#Wikidata - the Lange-Taylor Prize

Wikidata knows about many awards and it is a challenge to make the information available but it is even harder to keep them up to date. An example is the Lange-Taylor Prize,

Have a look at the English Wikipedia article, strictly speaking it is not  a list. It is a mish mash. To make this a "proper" Wikidata list, it helps when the "point in time" is added to the award winners. It helps when they are completed. Michel Huneault is the 2015 winner, he or she has to be added as an item to Wikidata and, he is not the only award winner who does not have a red link or an item.

Adding the point in time as a qualifier has an additional relevance. It becomes possible to build a query with no award winners for 2015. When it is missing and this happens a lot both in Wikipedia and Wikidata, we can check the website for the award and maybe find a 2016 winner as well.

As it is, the English article is a stub. There are missing links for instance to Mrs Katherine Dunn. Adding all this info to Wikidata makes improves the quality of its data but it makes it also possible to incorporate this list on both the English and the Czech Wikipedia.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #Pakistan Peoples Party politicians

There has been an announcement that lists may be generated on a Wikipedia using Wikidata data. For the Urdu Wikipedia, a list of politicians of the Pakistan Peoples Party could be interesting. This functionality is not available yet, but Reasonator does show us what would be on such a list.

As you can see many of them do not yet have an article in Urdu or alternatively a label. Once a label has been added, it will show up in the list. This may also help other languages from Pakistan like Sidhi because the label will fall back to Urdu and not English.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata has a CC-0 license. This should not change.

The Wikipedia Signpost is a publication of the English Wikipedia. It published a piece about copyright and Wikidata and it suggested that a more restrictive license would be fine. Their problem: others benefit and do not need to acknowledge Wikidata as a source.

For me the most important thing of our work is that it is used. Everything we can do to make our data used more increases the value of our data, This is best achieved by refusing to put any restrictions on our data.

One argument for another license is that "it recognises the labour that goes into maintaining the data". The question is how to recognise this and why.  Every data point has its own history both for the property and for the data and as a consequence it is the database that you refer to for the attribution. For human consumption it is the label that gives Wikidata much of its relevance; giving tribute to the people who add labels is as relevant.

Data is mostly generated in an automated or semi-automated way. I would not have over 2 million edits if all statements I added had to be done by hand. With StrepHit, a tool that retrieves facts from authorised sources, data gathering will become even more sophisticated, reliable and complete. The link to personal glory in attribution becomes very much absent.

Wikidata will become increasingly rich in references and tools like StrepHit will ensure the quality of such references. Wikidata is already very rich in references to other sources of data and it is why Wikidata will evolve into a resource for comparison with the data in these sources. These other sources may opt to adopt or report and the same is our option. Comparisons allow us to research the issues that exist with the data we hold and these comparisons will become highly automated and intelligent.

My point is very much that Wikidata is not a glory project. Our data is incomplete and immature and in several ways more ambitious than what a Wikipedia aims to do. Wikidata can include the ambitions of a Wikipedia up to a point. To realise its own ambitions, becoming a valuable and valued resource in the web of data set, it is important to be as open and available as we can be. A license that does not restrict is one of the underpinnings. Moving towards a more restricted license will only create a morass of uncertainty and doubt. It will bring us no benefit.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Mark Fiore won the 2016 #Herblock prize

The Herblock prize is just one award I added data to. I grabbed the data from the Wikipedia article and used "Linked Items" to import the winners. I checked the website of the award and noticed that there is a winner.

I added Mr Fiore as the 2016 Herblock prize winner.

I have done this before but something is changing. At Wikidata they are investigating how lists with Wikidata data may be used in a Wikipedia. Now that makes all the work that I have done relevant because I have concentrated on such lists and categories.

When this works out well, it takes one edit to include new data in every Wikipedia that has an interest about certain data. As Wikidata is finally evolving in this direction, things like showing a label, hopefully any label will be what is shown when a label in the language of the Wikipedia is missing are now relevant. Another new feature is that changes from Wikidata may be shown in the history.

