#AfricaGap - A #Wikidata based watch list about a Africa reality

Wikimania 2018 will be in Cape Town and a lot of words will be used to express the importance of adequate coverage of everything Africa. Words do not express the extend Africa is lacking in coverage. My estimate is that less than 1% of all humans known to Wikidata (ie all humans in all Wikipedias) is African. We cannot properly say where someone was born or died because we do not know all the places of Africa, we do not know its administrative divisions and we do not know its politicians. We have not properly structured the former countries and colonies of Africa.

We do not know really about Africa.

When one guy from the Netherlands can make a noticeable difference, it is obvious what two, three or one hundred people can do who care about Africa. In the Listeria list on several of my user pages, you find what are in effect watch lists about Africa. Every day I notice what changed about several aspects of Africa and regularly I add lists to it and become more aware how limited our coverage about Africa is.

It is 13 days to Wikimania and, you can make a difference by making a difference on the subjects I follow. You can add information, you can add even more Listeria lists. The biggest difference will be by relating all the loose ends and curating and refactoring what is wrong.

What is the point of a Wikimania in Africa when our coverage is at this level? Obviously, a call to make up for what we have not done so far.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#AfricaGap - #Wikidata localisation is about location, location, location

Beitbridge is both a town, a ward and a district in Zimbabwe. Particularly for Wikidata they are distinct; the town is together with other human settlements part of the ward and it is with other wards part of the district.

In Wikidata it is best practice to associate buildings, monuments, bridges whatever with the lowest local authority.

It is obvious that when you cannot find the associated item for an authority, or associated structures on maps such associations will not happen. Human settlements in Lesotho for instance will not be found because at this time they only exist as "black links".. eg here for the community council of Likhutloaneng in Lesotho.

In order to find any and all of the African local authorities in a language, there has to be a label in that language. For us, in any and all of the Wikimedia projects we rely on our own labels, titles whatever. When we want to show them on a map, the best maps available will be more and more the OpenStreetMap maps. Thanks to a very important project just finished by Wikimedia developers, we can show localised labels. Our labels. To do this properly our and the OSM data needs to be linked on the object level. This provides us with map functionality in our 280+ languages and makes it obvious that the location for localisation is at Wikidata not OSM.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#AfricaGap - The #notability of Chemba, the district and the eponymous ward

Chemba is a ward in the eponymous district of Tanzania. Chemba had 16047 inhabitants at the 2012 census. Lately a lot of additional information has been added to the existing articles (in Swahili or English) to Wikidata.

There are plenty of practical reasons why Chemba is notable. In 2010 I blogged about the "Geograph" project in the UK. Britain was divided by a raster in order to have representative pictures for the whole of the country. Obviously we could do the same for any and all countries in Africa. They do have digital cameras in Africa, maybe not everyone but that is not the point.

Africa is notable and, we want to close the gap in coverage of Africa. So we want to know about all the wards of Tanzania, not just Chemba. We need coordinates, maps and photos. There is census data for 2012 and all this, including maps and photos, can be shared in any language once the data is available in Wikidata.

The point of all this; make obvious what we do know and what we know is missing. In the end, the devil is in the details but Africa is a continent full of bright people who can make the difference.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#AfricaGap - OkayAfrica's 100 Women

When you visit the OkayAfrica website, you are kindly invited to learn about the 100 women celebrated in 2018. Having a list of 100 fine ladies is nice but what makes them really inspirational are their stories. All of them have been added as references for your pleasure in Wikidata.

We do not have the same pleasure for the fine women celebrated in 2017. Most likely those stories existed once upon a time but as the Internet Archive only knows 100women.okayafrica.com in 2018 the 2017 stories are lost at this time. We only know about them through a secondary source.

Kelly Foster added most of the 2017 ladies and we are now adding the remaining ladies to Wikidata. We would be very much obliged when the back stories as they were published in the past are added a reference.. Fine journalism deserves a place as a reference.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#AfricaGap - A is for apple

When you watch this talk, you learn that teaching the alphabet with "A is for apple" is problematic in Africa. People do not eat apples, it is an exotic fruit, and it does not relate to the world of African children.

In my #AfricaGap project I aim to enrich information relevant to Africans. I started with African politicians and added a map of Africa with labels in the local language.

