#Wikipedia - Wikipedian of the year Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight

Every year at Wikimania, a "Wikipedian of the year" is selected. This year there were two. Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is one of them.

From the Wikipedia article it is not so clear why Rosie was selected for this honour. At best it is a stub and it needs a lot of work before it becomes clear why Rosie is notable. The article is a one liner with a lot of "external links".

Rosie was the one person missing as an award winner so it was easy enough to remedy this. It is now just for anyone to do a better job for Rosie both on Wikipedia and Wikidata.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata supports over 300 languages - implications

Wikidata is a single project that supports over 300 languages. The aim is that all data is usable in any and all of them. One important consequence is that for each item 300 translations of the label are needed.

Obviously less items is more. Each item has to have a purpose that is clear, obvious and cannot be expressed in another way.

For this reason I am opposed to the addition of all kinds of subclasses that add no value. There is no point to "APA Award". It is an award that is conferred by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and it can be easily described in two statements.

It makes it extra hard to add translations. It is relevant to know that it is an award. It is important to know who conferred it but there is no point having this expressed in a combined item.  There is no point, it does not fit with the work that is done on awards. It makes Wikidata less usable and consequently such items need to be deleted.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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

Wikidata is becoming a repository where people may choose to share their data .. or not. When they do not want to share their data with Wikidata, it is their choice and that is fine.

The bottom line of copyrights for databases is that single facts cannot be copyrighted. It is only the whole of a database that can be under a copyright. When you look at the data of Wikidata and its structure, it is in many ways a reflection of all the Wikipedias. Increasingly its data finds its way into Wikidata and as a consequence data that may be found in a specialised database gets included in Wikidata.

Wikidata also has the habit of including identifiers to external sources on an item level. As a consequence people can see what other sources have to say about the same source. It also enables bots to make a comparison. When it writes a report about the differences, it is original research and consequently it does not violate any copyright. When based on such a report people make changes, it takes an effort to find what is correct and consequently it does not violate copyright either. When an agreement is in place, it is possible to add missing data to Wikidata. When done properly there will be an attribution of the original source and, when it is done by a bot, it may be a bot dedicated to that resource.

The objective of the Wikimedia Foundation is to share data. This is why it makes so much sense for Wikidata to have a CC-0 license. As the quality improves, as more and more comparisons are made and the differences are reconciled the data becomes more valuable. Given its scope, not much is out of scope and it is obvious that Wikidata needs to include data from other sources wholesale. It may get information in so many ways. With the CC-0 license it is obvious. Use our data, compare our data, improve our data and this will bring more power to us all.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Home Children

As I am adding more information to a female psychologist, Mrs Margaret Humphreys, I found that she documented Home Children, a British program of sending destitute children abroad. Sending them away was cheaper than leaving them with their families on welfare.

It became such a scandal that prime ministers of several countries that were involved apologised for the awful way people were treated.

Originally it was considered a solution to the slavery in the British match making industry. From good intentions it became something dreadful.

The problem; what statements to use to identify this program, the people who apologised for it, the original good intentions..
Thanks,
      GerardM

#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