The next thing to consider is that when Wikidata knows that somebody studied at a university, it automatically shows in an associated category.. Technically it is not hard, selling it to the Wikipedia crowd maybe.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Member of the Telangana legislative assembly

I finished my project or members of the Kerala legislative assembly. All 140 members that are part of the editathon have an item, are a politician and it is known to what constituency they were elected from.

It only follows that there is more work to do. For instance for the Telangana legislative assembly there are other challenges. Here there are no articles for most of the representatives and, there are not even red links. I have the impression that there is not much in one of the Indian languages either.

It is easy enough to add items for the missing people, add additional statements but the question is then, why do it? Why not leave it to someone from India? It could be different when there is cooperation

The one big thing that prevents me is that there is nothing that makes the work visible. When redlinks expose data from Wikidata, when the information can be found by searching. There is a lot of important work left to do. As there is no mechanism that shows the value of the work done, I move on to another project.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Should it include #medicines

A Dutch article indicates that only 12% of the 2500 most prescribed medicines deserve the label "proven effective". It cites the British Medical Journal; the findings are in the Clinical Evidence Handbook.  The article describes a practice where pharmaceutical companies churn out "papers" that are to prove efficacy; papers published by what are effectively marketing companies.

At Wikidata a bot is registering chemicals that are registered as being recognised as a medicine. Arguably, when only 12% is effective it is better not to register such notions. It is potentially harmful. It also suggests that medicines mentioned in Wikipedia need to be checked against the Clinical Evidence Handbook.

In the article it is mentioned that it is a common practice for "scientists" to lend their names to such publications. It contaminates everything such "academics" stand for and it deserves a mention in both Wikipedia and Wikidata.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Facilitating the use of Wikidata in Wikimedia projects with a user-centered design approach

A lot of students learn the ropes as an intern working on Wikidata. They do their thing, write a thesis and the good news is that their work is appreciated and used. 

Charlene Kritschmar is the latest to write a thesis and it is on an approach to the use of Wikidata in other Wikimedia projects. The central question is how to manage Wikidata data from a Wikipedia. I like what I have read, there are a few things that need to be considered.

Wikidata notability and the thesis have it that "everything that has an entry in Wikipedia can also be an entry in Wikidata". Technically it is the other way around; every item in Wikidata may have an article in a Wikipedia. The difference is profound because a new article in a Wikipedia may have a pre-existing item on the topic in Wikidata.  It follows that statements may already be present. It makes it less cumbersome to write an article and fill an info box with data. 

Wikidata includes 17,677,925 items and the biggest Wikipedia knows about 5,164,030 articles. This makes Wikipedia centric thinking problematic. What any Wikipedia offers Wikidata is a big community who may improve the data quality on Wikidata and by inference improve the quality of all Wikipedias. The flip side of this coin is that there is no Wikipedia leading on what Wikidata has to say on any given subject.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Facebook - Nataliya Kobrynska

For whatever reason a fellow Wikimedian elected to give attention to Mrs Kobrynska. He posted about her on Facebook and when I have the time I may add some statements in Wikidata. It was easy enough to improve the quality of the data and I read in the article that she was the daughter of a parliamentarian a Mr Ivan Ozarkevych.

I could not add him as her father because there was no label for him in English. I mentioned on Facebook that I could not find him and, a label and the relation was added. The father had an article on the Polish Wikipedia, it referred to him as a member of the Galician parliament and it was easy and obvious to add the fact that he was a parliamentarian and a politician. Not only for him but also for his fellow parliamentarians.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - Debunking #controversy in #science

I really wonder what an organisation would do that hands out "one of the scientific world's most respected environmental prizes" does when one of its luminaries becomes controversial.

The Volvo Environmenta Prize was awarded to Mr Ray Hilborn in 2006. Mr Hilborn and his science has become controversial because of the conflict of interest he has with the fishing industry. Greenpeace has documented this quite publicly.

