Wikicite: "No #rewilding in Wales" but why or why not?

No rewilding with a background of bracken

There is rewilding practice, there is rewilding science and there is rewilding controversy. Never mind how you define rewilding, it has been practices for a long time and rewilding practitioners want scientists to study the efficacy of their work. 

There are many papers that are about rewilding or touch on rewilding and as I am fascinated by rewilding, it is all too easy to concentrate on the papers and people that I like. So I am adding all the cited papers for "Abandoning or Reimagining a Cultural Heartland? Understanding and Responding to Rewilding Conflicts in Wales - the Case of the Cambrian Wildwood". The full text is available only as a PDF and as a consequence I have to google for every citation not yet in Wikidata. The result is a wealth of additional papers (they have a DOI), and new books etc have a mention on the Wikidata item.

As more papers on conservation, rewilding and its politics find their way in Wikidata, not only the Scholia for that paper evolves all the papers it touches have at least one "citing paper". The version of the tool that I use, SourceMD, is the first iteration of a tool that in a later iteration looked up authors from ORCiD ... Sadly no longer available. It has me use the author disambiguator to replace author strings with references to authors expanding the Scholia representations for authors and papers even more.

When you find scholarly papers interesting and you know what papers it cites, it should provide a mix op opinions balanced to make what is the point of the paper. At that it is comparable to a NPOV article in a Wikipedia. One provides original research and the other reflects on the available research.

What I do is in a wiki way.. When another paper takes my attention away, I leave a paper to eventually return to it. It is one reason why I work sequentially from top to bottom and add everything.

Thanks, GerardM

Wikicite from the ground up: attending a symposium on "rewilding"

 

Professor Dr Liesbeth Bakker has as a role to establish the science behind the rewilding practice. Professor Bakker has been appointed as the Special Professor of Rewilding Ecology at Wageningen UR in April 2020. Because of the Corona pandemic, her maiden speech is for now replaced with a one time symposium on the subject. Anyone can attend, it is wildly popular and you can attend to this one day event as well. 

Rewilding is being practices on a large scale, it did not happen overnight, there is a large amount of scholarly work that will be the basis of what Professor Bakker will consider in her own research.

What I can do for the occasion is make a Scholia for the conference? I can add more citations to papers, I can attribute papers to scholars. The bottom line for citations is that they are an invite to read more papers, to get to a better understanding of what is considered. Providing a better understanding of rewilding is the role Professor Bakker. When the public is to understand subjects like rewilding, ecology Wikipedia is the first place people go to. Its references can now link to Wikidata but from there it is still a huge step to a Scholia for a paper and better understanding of a paper.

When the subject matter of rewilding is to be more inclusively covered in Wikidata, it follows that the ecology of Wikidata has to play its role. It consists of items, properties and qualifiers. It has its data with  bots and users all iterating on. Applying this ecology for a purpose is a challenge.

As a paper like "Wild Steps in a semi-wild setting? Habitat selection and behavior of European bison reintroduced to an enclosure in an anthropogenic landscape" has no references in Wikidata, there is not much in its Scholia. Compare that to this paper where references exist to all the cited papers. Wikidata provides a rabbit hole that can help bring context to subjects, authors and papers. What to do for rewilding is very much a collective challenge.

Thanks, GerardM

Wikicite from the ground up: understanding wildfires

The world has to deal with climate change and one of its effects is the severity of wildfires. One paper on the subject is "Can trophic rewilding reduce the impact of fire in a more flammable world?" It is only one paper, there are others. It caught my attention after watching YouTube about goats and blogging about rewilding..

When I found the paper, it did not have any "cites work" statements. In the PDF of the paper, references to 91 other works can be found. Text in a PDF is problematic; you may scrape the titles and search for a match but you won't find them in Wikidata even when they are there. This is because of missing spaces and special characters that are different in Wikidata. It has been a lot of work finding and linking many of the citations. 

The effect of these references on the Scholia for the paper is staggering. It demonstrates the power of open data; authors of the cited papers are shown, there is an accumulation of the papers they have in common. The associated subjects are shown and have their own weight. 