Thanks to Kelly Foster I added the 100 African women celebrated by OkayAfrica. This addresses the gender gap to some extend  and adds a healthy dose of women in the mix. Kelly is adding the 2017 women and I am not done yet with the 2018 women.

Obviously there are more politicians and, obviously the information about politicians is not complete. However, when people do add information about any of them it will update on Listeria lists on the English, the Zulu, Yoruba and Swahili Wikipedia. There must be other African awards as well.. Additional lists will happen when they do..

What the Ted talk taught me is that African food is different and, there is a point in highlighting these differences. There are categories specific for the national cuisine on the English Wikipedia. So when I am done with the OkayAfrica women African cuisine is next.

PS I am happy when people suggest other subjects particularly relevant to Africa. Collaborating on exposing them using Listeria lists and maybe info boxes is what I can achieve.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#AfricaGap - Recent changes in Zulu and Yoruba #Wikipedia

Listeria list are now updated on a daily basis on the Yoruba and Zulu Wikipedia. That is really fortunate because one person active on the Zulu Wikipedia is making changes in Wikidata and it now results in local changes. A next step could be info boxes to be used for the African politicians known in the existing lists.

When African Wikipedias adopt lists like these, other subjects may become popular. Anything popular could do, soccer for instance. With information maintained in Wikidata, all Wikipedias could benefit. At some stage the perception that lists maintained as text in any Wikipedia is behind the curve. That moment will arrive for any Wikipedia and when it does, information becomes more timely and complete.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia - where anyone can edit?

It used to be that anyone could edit Wikipedia. In theory this is still the case HOWEVER with university students increasingly refining their skills on Wikipedia, with scholars featuring as "Wikipedians Fellow" for particular subjects, the quality bar has been raised making the environment increasingly hostile for non scholars.

These scholars are active mainly on the English Wikipedia but the effects are felt everywhere; as it is perceived as the standard to aspire for. This is hugely problematic. Compare for instance these articles about Cyril Ramaphosa; the English and the Zulu article. There is little purpose in comparing them. There are hardly any editors on the Zulu Wikipedia and almost every subject is missing; so what to do what to write? When you then apply the scholarly standards of the English Wikipedia, it is akin to insisting on Nupedia standards and, as an aside how much different are the Nupedia standards when they are compared with current English Wikipedia standards?

What a Wikipedia like the Zulu Wikipedia needs is scaffolding for the information it wants to supply. Mr Ramaphosa is the current president of South Africa and a list like this would serve much better than the existing red link. With an English Wikipedia background you would not consider this because almost all basic information already exists.

In Wikimedia publications on scholarly editing almost always English Wikipedia is the platform. Arguably the kind of articles written by scholars would not even fit. They would exist in a vacuum. Arguably the kind of articles currently written by scholars have little context in a Zulu Wikipedia because the subjects have little bearing on what is relevant in an African context.

Given the state of a Wiki like the Zulu Wikipedia, we do not need scholars. We need high school students who write many basis articles. We need many high schools with all their students writing articles. If anything for the majority of Wikipedias we do not need scholars.

It would serve the Wikimedia Foundation well and consider less scholarly options.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#AfricaGap - Lucien Xavier Michel-Andrianarahinjaka a politician from Madagascar

Lucien Xavier Michel-Andrianarahinjaka is a politician from Madagascar with two Wikidata items that have now been merged. People at the Zulu Wikipedia expressed an interest in information on all African politicians and as a consequence they want to have all information available in Zulu.

Reasonator is a tool that makes this easy. As you can see in the screen shot, there is a lot to do; the label for "male" for instance is not even known yet. When someone who knows Zulu sees the information in this way, it is extremely easy to add a label in Zulu.

When you consider names of people, typically the spelling of a name is the same when seen in the same script. When this is true for Zulu or Xhosa or .. it is easy enough to have a bot add the missing labels in Zulu.

When labels are available, it becomes practical to have info boxes particularly when the info in these info-boxes is updated from Wikidata. In this way it becomes possible to provide information in Zulu, information that will be hard to find in Zulu elsewhere on the Internet.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#AfricaGap - Requested lists from the Zulu #Wikipedia

After the introduction of Listeria lists for African politicians on the Zulu Wikipedia, the question was raised how complete lists could be made available for the localisation of names and the positions held by these politicians.

A good question. The answer is problematic. These Listeria list are the best we have available. Typically they are incomplete and it takes effort to make them complete. I completed the list of Foreign Ministers of Madagascar based on information from the English Wikipedia. To achieve this I added eight people to Wikidata and I merged one.