Together with Mr Hilborn, Mr Pauly and Mr Walters were awarded the Volvo Prize. They are all known for their work on fisheries. The obvious question is now whether the work of Mr Paul and Mr Walters are tainted in the same way. This is one reason why controversies like this are so important.

When a specific line of work in science has been debunked, it becomes important to undo the damage and reevaluate the work in a field. One of the more obvious ways to make this point is for the Beijer Institute to address this issue in one way or another. When the science of Mr Hilborn is unsound, it follows that his work does not point to a sustainable future and that he does not deserve the Volvo Environment Prize.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia #citations - LibraryBase

The general idea is that if Wikipedia articles are to be believed, citations ensure the quality of the statements made. The quality of the sources is therefore important. When a specific publication has a problem, a problem like reproducibility or a known conflict of interest of the author or the organisation he stands for, it follows that the publication as a source becomes problematic.

The problem with sources in Wikipedia is that like all the rest they are buried in the articles. As sources are typically known in the text through templates, it becomes possible to harvest all this and put it in a database. When things get into a database it becomes possible to analyse the data and find the authors that are problematic, refer back to the articles and remedy the inherent conflict in the article.

Take Mr Ray Hilborn for instance. He is under attack for his conflict of interest by Greenpeace. Consequently his POV needs to be collaborated by independent sources and all his science is suspect. It is wonderful to harvest all the data about sources from all the Wikipedias but there is no point to it when it does not lead to something useful.

There is a lot of money going around to confuse issues and serve specific interests. When sources are available to us all, it becomes possible to mark publications for the quality that they have. When sources are not reproducible, it follows that you can not build arguments on top of those. It then becomes possible to consider basic stuff and no longer confuse a Neutral Point of View with what is patently false.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - Kerala MLA constituencies

Kerala is one of the states of India and like all the others has its own legislative assembly. Like in Great Britain politicians are elected from constituencies. There are many as you can see on the map.

When there are elections, things change. New people become a representative, some remain a representative and others no longer have relevance in that way. At Wikidata, the current list of people who are "Member of the Kerala Legislative Assembly" is a bit of a mess. There are many items without a name in English, there are people who are only known in English and probably there are a lot of doubles. 

There are even representatives who are known to have an article on the English Wikipedia but do not (yet) have an item. This is all because of this big push to write articles on Indian representatives.

As more work is done for this big push to get the data complete, the data will become more informative. What we hope to achieve is:

• associate MLA's with constituencies
• have labels in both English and Malayalam for all of them
• merge all the possible duplicates

Obviously there is more that might be done. We could add the dates when people became a MLA. This will allow us to create queries that shows who was a MLA at what time. When all this is done for Kerala, there are 28 other Indian states and there are many other countries that could do with a little bit of TLC.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikimedia - [[citation needed]]

Our articles in any #Wikipedia can be trusted when an effort has gone into providing sources. Sources or citations are very much needed because help us distinguish fact from fiction. Finding sources exposes an origin and it helps us debunk fiction. The result of this continued effort is content that can be trusted as a sincere attempt to achieve a neutral point of view.

There are very practical problems. Sources are not always easy to find and they do not exist in every language. Sources are often behind a "pay wall” making access to the body of knowledge is very much restricted. Sources, particularly sources on the web do not exist forever. The consequence is that sources are problematic and, not everybody is equally able to help us with sources for the content we have.

When we are to improve the current, unsatisfactory situation we have to address multiple problems.

• Once sources are lost we rely on the internet archive for an historic view. It has policies that allow for the removal of content and this is often the content that is controversial and removal is often intended to rewrite history. What to do?
• Access to restricted sources is provided to the privileged few who have access to libraries. The WMF has a program that enables some of our editors access to a few pay-walled sources.
• When this proves insufficient, it is great to know that  Sci-hub among others provides “illegal” access to any and all sources.

Open access to sources is very much what we as a community care for. One of our own died in the struggle for this access so I do not think we should be deferential to an industry that is despicable. We should teach people how to find sources and ignore licensing as much as possible.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia / #Commons - Brigadeer General Loree K. Sutton

Mrs Sutton is psychiatrist who is a specialist on PTSD. When you read her CV, it is impressive. She no longer works for the US Army, she works for the City of New York.

