Some of them were missing in Wikidata. The majority existed because a volunteer added them based on information from a database. Given the list in Wikipedia some were missing and have been added. For all of them it is now known that they shared this position.
Reasonator provides an organised presentation based on the information available real time from Wikidata. This presentation is only available when you know about the availability of this tool AND the data. There is one list on a Wikipedia that will update whenever when there are changes. This list could be on any Wikipedia and dependent on articles for an individual the name of the person is shown in cursive or straight up. So with more local articles less will be shown in cursive.
Why care about improving information about Burundian politicians? It is because it is part of the sum of all knowledge and it should be knowledge available to the public of any Wikipedia that considers it relevant.
When a Wikipedia is interested in any list of politicians of any country.. It needs only two things, a Listeria like service needs to run and the definition of a list to start of with. This could be done more efficiently. The query could be part of a template making it easier to change the underlying query. We could have templates for politicians, awards, competitions ...
One benefit of linking to Wikidata is that implicitly more information is available. Some of these finance ministers became presidents or premiers of Burundi. Obviously linking to a Reasonator will be an improvement from a "reader" perspective.
We do have experience with this approach. The result of combined efforts is in this collection of African politicians. With functionality like this available for use in any project, we will be sharing more of the sum of all the knowledge that is available to us.
Thanks,
GerardM
The best that can be said about USA government publications is that it publishes its policy however it no longer provides us with a reliable source. It no longer has the organisations that had a quality making their publications qualify as reliable. Examples abound; think health, climate, traffic, trade, military.
Wikimedia serves a global public. Arguably foreign sources became more reliable and respectable, more likely to provide a narrative that clashes with what some in the USA expect to hear.
The Wikimedia Foundation is an organisation based in the United States, its infrastructure is centred in the USA. I fear for for the continuity of its products and its quality. It is not a given that this will remain given a US government going to court with the BBC because of what it considers partisan reporting. Wikimedia aims to provide a neutral point of view but given that its traditional sources are increasingly suspect, that it operates in an environment that is no longer free. Given that its bias is also in what it does not cover, I wonder how we measure Wikipedia as a reliable source.
Thanks,
GerardM
When all the relevant information is to be offered in many languages big and small, there is a need for a scaffolding for the information. on all the parties, all the candidates and all the other entities that may be of relevance.
Wikidata can provide this scaffolding. For the existing members of parliament there is likely an existing item. All the candidates are included in Wikidata and identified as a candidate for the 2027 elections. Assuming that there is a project page for all the language Wikipedias relevant for Nigeria, there will be a Listeria list with all the candidates, the candidates with and without a local article are identified as such.
Another list could include all the fake news recognised by the project and the parties, organisations, parties involved.
Technically, there are a few things that will make live easier.
On many projects there are links for African politicians and when the Listeria bot is active. It will update the links whenever there is an update and it will perform this update on any Wikipedia that shares these links. For someone like Mr Bola Ahmed Tinubu it is likely that there will be an article and it will be show in the list. For someone like Mr Osagie Ehanire this is less likely and it will show a link to Wikidata.
In a personal project there are many national politicians for African countries.. The idea is that when something changes, it is reflected in the Listeria list on all the participating Wikipedias.. Recently I have done some work on Nigerian politicians, later office holders and some new Listeria lists. The new lists have to be added on other Wikipedias for them to share the latest data.
New national elections will be held in Nigeria in November .. There will be many new people who will be a candidate and compete with incumbent politicians. They all belong to parties, they studied, some may already be known to Wikidata. They may make claims about their education, their background and yes, all these claims can be verified and find a place at Wikidata. For both claims that can and cannot be substantiated there is room if only to support a public that is to make a choice.
Thanks,
GerardM
The question becomes, how will we remain relevant and up to date. Relevancy is in multiple parts, how do we remain a challenge for our editor community, how do we remain the "go to" place for our public and how do we remain a source for the bots feeding the AI.