The papers informs that there are 91 cited papers, at this time only 54 papers have been linked. All of them have a title, a DOI. The Scholia presentation is the best we have for the paper but it is as a consequence incomplete. Why not have a "Cites work string"? Combined with attributes like "series ordinal" and "DOI" even "Main subject" it completes missing information for the paper. Bots can pick up on this, check Wikidata for the DOI, add the paper when we do not have it and even replace the string when it is with the process of checking and importing papers. 

When people take the effort of understanding a subject like "wildfires" and enrich important papers, the power of their work followed by the work done by bots opens up scholarly papers even more to the people who care to learn from the scholarly papers themselves.

Thanks, GerardM

Wikicite from the ground up: a call to action

Many of the world's ecological systems are under thread. All kinds of reasons may be given and there is an interplay between the many causes that affect a downward spiral. Similar patterns can be found in many places and when these patterns are broken up, an ecological restoration may be one of the consequences.

I was called stupid when I said that water management is essential and suggested that beavers in California could do a lot of good. Beavers have been extinct in California for over 100 years, the many gullies in a watershed rush water straight to sea. Consequently the water table is not restored resulting is an increase in the risk of fires. So I am stupid, but at least I read some papers lately.

I follow the Mulloon Institute on Twitter, they have been restoring the watershed of the Mulloon Creek, this Australian project has been running for more than 10 years and apart from all the other benefits it restored profits to farmers by 60%. To underpin their results, they perform scientific research with the aim of convincing incredulous farmers and government to consider alternatives. This project is recognised by the United Nations as a research project. 

One of the papers they produced is about a possible reintroduction of the Green and Golden Bell Frog in the Mulloon catchment. I understand this paper to be about  an indicator species. From a scientific point of view, there are no issues, the paper is richly referenced and when you want to read scientific papers about the Green and Golden Bell Frog, check out its Scholia..

The problem is that like so many papers, it does not have a DOI and the best insurance for it being available in the future is the "Wayback Machine". It was not known there and it is now.. When papers are to be known to the general public, adding a paper like this to Wikidata is a next step. 

More can be done; for instance adding the references in the paper to the Wikidata item. Maybe there is an update about an introduction of the Green and Golden Bell Frog in the Mulloon Creek, who knows.. I did not find it.

Thanks, GerardM

Wikicite from the ground up: references

When a point is made in Wikipedia, when a statement is made in Wikidata, best practice is to include a reference. The same is true in a scholarly paper, its references are typically found in a references section.

Wikicite is a project that brings many scholarly papers into Wikidata as beautiful as it is, it is a top down process. As an ordinary editor there is a lot that you can do to enrich the result.

The paper, "Can trophic rewilding reduce the impact of fire in a more flammable world?" has a DOI, the PDF includes a reference section. It takes a lot of effort to add the authors and papers it cites to Wikidata. The visibility of the paper improves and so does the visibility of the paper it cites. The Scholia shows that at this time, this paper is not used as a reference in Wikipedia. 

There is now a template that retrieves information from Wikidata for its reference data. It will be great when it is widely adopted because it provides an additional pathway from Wikipedia to the used references and the information relating to the reference.

So what can we do to improve on the quality of the data in Wikidata. First, the processes that import the bulk of new data are crucial, they are essential and need to be appreciated as such. The next part is enabling a community to improve the data. A recent paper explained what can be done with a top down approach. All kinds of decisions were made for us and the result feels like a one off project. 

When ORCID is considered to be our partner, it makes sense to invite people registered at ORCID to contribute to Wikidata. Their papers can be uploaded from ORCID into Wikidata, their co-authors and references can be linked by these people. As they do this while being logged into ORCID, we are assured because of their known personal involvement and use this as a reference.

The quality of such a reference is better than our current references that came with a link to an "author name string". Who knows that the disambiguation was correct? When a paper is linked to at least one known ORCID person with public information, we have a link we can verify and consequently it becomes a link we can trust. Once the link with a person with a ORCID identifier is established, we can ask to acknowledge the  changes that happen in his or her papers. Our quality is enhanced and a sense of community with ORCID is established.