The cool thing is that a similar Listeria lists will be updated daily with new and updated information. The same list could be used on 280+ Wikipedias and as you can see, there are many, many positions held by national politicians in Africa. For all of them you want more specific information and obviously, that is even more work that coule benefit 280+ Wikipedias.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#AfricaGap - maps in Yoruba, Swahili, Hausa and Zulu

As no percent of Wikipedia is about Africans, it is great to learn how "map internationalisation" works on African language Wikipedias. The original example has Africa in Russian and with two tweaks, this same map shows really well in Yoruba, Swahili, Hausa or Zulu.

My objective is to bring focus to African content. I am still adding African politicians and this new functionality is too good to miss. It works really well, the documentation is there and it becomes a matter of localising the information for it to provide the same information properly in the languages of Africa.

While adding such information it becomes painfully obvious how much is still lacking. It would be cool to have information in long lists like this in columns. It takes more expertise than I have to make this happen. I have not figured out how to get Listeria to update these lists either.. At some stage I will or probably sooner, someone else will help me out.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#AfricaGap - Doing a bit more when time permits

In a previous blog post I indicated that I would not include ministers. Well, I changed my mind because of feedback that I received. The list of African politicians on the English Wikipedia can be found here. There is now a list on the Yoruba Wikipedia that I update regularly with new enties. I am also considering adding information on the Swahili Wikipedia.

The list is far from complete and there are several challenges. The first one is that what I copy across is in English. When someone volunteers, it is easy to change fixed text. The second one, the Listeria bot is to include new Wikipedias and update there as well.

Listeria is run by Magnus and the functionality he provides is important. It would be better when Listeria lists would be standard functionality. When it starts with the functionality as provided by Listeria it would already be good because it would acknowledge the need for this functionality. Improvements are welcome but are secondary.

When I have time I add additional lists, add new "positions" and I do monitor changes like the people involved, their nationality and the dates they started and ended their position. I may tweet occasionally using #AfricaGap.

At this time no percent of humans known to Wikidata is from Africa..
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - No #copyright on common knowledge

The approach on copyright for text and data is imho utterly different. For your text you seek a reputable source, you cite it. All in all a lot of work.

A proper approach to data is that you seek confirmation on what you already know and it is encouraging when there are many sources that agree on what is common to all of them. When you add new data, typically most of what you care for you will find through links from existing shared data probably in multiple sources. This is not done by hand, too much work, it is done by bot and consequently there is not even some "sweat on the brow".

Arguably, common data exists as common knowledge. It is not proprietary to any one of these sources and consequently claiming copyright let alone a license is at least problematic.

When data is specific to one data source, it is inherently problematic. It may be wrong, particularly when it differs from what other sources state. It follows that there is a need for care before this data is used. You then get into a manual process of reconciling and curating the data, you may even decide to diverge from what all the others say. The confirmation and the creation of new data both is actually research. It is not the using of data from the other source. In my mind this means that there is no burden of copyright applicable.

When data is considered from Wikipedias for Wikidata, the same considerations apply. When you think about it, it is quite bizarre; you take expressions in words and convert it into a qualifier that represent said words, words that can be in any language. Words that may not even be what you see on your screen. The processing of texts may be automated and, it is easy to understand that from the input of all the Wikipedias alone a superset of data is created that is more than any one article. The notion that copyright can be legitimately claimed is problematic at best.

When you take all this on board, and the fact that individual facts cannot be copyrighted, it is obvious to me that the choice for a CC-0 licence for Wikidata is fortunate. A license implies copyright but it is given away with this licence. The claim of the copyright is at best a defensive strategy.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#BRAVEedit - Lessons learned at the Amsterdam editathon

The Amsterdam editathon for female civil rights activists was a success. This Listeria list shows it well. All the articles not cursive now have an article in Dutch. It may be that some Dutch articles were written in Brussels. The request to those who joined was to write or translate articles in English or Dutch. This is the same Listeria list for English..

Editathons happened in twenty countries concurrently. Organising such an event is a mammoth task, it is easy for things to go wrong, not to be clear. With 20 countries many languages are involved producing sufficient information for all of them is not easy. The question is how to do this optimally.