My suggestion is predictable. Leverage the sum of all the knowledge we have in all our projects and maximise cooperation with any and all compatible organisations.
We can share all the awards and recipients of awards known on our projects. Our academic references should all be known to Wikidata and we could and should update these in collaboration with ORCiD and CrossRef. We would have up to date portfolio for the scientists we have Wikipedia articles of. We would know for scientific articles their citations and what cited these articles. Our editors would be enabled to improve the quality of our work.
Yes, the AI engines would be better informed but hey, our intention is to share the sum of our knowledge. They are welcome to it.
Thanks,
GerardM
Professor Fei-Fei Li is one of the recipients of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. It says so on the English Wikipedia and it is confirmed on the website of the prize.
There are nine Wikipedias with an article for the award and there is Wikidata. When the 2025 awardees are known on a Wikipedia, "2025" should be available in the text of the article. Otherwise the article is likely out of date. The recipients should be known on Wikidata AND there should be an "award received" for the award with a date of 2025.
When you check Wikidata for this award using "Reasonator", you will find that Wikidata is in need of an update. It is by accident that I learned of this award. Updates are an hit or miss affair, this would be improved when a bot produces a list of all the awards that are in need of updates. When a bot produces this list for every Wikipedia for all the known awards, it enables people to do this maintenance work.
Obviously 2025 is this year and it will have the most mutations. A similar job can be run for other years but it is less likely to bring many additions, more likely these list will become reduced in size over time.
Thanks,
GerardM
So why not have a tool that produces a list for all awards on a Wikipedia where Wikidata knows about an award AND an award winner where both have a Wikidata item and the award winner is not on the award article. Easy obvious and it will improve the quality of articles about awards.
This can work two ways.. Why not have a tool that produces a list where awards known at Wikidata are not linked on the article.
Technically it is not that hard. It is just a few queries that are to be run on a regular basis. It is the user interface where it becomes tricky. How will a user know that something was fixed.. How will we run it for all the Wikipedias.. Will we be smart and recognise red links..
Another tool could be where we indicate to Wikipedias with an article for an award when a change happened for that award.. particularly new award winners for the current year.. It could be a list where editors are triggered to revisit their articles.
Thanks,
GerardM
I revisited my Wikipedia user page. On it I have several subpages that are regularly automatically updated when things change on Wikidata. One of them is about the "Prix Roger Nimier", I had not looked at it for years. I updated Wikidata from the data on the French Wikipedia and to make it interesting, I added the Listeria template to my French Wikipedia user page. It updated and the English and French article are nearly identical. The difference is in the description.
There are many personal project pages that are automatically updated from Wikidata. The point that I wanted to make: topics are not universally maintained. As I had another look after a few years, I found that many have had regular updates. The quality however is not that great. From a Wikimedia perspective, it seems that we have not one audience but many. When we allow for automatic updates, we will be able to share the sum of all our knowledge with a much bigger audience.
Thanks,
GerardM
An article typically starts with a title and it may be linked to an existing item in Wikidata. If so, the item, the concept is linked to a workflow. All the references for all articles are gathered. All relations known at Wikidata are presented. Based on what kind of item it is, tools are identified presenting information in the concept articles. They are categories and info boxes. References for content in the info boxes are included as well.
Another workflow is for existing articles. All references and relations expressed in the article show as green, unused references and relations show as orange. Missing categories and values in info boxes are presented and the author may click to include them in the article. Values in info boxes may show black, red or blue it will be whatever the author chooses.
The workflow is enabled once the concept or the article is linked to Wikidata. So for those Wikipedians who do not want to change, they just do not make use of this workflow and are left unbothered. There will be harvesting processes based on the recent changes on all projects; a change will trigger processes that may look for vandalism for new relations and for suggestions for new labels.