Thanks, GerardM

Wikicite from the ground up: "Trophic rewilding"

In nature conservation, trophic rewilding and trophic cascades are important topics. When an animal like the howler monkey is no longer around, it no longer distributes the seeds of trees. The likely effect is that in time plants are no longer part of the ecosystem. Reintroducing a howler monkey restores the relation; it is considered an example of trophic rewilding.

At Wikipedia there is no article about trophic rewilding. As someone famously said, references are the most important part of a Wikipedia article, let's start with finding references.

There is a longstanding process of importing data about scholarly papers, all kinds of scholarly papers. Some of them have "trophic rewilding" in their title. Trophic rewilding was not known as a subject so it was easy enough to look for "trophic rewilding" and add it as a subject. Slowly but surely the Scholia representation evolves. More papers means more authors and more authors known to have collaborated on multiple publications. More citations are found for these papers and by inference they have a relation to the subject.

The initial set of data is already good enough to get a grasp of the subject but when you want more, you can look for missing data using Scholia, information like missing authors. The author disambiguator aids in finding papers for the missing author. With such iterations, the Scholia for trophic rewilding becomes more complete.

Another avenue to improve the coverage of a subject is by adding "cites work" in Wikidata for a paper like this one. Not all cited works are known to Wikidata but the effect can be impressive. NB The citations are often found in a PDF  and not in the article..

Slowly but surely all the scholarly references to be used for a new article are available, you can use a template in the article to link to the (evolving) Scholia. The best bit is you can add this template in an existing Wikipedia article as well providing a scholarly rabbit hole for interested readers.

Thanks, GerardM

Wikicite from the ground up - oyster reefs

 

I watched this video having looked for oysters and oyster reefs. They are a thing in the Netherlands, we don't have them enough of them and should have them as a functioning ecosystem. 

The video starts with a Prof A. Randall Hughes moving into the water for an experiment. Prof Hughes was already in Wikidata from 2018. Being triggered by the video, adding additional information and papers is for me the thing to do. One of her paper is about oyster reefs, linking the paper to the item for oyster reefs includes her in the Scholia for oyster reef. 

Wikicite is about citations and one of its ambitions is to link Wikipedia references. There are many articles referenced that include the subject of the article: "oyster reef" but only one of them can be found in Wikidata. When you check the authors, Megan K. La Peyre is an associate Research Professor in the School of Renewable Natural Resources at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, her name you will find quite often. It is cumbersome to add papers by hand, I made a stab at one of them. Only to find that I have to merge two items for Prof La Peyre because "there can be only one". 

Given that the scholarly papers among these references all have a DOI, we should have a tool that collects all DOI from the reference section of an article. It then gets the information from CrossRef using the DOI, includes the publication in Wikidata AND, something on my wishlist, link it to the Wikipedia article where it is used as a reference.

The objective of this tool is not so much expanding Wikidata but make it easy and obvious to find more information and publications on a topic through co-authors, subjects and Wikipedia articles where the same paper is used as a reference. When references are considered by some as the most important component of an article, it follows that it should be easy to expand from there in a whole different rabbit hole.

Thanks, GerardM

Wikicite, but from the bottom up

Wikicite is one of the most active projects in Wikidata. Its purpose is to "develop open citations and linked bibliographic data to serve free knowledge". A lot of work has been done over the years, there is only one issue; what purpose does it serve.

One of the visible parts of Wikicite are the many Scholia presentations for information. Papers, authors, organisations, subjects even combinations. There is a template that enables the inclusion of Scholia information on a Wikipedia article like here.

One objective of Wikicite is to become the repository of all references of Wikipedia articles. This is where progress is possible enabling people like myself to combine the two and make it easier for Wikipedia editors to find even more sources.. I spend a lot of time adding the subject "trophic cascade" to scholarly articles that include the phrase "trophic cascade" in its title. In addition I attributed the papers of many a scholar as well. This is reflected in the Scholia for trophic cascade. Many of the papers in the references part of the English article are these same papers.