When you read the article on Wikipedia, you find her picture. It is marked as Public Domain and it is not on Commons. Given that Wikidata is working towards the point where copyright and license information one can only hope that images like this can be easily shared based on the license.

When Commons started, it was intended as a repository that prevented the same file to be uploaded to all the Wikipedias. As such it served its purpose remarkably well. With Wikidata it becomes trivial to share images like the one of Mrs Sutton.

I fear that for some this reads as frightening. It undermines the one thing they love. It actually does not need remove the need for Commons as a platform. Quite the opposite; it will bring new tools to finally leverage all the data on images. It may bring this image of Mrs Sutton to Wikidata for starters.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - its sex ratio II

In April 2014 I blogged about the sex ration at Wikidata. At the time there were 1,332,383 "humans", 760,616 were male and 154,455 were female. Now in April 2016, the numbers are different: there are 3,135,792 humans, 2,442,444 are male and 466,748 are female.

The percentages were: 57% males, 12% females and 31% unknowns. This time they are 78% male, 15% female and 7% unknown.

Based on these Wikidata numbers, the gap between men and women has substantially increased. On the other hand, the number of humans that were not identified as male or female has substantially decreased.

This does not mean at all that the movement to chip at the gender gap is a bust. Far from it. Numbers only expose realities. What can easily be achieved in Wikidata is more focus on the females in any group. The subject I focus on is mental health and I concentrate on female psychiatrists or psychologists. I add statements for them and add where possible the data from categories to Wikidata. In this way they become better connected, more information becomes available. In this way the subject I care for gains quality and relevance and it is women who benefit most.

Numbers provide an indicator, when numbers are this big they should not have our focus. At best they move glacially. More relevant is to know if they as a group, gain more readers over time. These numbers reflect an increase in quality of articles and data. That is an approach that has potential.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #YLE, the #Goldman environmental Prize and the #ArticlePlaceHolder

#YLE is a Finnish public broadcaster that announced that it will use Wikidata to label its articles and news items. This is really cool because it means that they have an interest to supply missing labels in Finnish and as a consequence we actually benefit from them.

So let us consider what we can do to make both their and our life more pleasant.

When something happens that is "notable", for instance the latest announcement of the Goldman environmental Prize awardees, we can add the winners. One of the winners is from Cambodia, It can trigger a request for Mr Leng Ouch's article to be written in Cambodian. We can update lists of award winners of the award. We can link to articles in the Finnish press for each and all of them.

Once more newsagents use Wikidata, new use of labels indicates breaking news or renewed interest. This may help journalists worldwide to stay on top of what is current. This may all happen but the most important benefit is that it ensures that Wikidata remains up to date.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia - Jimmy Wales is not a constitutional monarch

Thank you Durova

Having known Jimmy / Jimbo Wales for a long time, I appreciate him for the many things he does. Particularly the many things we do not really hear about. Jimbo either has the ultimate conflict of interest, or is best positioned to do well for the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects.

At the start Jimmy was the founder and financier of Wikipedia and as it became a bigger success, he could no longer afford his hobby. He was apprehensive to let go and slowly but surely handed over more power to what is the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

His role changed and he became more of an ambassador at large. Jimmy is not a constitutional monarch with an entourage that prevents him from being "political" or personal. I have personally experienced on several occasions where Jimbo was instrumental in bringing people together. It is why I am more than happy to express my happiness that he is who he is and does what he does.

The only question I have for his detractors is: if not Jimmy who else can perform the role that is uniquely his?
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - the Panama Papers

The Panama Papers brings to light how the rich and famous hide their wealth. Arguably this is typically a criminal activity because it prevents them to be liable for their possessions according to the law of the country they live in. Liability comes in many ways; it is recognition what it is you own, what you are taxed and also what conflicts of interests exist. In an interview for Amnesty International, Mr Snowden says it well; "Privacy is for the powerless. Transparency is for the powerful."

