the Wikipedias. Particularly when I run a second job, a job will run for your co-authors with pubic ORCiD information as well, improving the subset of the data you are part of.

There are things you can do that have an impact on what we do:

• You can check your data, add what is missing, improve what is wrong or missing on your Wikidata item
• You can create/improve your ORCiD data and make it visible to everyone
• You can trust organisations like CrossRef to update your data in ORCiD on your behalf
• Please add your "name in native language" and indicate using the ISO 639 code the language it is in.
• Check if the authorities that are linked to you are indeed correct and do not link to a false friend
• Add your occupation
• Please add other authorities that know you.. ISNI for instance
• We love to have a (freely licensed) picture, it helps with disambiguation. You can upload it to Commons.. 
• Having a picture on the GYA website and on Google Scholar is why there are so many links to Google Scholar

So what is in it for us?

• We want people to know about science and learn about the scientific record
• We want people to write Wikipedia articles and your papers may be used as references.
• There are many gaps in our coverage of science. We know and it is improved one paper, one scientist at a time.. There is even the option to work on a specific subject.. like this one

As a member or the GYA, you are part of an outreach program. We happily invite you to work with us and together do the best job possible for science.

Thanks,

      GerardM

Authorities relieve us from the tedium of completeness and enable functionality

At Wikidata we do not rely on any one authority and we refer to many. As a consequence we bring many links to authorities to our users and only when they know how to value them, it is of value.

The link for William Shakespeare to the Open Library gains you access to his work.. It links those works to the Library of Congress to indicate that it is indeed that work of the bard.

When authors we know are linked to the Open Library, it does not really matter if we know their books. People find them regardless. When we want people to read, all we need to do is promote these links to Open Library and to local libraries.. Such promotion could be done in the Wikipedias. Like we do for WorldCat and WorldCat could be so much better if it is about local attention for the user and consequently have more of a purpose.

One project on Wikidata has been to include scholarly works that are free to read. Free to read enables for those works and their authors an additional audience and increased relevance. However among all the works we represent, we do not know what works were added. That makes it a fail. There is an authority for that. It is Unpaywall. However even when we have a link to Unpaywall it only makes a difference when people use it and read articles. This effect is something we can measure when people go to the free version of an article.

We can get the database of Unpaywall and add just another authority. Next is the issue of maintenance. We could partner with Unpaywall and have a hybrid system where we import the database and regularly check those articles we do not know to be open.

In this way we still do not see the effect of more reads of open science. To achieve that we should mark free articles with an Unpaywall icon in Scholia and Reasonator. Measuring the amount of reads is now possible and we positively acknowledge authors with free to read articles.

Next could be an Unpaywall icon in Wikipedia for all free to read references..
Thanks,
      GerardM

@Wikimedia, when we do "science outreach" what audience do we reach out to and why?

A recent tweet said "If you are an outstanding woman then you have a 1 IN 6 chance of having a @Wikipedia article. If you are an #African woman then you have a 1 in 300 chance." This bias exists for all Africans and all of Africa.

In Wikicite, with all respect for what has been achieved, we find a professional approach by scientists. Their profession, their data and this is all well and good. However, as the University of California no longer has access to the Elsevier papers, business is no longer "as usual" and consequently the relevance of access to readable papers has gained priority.

We need to know if papers known to Wikidata are available and we may have all the papers known at UnpayWall but as long as we do not indicate availability, it is irrelevant.

We need to make it easy for scientists to gain a presence for their science. At this time there are too many hoops to jump through. We can make it easy by putting scientists in the driving seat.

1. Make an Orcid identifier for yourself and open up the data
2. Enable common sense organisations like "your" university, CrossRef to update your profile
3. Have a button that runs a SourceMD process importing the data into Wikidata.
4. Enjoy and improve on your Scholia

By enabling people to update their data and the data of others, you create value. When we run the API of Unpaywall as part of the SourceMD process, we help USC and we help the rest of the world that is facing the insurmountably obstacle that exists because of the likes of Elsevier. Science becomes easier, scientists gain relevance for their science and Wikidata establishes another purpose.

NB Wikipedia gains as a fringe benefit an objective criteria for the establishment of notability (it is in the science, the Scholia)

Thanks,

      GerardM

@librarycongress and @gndnet link to @OCLC's #Viaf and beyond

In 2015 it was news that in VIAF, Wikipedia was replaced by Wikidata. In quick succession it was recently announced that both the American Library of Congress and the German Deutsche National Bibliothek announced that they are linking to Wikidata.

That is awesome enough. Awesome because as a result, Wikidata is easier to link to VIAF as every entry of the LoC and DNB results in a VIAF registration. The only thing needed to make this a reality in Wikidata is a dedicated bot for us to know all the good work done in the US and Germany.

Another relevant improvement that is of particular relevance to scientists like linguists is that it is now possible to authorise the GND to automatically update the ORCiD record. It will be truly awesome when this is the example other authorities follow.