Referenced articles may be specific to multiple subjects and, may be part of the references of multiple articles. When we know all the papers used as references in a Wikipedia article in Wikidata, we can make the information in a Scholia even more useful. 

The information of existing papers with authors and citations can be enriched. For references we can add new papers., the subject of the Wikipedia article can be marked as a "main subject" for the paper as well. We weave a mighty web in this way. Our quality will be improved by flagging retracted papers and we can flag articles for an update when new information becomes available as well.

What we do does not have to be complete. That is not the way, that is not the Wiki way. When we start with what we have, we will find that it is already really useful.

Thanks, GerardM

A new tool implies changes for me .

A list like this is wonderful and it has always been a list where I either only import existing office holders or attempt to "do them all".  Typically I did the first few, making a point to include the incumbent. 

I added this template {{PositionHolderHistory|id=Q**}} to all the items for an office in my African politicians project.  You find the template on the talk page and like the Listeria lists, they show past and present office holders.

I still prefer my method of including the "red links" in Wikidata but it is a wiki and there is so much more to do.. What I started to do with office holders from Togo is that for those I will not link to predecessors and successors, I will at least show the dates they were in office. 

It looks much better in Listeria too. 

Thanks, GerardM

Амама Мбабази is a politician who held multiple positions in the Ugandan government

Amama Mbabazi is a former Prime Minister of Uganda and held many other governmental positions. There are 19 Wikipedia articles for him, Mr Mbabazi is notable. 

When you want to find a picture for him and you know his name in Russian, you can use Special:MediaSearch. You can also find him with اماما_مبابازى. 

One of the positions Mr Mbabazi held is Justice Minister of Uganda. English Wikipedia has a category for these Ministers, at this time two people are included but not Mr Mbabazi. There are ten Ministers missing in the category. Mind you, it is English Wikipedia that has a list that made my work at Wikidata possible!

On the talkpage for the Wikidata item for Justice Minister of Uganda, I added the {{PositionHolderHistory}} template. A bot updates the information every day and it adds comments on the quality of the information. This makes it easy to add positions of interest to a watchlist. 

On my Africa project you find Listeria lists for African political positions. It is duplicated to several Wikipedias and once a Wikipedia is synchronised it will show information like the lists that include Mr Mbabazi. 

One day all the data will be complete and up to date. In the meantime it is a "work in progress" and you are kindly invited to check the information out, find its shortcomings and make updates where necessary.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Proposal for the liberal use of data from the Wikipedias and Wikidata

Every Wikimedia project has information available that could be shared with other Wikimedia projects. Data is incomplete in every project and the objective of this proposal is to indicate missing data so that it may be included.

It starts with a category. This category links to six English Wikipedia articles. Using a tool, that information is now available in Wikidata as well. As this information is further enriched, it is found that one article should be included in the category.

The category exists on many Wikipedias, in the defintion of the category it is known what content the category contains in Wikidata. Reasonator shows the information with an inbuilt query. When you check the article with a list, it is obvious that many articles do not have a category entry. The latest entry in the list is known to Wikidata thanks to the Latin Wikipedia..

The proposal is simple. Have a messaging agent that indicates missing categories on articles. This will enable any Wikipedian to add them. For Wikidata we would import data based on the definition of categories. The process would be enabled per defined category.

Arguments: 

• Nothing happens on a Wikipedia without prior agreement
• The mechanism used is by default one of signalling and not of updating 
• It follows existing practice for importing data from Wikipedias into Wikidata

Thanks,

      GerardM

Having a conversation about the usefulness of shared data

Once there is a stalemate, where positions are entrenched, there is only sniping and little progress. At the English Wikipedia they are adamant; they do not want automatic changes from Wikidata. As a result there is little or no progress making effective use of the information that is at all the Wikipedias and Wikidata. There is room for improvement, improvement that will benefit both English Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Let me explain with an example. In the Gambia they have foreign ministers. Great information can be found at this English article. There is also an incomplete category, incomplete because not all the foreign ministers with an article are included. 

When somebody enters the data for Gambian foreign ministers in Wikidata, the result is best shown using Reasonator. Reasonator show it best because you can have it show in any and all languages. That is quite relevant because there may be lists in other languages.. like in German for instance. The German list has only one red link, the English list has five and the Reasonator list, once completed, will have none. 