The Panama Papers brings much needed transparency and there is one big difference with the unwanted intrusions on their privacy they suffer. They are in the limelight because of their lack of transparency in their actions and the resulting negative effect on society. It would be good when organisations that spy publish any and all of these transgressions. A change of focus like this would ensure a much more equitable society and it is easy to argue that it will make us all more secure.

The English Wikipedia has a list of people who are implicated by these Panama Papers. The information has been included in Wikidata. It is therefore easy to have the information in any Wikipedia. The ListeriaBot will perform updates on a regular basis. The only manual maintenance is including the necessary labels.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - labelling and the ArticlePlaceholder

The ArticlePlaceholder is a Wikimedia extension. It has huge potential to rapidly increase the available information in any and all Wikipedias because Wikidata has more data than any Wikipedia has articles. The big initial issue: How to translate the labels into the language of a Wikipedia.

There are many approaches and the initial one is to concentrate on "red links" first. With "red links" linked to Wikidata items, the ArticlePlaceholder may express the data as information for that Wikipedia. That is one big incentive to write the missing article :). Missing labels associated with properties may be added to localise all the information available on an item

It then becomes interesting; What to do next? There are the categories, the lists associated with articles. It would work, it would rapidly expand the number of items linked through ArticlePlaceholders. It would also rather quickly expand the number of items that seek a translation of their label. These can be found and sorted in order of prevalence.

Another approach would be to add labels as many labels as possible in Wikidata. When this results in terms that can be found, ArticlePlaceholders may be created when they are requested. When we keep track of the requests for ArticlePlaceholders, we can even prioritise the writing of missing articles.

Adding labels can be done in multiple ways; we can use dictionaries, we can transliterate. We can even use bots to do all this automagically for us. The biggest difference will be made when we seek and find collaboration. For most languages there are schools where students need to write papers. Particularly in the smaller projects this may make a huge difference. As they research their topic, they can localise all the missing labels starting from a "Concept cloud" for a subject.

Once this work gets underway, small Wikipedias will rapidly increase the number of subjects that are being served. The big question is not if it will be worthwhile but how it will affect Wikipedia article writing.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia - Naomi Ellemers and sources

Mrs Ellemers is a professor in social psychology. Her work has been recognised by many awards and the English Wikipedia does report about this correctly. The European Association of Experimental Social Psychology recognised her twice; once with the Kurt Lewin medal and once with the Jos Jaspars Medal.

Recognising people for their achievements is relevant because it indicates how peers appreciate one of their own. It is also a way to establish notability. Like so many topics for credibility sources are important. They are however susceptible to "bit rot". The EAESP changed its website and all the Wikipedia links are dead.

Wikidata knows about these awards as well and, each has a link to the URL for "official website". On it you find all recipients of the award. Mrs Ellemers is good; the new sources provide the needed confirmation.

Awards for a person can be a list generated by Wikidata. Associated sources can be as well. With Wikidata as the source for lists and sources, Wikipedians are free to provide the textual content about a subject and Wikidata would be the place to store sources and lists. In this way information will be maintained in one place and quality for all articles will improve.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikimedia - #India and #Wikisource

Subhashish Panigrahi wrote about the challenges facing Wikipedia and the languages of India. It is a good article and it is well worth a read.

It presents eight challenges, the one of most interest is that people often feel that their language is not present on the web. The question is how to raise relevance on the web.

When you consider relevant projects in the Indian language, the one that stands out most is Wikisource. It is an easy point of entry to writing in a language; it trains people to use their language in their script. What is to be written is in a scan so language proficiency is not even assumed.

As a member of the language committee I am on record that if there is a credible growth path for a Wikisource particularly when a notable organisation will support the project for at least a year, I want us to allow a new Wikisource as soon as possible.

At the same time we need to consider how to make the effort in Wikisource more visible. I want someone with some "marketing" savvy to consider how to bring our finished projects to potential readers. There are plenty of people in India and elsewhere. Investing just a little will have encourage our projects a lot and it may increase our community a lot.
Thanks,
      GerardM