It is a small step for Viaf to include ORCiD as it links to other scientific publications. For librarians and library systems this is most relevant. For Wikidata it will help with disambiguation and it allows us to populate our information with even more papers and co-authors.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Hey @GlobalYAcademy this blogpost is for you

I am adding members of the Global Young Academy to Wikidata. This was requested on Twitter and I was asked to describe the process how they are added. With 100 members added, it is high time to take the time for this.

• First I check if the person already exists on Wikidata.
• Given the description on the GYA website, it is possible to find him or her.
• When I don't I add a new item for the person, I indicate that it is a "human" and add a gender based on what I think I see.
• Next I make this person a "member of" the "Global Youth Academy" and add the "start date" as specified on the website as a qualifier.
• I then check ORCiD for this person. When I do I either run the SourceMD process and at this time I add it to a list for later processing. 
• This will eventually generate a well filled Scholia for those who have been processed.
• I also check Google Scholar and VIAF because "authorities" are important.

In this blog many of the pointers are for Matthew Levy, all edits are done in Wikidata itself.. This is the item for Mr Levy.

Thanks,

      GerardM

Bulk uploads linked to @ORCID_Org and others, then what

Bulk uploads to @Wikidata happen all the time, for instance the latest medical publications. They result in links to existing scholars and new authors. The question: "then what" was raised on Twitter and in the question was the assumption of a quantitative reply.

When such data is imported in Wikidata it does not fall into a vacuum. Many notable scientists are already known because they have a Wikipedia article and because they are linked to "authorities" like ORCiD, VIAF, Google Scholar and many others. The result is a "Scholia" for a scholar and it includes all the known papers, the co-authors, dates of awards. This is one example of a scholar without a Wikipedia article.

Scholia is a very important tool as it enables more work on scholars. The display of co-authors for instance show their gender. Orange for women, blue for men and white when it is not known. Many people are involved in "Women in Red" writing new articles about lady scientists. On the project page of Women in Red you will find lists that are the result of queries run on Wikidata. This is why adding gender info is so important. Notability may be inferred from the awards people received, notability gains relevance when it does not stand alone. This is why a link to "authorities" establish the necessary notability for a Wikipedia article. Objectively this is best presented in a Scholia like the example of Elizabeth Barrett-Connor.

When attention is given to a scholar like Mrs Barrett-Conor, arguably the "ungendered" scholars are relatively new to Wikidata and typically incomplete. There is a tool for that; SourceMD adds missing papers and links to existing papers. It also adds links to known authors and adds missing authors. The effect is a network of information that is increasingly rich. Arguably this is a bulk upload in its own right but the origin is a different one.

Presentations on topics like awards, organisations, topics and much more are available from the Scholia tool. In such a presentation it shows what we have and given that Wikidata is a wiki, there is more to know. Award winners may be enriched with authority information, they may be linked to papers. Frequent publishers to a topic may have co-authors that could do with some TLC.

In answer to the original question; bulk uploads invite additional work, the data is enriched and becomes increasingly relevant.
Thanks,
       GerardM

@Wikipedia - could give a clue to #deleted articles

Even deleted Wikipedia articles have "false friends". In a list of award winners a Mr Markku Laakso used to have an article. This Mr Laakso was actually a conductor and not the diabetes researcher the list was there for. For whatever reason, the article for the conductor was deemed to be not notable and it was deleted.

When you are NOT a Wikipedia admin, there is no way to know what was deleted.

One solution is for all blue, red and black links to refer to Wikidata items. When an article is deleted, the Wikidata item is still there making it easy to prevent cases of mistaken identity like with Mr and Mr Laakso.

A more expanded proposal you may find here.
Thanks,
     GerardM

@Wikipedia: #notability versus #relevance

I had a good discussion with imho a deletionist Wikipedia admin. For me the biggest take away was how notability is in the way of relevance.

With statements made like: "There are only two options, one is that the same standards apply, and the other is the perpetuation of prejudice" and "I view our decisions of notability as primarily subjective--decisions based on individual values and understandings of what WP should be like" no/little room is given for contrary points of view.

Notability has as its problem that it enables such a personal POV while relevance is about what others want to read. For a professor Bart O. Roep there is no article. Given two relevant diabetes related awards he should be notable and as he started a human study for a vaccine for diabetes type 1, he should be extremely relevant.

A personal POV ignoring the science that is in the news has its dangers. It is easy enough for Wikimedians to learn about scientific credentials, the papers are there to read but what we write is not for us but for our public. Withholding articles opens our public up to fake facts and fake science. An article about Mr Roep is therefore relevant and timely particularly because people die as they cannot afford their insulin. Articles about the best of what science has to bring about diabetes now is of extreme relevance.

At Wikidata, there is no notability issue. Given the relevance of diabetes all that is needed is to concentrate effort for a few days on a subject. New authors and papers are connected to what we already have, genders are added to authors (to document the gender ratio) and as a result more objective facts available for the subjective Wikipedia admins to consider, particularly when they accept tooling like Scholia to open up the available data.
Thanks,
      GerardM