When you summarise the state of play for lists of position like this, the presentation of these lists differs greatly while the content is by definition the same. When you want to spare both the cabbage and the goat, it takes extra moves. The Reasonator information for the category shows 24 entries and categories in four languages. It is easy to test if all the articles linked have a category entry for each language and also if Wikidata knows these people for the position they hold. 

We do not have to put Wikidata in "your face" like we would do with automatically changing infoboxes. Having a system that indicates that attention is needed is a first step for getting used to shared information. Information that comes from all Wikimedia projects and has Wikidata as its intermediary.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Keeping it simple for "Abstract Wikipedia"

Abstract Wikipedia is confusing to me; it is said to be about "articles in a language independent way". Articles are complicated because the expression in any language has to be consistent with the grammar, the diction, the vocabulary for that language. Wikipedia articles have one additional complication; once you start reading you may end up in a rabbit hole of wonderful stuff that grabs your attention.

Abstract Wikipedia covers all of Wikidata and that is much more than what all Wikipedias combined cover. Currently there are two items for every item with a Wikipedia link. The first objective that seems obvious is to have something to say about each item. It can be as little as **Name** is a **human**. When we know his profession **Name** is a **chemist**. When an award was won, "**Name** is a **chemist**. The **Award** was received in **year**." Patterns like these are similar for every language.

This minimal approach is the basis for automated descriptions and are vital when disambiguating. It is an improvement over manual descriptions because they do not get updated when new information becomes available. Automated descriptions are not articles; they have to be descriptive and not describing.

When a Wikipedia articles exist, they provide a rich source of information when new texts are to be generated. Given that Abstract Wikipedia is based on Wikidata, a tool like "Concept Cloud" is useful because it shows all the links to other articles and how often they occur in an article (Concept Cloud is part of Reasonator). The challenge will be to model such relations in Wikidata OR allow for these relations to be registered in a new way as part of Abstract Wikipedia.

Once sufficient information is available, an article can be generated. That is what LSJBOT and the Cebuano Wikipedia are famous for. It follows that once the same amount of data is available for a similar subject in Wikidata, an article can be generated in for instance Cebuano. When we recreate these templates, we can update them for any language. 

The linguists who theorise Abstract Wikipedia to death, can apply their magic and find if their pet theories hold water in the real world. In Abstract Wikipedia their function is to enable the provision of information in any language. Obviously competing theories may be implemented and as a result the underlying technology may evolve.

Thanks, GerardM

Commissioners for Tanzanian Regions

Aggrey Mwanri is one of the 31 commissioners for a Tanzanian Region. The Tabora Region has a population of 2,291,623 inhabitants. For most of the 31 regions we know at least one commissioner and only for the Arusha Region we know "them all". 

I have been adding information about these Regional Commissioners and this is from a quality point of view a step in the right direction. Slowly but surely we know for more African countries structures and politicians.

When you compare African countries with "Western" countries, such structures are comparable. This makes it possible to show the extend the data in Wikidata does not represent the African reality. 

It is more than likely that there are lists of the data that is currently missing. These lists help us provide the bare bones of what it takes to know about African countries. 

So who are the data wizards who show where we our data is lacking. Where are the lists that enable the people who know tools like OpenRefine to fill in the gaps. Who has the pictures so that a Wikipedia article for a Mr Mwanri is illustrated??

Thanks,

       GerardM

Data in Red - A holistic view on the bias for the English language and for AngloAmerican subjects

First a definition; "When data is biased, we mean that the sample is not representative of the entire population". This approach successfully underpins the Women in Red project currently a percentage of 18.51% women in English Wikipedia has been achieved. Compare the coverage of Anglo-American politicians with the politicians from the whole of Africa, the bias in the data at Wikidata is already obvious, it will then have numbers attached to it.

This is not a problem for Wikidata alone and yes, we can have a project and include a lot of data to get to a growth percentage as we did for the Women in Red. Worthwhile in its own right but in this way we do not forge a closer relation with its "premier brand Wikipedia". It would be mere stamp collecting.