Information is to be available for all the languages a particular person or organisation is targetted for. Care needs to be taken that people are uniquely identified; this to prevent the creation of duplicate articles (this happened for Fartuun Abdisalaan Adan aka Fartuun Adan). Now you can make lists in a spreadsheet, you can write texts with the sources but the challenge is to maintain this for twenty languages!

Enter a Wikidata property: "on focus list of Wikimedia project". As you research a person that is to be on the focus list for the "Amnesty International Editathon", you either append it to an existing item or a new item. You can add the location as a "qualifier", this has been done for Amsterdam enabling a list specific for this editathon.

Articles that are to be written will be in italic on a Wikipedia and, this helps prevent duplicate articles. Sources can be added as qualifiers as well and with a small change they show in a list. Images and all kinds of other information can be added and this shows really well in Reasonator.. The family of Fartuun Adan for instance was already known and, she did win the International Women of Courage Award in 2013.

So the editathons happened and, for all the people and organisations the "on focus list" property can still be added. This will make it easier to analyse the impact of all the work; queries can be made to learn how many articles exist and, it makes it easy to learn how many of these articles are actually read.

One of the things these list also show is that for many people we do not have an illustration. I think that when Amnesty makes images available for all of them, the articles become more attractive and are likely to gain more attention.

For me the Amsterdam was wonderful. I enjoyed seeing people grapple with the idiosyncrasies of Wikipedia editing. I had it confirmed again that I am not a Wikipedian.. I do not edit really but being there had me experiment and think about organising multi lingual projects and find confirmation for my understanding how this could be done efficiently.

PS I do think that the people at the English chapter and the people at Amnesty did a great job.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#AfricaGap - #Wikidata; its quality as Wikidata matures

Currently there are 45 countries that I monitor for their national politicians. When I add a specific national "position", I do several things; I add existing politicians that are known in a particular category and I include a definition of what that category contains.

I give hardly any attention to details; my objective here is simple I want to see how this (underdeveloped) data evolves. There is a huge gap in what we know about Africa and as it is, we hardly inform about Africa, we need Africans to help us gain the most basic facts straight for ourselves.

As Wikidata matures, we gain subsets of data that is of varying quality. The most mature living data are our interwiki links. It is live data and it serves a purpose. Changes require attention to detail it has an immediate effect in the discoverability of information. When data comes alive, when it serves a purpose, it has people who will invest their time to get the data right. They will give attention to detail because that serves their purpose.

For arcane subjects like the Ottoman Empire, even Africa, there are few people who find a purpose in the data. Arguably there is so little data that almost everything added is a 100% gain in quality (a person exists, he is a member of parliament of ***, I do not understand African names so it could be male or female I do not know). Sometimes there are whole lists of people like these people from the Bosnian Eyalet, it is easy enough to complete such a list. But will it serve a purpose? How to give it a purpose?

There is no uniform quality to Wikidata. There are whole areas where we are 100% of the mark as we do not have the data nor the ability to link to data elsewhere. There are other areas like in biomedical literature where our quality is such that it is actually useful. As this becomes known thanks to its evangelists, more attention is given by a wider public and more attention to detail is given in the process.

Arguably the quality of subsets of our data depends on its usefulness. When it is useful, people will come and give the attention to detail as it serves their purpose.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #Copyright and linked data

There are many points of view when it comes to copyright and data. In the Wikipedia world the discussion is different because each text has its own copyright. Data is different because you can not own ie copyright a separate fact.

When data is open or opened up, it follows that much of the data that exist in multiple sources is identical. When the data is the same, it has two benefits. The first is quality. When multiple sources agree on something, it is more likely to be correct. The second is copyright; whose copyright?

Every now and again, the license used by Wikidata is questioned. Typically by Wikipedians who think they know their stuff. They will be the first to tell you the importance of sources and, indeed many factoids in Wikidata do not have a source. When a factoid is sourced, a statement like John Doe died on Friday, 13th, that factoid only links to the source and hardly to the place where it came to the attention of the person or the bot adding it to Wikidata.

When I add the fact that someone is a member of the Somalian parliament, when a list is used like this one, that information is sourced, there is no added value except for a name being on a list. It has been in the news that in the last year parliamentarians have been murdered, there is no article for them and consequently even in Wikipedia it is only a name on a list, no added value, no arguable reason for copyright.