The best argument for having data in Wikidata is that it is used. This is done in self selecting Wikipedias through global info boxes and lists. Interwiki links are used on every Wikipedia. Integrating the necessary functionality is a meta/technical affair and firmly for the Wikimedia Foundation to own. 

The functionality to make this happen implements an existing idea with additional twists.

• Pictures for the subject are linked to courtesy of Special:MediaSearch
• Automated descriptions are provided in every language to aid disambiguation. At first the functionality by Magnus is used and it is to be replaced with improved descriptions provided by Abstract Wikipedia
• A Reasonator like display is provided to inform on the data we have on an item.
• Suggestions for the inclusion in categories and lists are provided based on Wikidata definitions for categories and lists.
• To help people find sources, alternate sources, Scholia is included when there are papers about the subject. Once existing citations are available, they are an additional resource

In essence this is a toolset that you can opt into as an individual and/or it is the standard for a project. Particularly for the smaller projects this will prove to be really valuable; it will prevent false friends, it indicates heavily linked items that do not have an article. It stimulates the addition of labels because it is beneficial in finding illustrations. 

This proposal is relatively low tech and it will bring our many communities together by providing widely the information that is available to us.

Thanks,

     GerardM

What to love in English Wikipedia

This list of commissioners of the Arusha Region is great, it provides the basic information that enables me to include this information in Wikidata. It can be assumed that they are all from Tanzania, politicians and human as well. 

What I love in English Wikipedia are lists like this. It is more than likely that for every Tanzanian region there will be a similar list and as a consequence we can include all these fine politicians to Wikidata, list them in whatever Wikipedia.

As more politicians for Tanzania or any other African country are added, politicians will pop up who have held multiple offices. This will be explicit in Wikidata and in Wikipedia you could use Special:WhatLinksHere.

Technically there is not much stopping us from associating red links with Wikidata items. This is the same guy used in the "WhatLinksHere" and you find him in this list that is a work in progress as well. 

Think this through.. With lists like this in any Wikipedia, these people are findable, linkable. It will be possible to state in text what a given commissioner did and, there will be no ambiguity because of the link. 

So I love English Wikipedia for the rich resource of information it is. I love its editors who provide us with the information that enables the reuse of data. I will rejoice when it is recognised that we can do much more. When we accept that together, as an ecosystem, we are in a position where we actually share the sum of all knowledge that is available to us.

Thanks,

        GerardM

What to do to counter an institutional bias of the Wikimedia Foundation (part 2)

Our aim is to share the sum of the knowledge available to us with everyone, everywhere, in every language. That is what we are to achieve.

As we establish what we, as a movement, are to do, it follows that we need to measure how well we do. When a community does not play an active part for a particular goal, that too will show in the numbers.

Commons does not need to work in English only. The "Special:MediaSearch" works in all the languages we support. With this search engine enabled on every Wikipedia, we will learn how well it gets adopted in  all our languages. We will know if new Wikidata labels are used in searches on Commons. We will know if more diversity is realised in the pictures used in Wikipedia. We will know how many pictures are downloaded and from what languages.

Only in the Portuguese Wikipedia we find the governors of Mozambican provinces only in text. We can include them in Wikidata, make Listeria lists for them, but how do we disambiguate these politicians. What does it take to make the information for them usable for "abstract Wikipedia"?  How do we assemble information about countries like Mozambique and how do we get it to the quality level that some expect? As important, how do we get people from Mozambique interested and involved? 

Some Wikipedians opine that the Wikimedia Foundation does not need to raise funding for their project. Arguably this is correct, but we can raise funds for other projects, other languages elsewhere because we have more and other ambitions to realise. As we raise more money outside of the USA, more people will gain a sense of ownership. 

When we are to overcome our bias for English and our bias for Wikipedia, we need to market our other languages, our other projects. We need key performance indicators.. For Wikisource, how many books were downloaded. For Commons how many media files were downloaded and from what language.

Results need to be objective and measurable. As our research proves to have been about English Wikipedia we have a problem. We seriously need to consider to what extend it is applicable.