Value is in the links, it is in knowing the same data to be true in many sources. Claiming copyright, particularly in data, is predatory. It prevents people from bringing facts together. Only when facts are brought together informed knowledge exists. Only in linked data, sourced data, there is a handle on fake facts and fake news.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - What I am willing to do for the #AfricaGap

Africa hardly gets attention in Wikimedia projects. When the one project that brings together, Wikidata, does not know the people who are or used to be president of an African country, this is obvious. There is no reasonable argument to counter this.

What I can do is "watch the gap". To do this I have a growing list of African National politicians. The list is not complete, I am still adding countries. I do not add ministers and I have not included "first wives", this to reach out to people who care about that other gap, a gap that is no longer as wide.

When people add data about politicians, it will update Listeria lists. There are many of them and they will show up on my watch list. It means that I can tweet about changes as they occur.

To be perfectly honest; I expect it to be like in a railstation; typically you wait for the trains and are watching a chasm and not a divide.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia - Introducing the #AfricaGap

Minding the gaps is  important in all our projects. The #GenderGap program is an excellent project that shows the important and impressive results possible when we make a deliberate effort.

One area where we are weak is in our coverage of everything Africa. One area where we are particularly weak is in providing support for our readers and editors in Africa.

There are many things that can be done to improve upon the current situation and I am grateful to the people who have worked so hard to get us where we are.

To mind a gap, it starts with awareness. My "Africa" page provides some insight in the politicians of African countries. Obviously most politicians are missing and as my page links to Listeria list, every time a new African politician becomes known in Wikidata, it will show up on my watch list.

I intent to include all African countries and their national politicians. I will remain committed to bring more information about Turkey and its history, this project will show through the daily Listeria updates the extend of our African efforts. It would be cool when 1% of the humans we know is from Africa.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia - please mind the Africa data gap

A friend attended a Wikimedia conference in Africa. He asked me for the number of people known to be from Mozambique. A question like this is really relevant, I asked for a query and I am happy there is a result however, only 319 people known from Mozambique in Wikidata (that is all Wikipedias together) is a really low number. It is not an exception, countries like Rwanda or Niger, Malawi or Gabon do not fare better.

When you consider that there are more people known to be from Andorra (339) it is obvious that there is a real issue with how we cover "the rest of the world".
Thanks,
     GerardM

#WeMissTurkey - six times #Listeria for best results

Reading about the history of the Ottoman Empire is a different experience on every Wikipedia. Typically most of the "humans" involved do not have an article and the spelling of the names differs. In English one title is pasha, in Catalan it is paixà and in Turkish and Bosnian it is paša. In all these languages it is part of the name of many dignitaries.

There are often multiple items for the same person thanks to these differences in spelling. Disambiguating the information together comparing the articles. The English, Catalan, Turkish, Bosnian, Greek and Arabic Wikipedia have their reasons to have an interest in the Ottoman Empire. For this reason I copied the Listeria list from my English user page to the ca.wp, tr.wp, bs.wp, el.wp and ar.wp.

When labels in a particular language are changed or when data is added, the Listeria list will update on a daily basis. So as we work on Ottoman information, the best effect will now show six times on my user page.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#WeMissGerardM - Got banned from #Wikidata

A friend of mine got into problems on #Wikidata.

The story:
She had proposed a property that was talked into something else that would not work for her or me. There was no obvious consensus particularly because of a lack of agreement how the property would function. Someone in power stated consensus and created the property and my friend proposed for its deletion.

What followed was awful because it shows how we interact. When someone says:  "This is a disruptive and bad-faith nomination" in my book this is aggressive and a personal attack. When someone else follows up with a request for a ban because of something that happens elsewhere it becomes a mob howling for blood. The arguments used were personal, had no relation to what happened at Wikidata and I objected strongly.

What else:
I objected to the language used, to the fact that you do not attack someone this personally. The language used is in my opinion not critical but overly aggressive even brutal. I object to how we behave, the language used, the personal attacks. It is not the first time that I objected to the way how we treat each other. Given that a friend was victimised this time I did not back down. Now I am banned from editing Wikidata for a week even though the admin who banned me agrees that I did not do anything that is a "banning offence". What I did was not let others "get away with murder" and not agree that the common good gets damaged by me in this way.

What next:
I do not know. I will miss working on the Ottoman Empire, I will miss working on awards, I will miss working on the BHL. But I will miss my friend most and I am sad that we Wikidatans treat each other in such an adversarial way.
Thanks,
      GerardM