Thanks,

      GerardM

NB While the bias is real and the relationship with English Wikipedians is often antagonistic, it is important to recognise  English Wikipedia as the source for much of the information that ends up in other projects. When we collaborate more, our available data will reach more people in an informative way.

What to do to counter an institutional bias of the Wikimedia Foundation (part 1)

The bias for Wikipedia as a project is strong, the bias for English makes it worse. When our aim is to share the sum of all knowledge, we have to acknowledge this and consider the consequences and allow for potential remedies.

"Bias" is a loaded word. When you read the Wikipedia article it is only negative. Dictionaries give more room an example: "our strong bias in favor of the idea". The Wikimedia Foundation is considering rebranding and it explicitly states that it seeks a closer relation with its premier brand Wikipedia. 

This is a published bias. It follows that other projects do not receive the same attention, do not get the same priority. For me it is obvious that as a consequence the WMF could do better when it intends to "share in the sum of all available knowledge" let alone the knowledge that is available to it.

Arguably another more insidious bias is the bias for English, particularly the bias for the English Wikipedia. Given that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, we have a world wide public and the use for our information hardly grows. Research is done on English Wikipedia so in effect we arguably do not even know what we are talking about.

When we are to do better, it means that we be need to be free to discuss our biases, present arguments and even use the arguments or publications of others to make a point. The COO of the WMF states in the context of diversity in tech and media that "when the bonus of executives relies on diversity, diversity will happen". It is reasonable to use this same argument. When the bonuses for executives of the WMF rely on the growth in all our projects, it stands to reason that they will make the necessary room for growth. When one of the best Wikipedians says "There are only a limited number of projects that the WMF can take on at any time, and this wouldn't have been my priority", this demonstrates a bias against the other projects. Arguably the WMF has never really, really, really supported other projects, it does not market them, it does not support them, they exist because the MediaWiki software allows for the functionality. 

When we are to counter the institutional bias of the WMF, we have to be able to make the case, present arguments and ask for the WMF to accept the premise and consider suggestions for change. This proves to be an issue and makes our biases even more intractable.

Thanks,

       GerardM

Telling the story of governors of Mozambique

As part of my Africa project I look for political positions like Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and now also Governors. I started with provinces et al because a South African minister of health of a province was considered to be not notable enough.

With Wikilambda or if you wish "Abstract Wikipedia" being a thing it is important to consider how the story is told. The bare bones of a story already shows in Reasonator. Most of the Mozambican governors are new to Wikidata. They have a position of  "governor of their state", a start and end date and as applicable a predecessor and a successor. Obviously they are politician and Mozambican.

This time I had to go for the Portuguese Wikipedia for a source. There is a list mixed with colonial governors and they need to fit a different mold. They are Portuguese and arguably they are not politicians but administrators. 

What I am eager to learn is how Wikilambda will be able to tell these stories. How it will expand the stories as more is known. I wonder if a tool like ShEx will play a role. Anyway, good times.

Thanks,

      GerardM

The quality of all the Nigerian governors at @Wikidata

There are lists for all the governors of all the current Nigerian states. They exist on many Wikipedias. The information was known to be incomplete and based on lists on the English Wikipedia, I added information on Wikidata and as a result these lists may update with better data.

Obviously, when you copy data across to another platform, errors will occur. Sometimes it is me, sometimes it is in the data. I have only indicated when a governor was in office and predecessors and successors. 

The data is provided in a way that makes it easy to query; no information on elections (many governors were not elected) but proper start and end dates. The dates are as provided on the Wikipedia lists, articles for a governor are often more precise. People from Nigeria often are known by different names, I did add labels where I needed them for my disambiguation. 

When you want to know how many of these fine gentlemen are still alive, it will take some effort to kill of those who are still walking around according to Wikidata. It is relevant to know if a governor was elected or not. To do that properly you want to include election data elsewhere; there is no one on one relation between a position, elected officials and them being in office.

There is plenty to improve on the data. When people do, Listeria lists will update. Maybe someone will consider updating the English Wikipedia lists.

Thanks,

        GerardM