The most important beneficiary will be our audience. This workflow makes the sum of all our knowledge actionable to improve articles, populate articles and reflect what we know in all our articles. Our editors have the choice to use this tool or not. Obviously their edits will be harvested and evaluated in a more broad context; all of the Wikimedia projects. The smaller projects where more new articles are created will have an easy time adding info boxes and references. The bigger projects will find the relations that are not or not sufficiently expressed with references.
Providing subject resources will work only when it is supported on a Foundation scale. It is not that volunteers cannot build a prototype, it is the need for scalability and sustained performance that is not provided by the Toolforge.
Thanks,
GerardM
All Wikipedia articles on the same subject are linked to only one Wikidata item. Articles linked from a Wikipedia article are consequently known to Wikidata. When Wikidata knows about a relation between these two articles, dependent on the relation they could feature in info boxes and/or categories in the article. At Wikidata we know about categories and what they should contain. Info boxes are known to Wikipedias for what they contain, relations are likely to be known both to Wikidata and Wikipedia
Issues identified in this way will substantially improve the integrity of the data in all our projects. We are expecting false friends and missing information in Wikidata and in all Wikipedias.
Using AI for identifying issues ensures that quality will be constantly part of the process. That basic facts are correct so that the information we provide to our audience will be as good as we have it.
Thanks,
GerardM
Functionally, every link red or blue should remain exactly as is. Technically, every blue link refers to one article and every article SHOULD have an item at Wikidata. Every link, blue or red, may be referred to from many places and SHOULD be about only one concept. For every destination there MAY be a link to an item at Wikidata. At this time we have no way of knowing if there is only one concept and if there is an item at Wikidata for that concept.
Many years ago Wikidata solved a similar problem. Wikidata was an instant success because it replaced the interwiki functionality. The solution proposed today is similar and only possible now that Wikidata can be "federated" with many instances of a Wikibase.
All destinations for both red and blue links will be known in a local Wikibase federated with Wikidata. Any destination may be linked to a Wikidata item but the name of the local article/destination will remain unique. Thanks to this federation, disambiguation support may be provided based on what is known both locally and globally when a new link is created. It will know about the synonymy for each subject.
This change does not need to be controversial because like with the interwiki links, people can opt out of this new functionality. When only a subset of the editor community becomes involved, the quality of all links will improve quickly. With the interwiki links fixed, Wikidata was ready to become a knowledge base. As the wiki links in the local Wikibases get in shape, the Wikidata knowledge base may be used to signal that articles should be in specific categories, or that red links could be added in summation articles like in articles about an award.
Our dependence on Wikipedia editors will remain key but tools like the Wikidata knowledge base are available to bring us the data that enables us with information that is up to date and improves the connections between all our articles. Manually checking wiki links is a Sisyphean task, with tooling it becomes manageable and worthwhile.
Thanks,
GerardM
This was done in the past by a different tool. It was a drama because Wikidata is NOT a relational database. The problem is that an item cannot be created with the certainty that it will be unique. To ensure that new items will be unique there are plenty of available tricks.
The easiest trick is to have an option in the tool to create all the missing papers known for a given author. One author at a time and, from Scholia. It makes use of results from a batch process that runs once a week. Cheap, cheerful highly effective.
Then there is a need for another batch process. For all the "author string"s that include an ORCiD identifier, existing authors are sought and these author strings are changed into "author"s removing the link to the ORCiD identifier as it is implicitly part of the author. This process can run once a week.
A second batch process, also running once a week, looks for "author string"s with ORCiD identifiers without corresponding authors. It generates a list of ORCiD identifiers with associated "author string"s and creates one new item uniquely identified by that ORCiD identifier.
Obviously new authors make it useful to run the first batch process again.
These batches could run exclusively for an author processed by Orcid-scraper making this tool and Scholia more powerful and up to date.
Thanks,
GerardM
This award currently has no Wikipedia article, it has a Wikidata item and consequently associated information can be shown in Reasonator or in a Scholia.
I added the 2024 recipient because awards without recipients is not really informative. I came across the inaugural 2013 recipient because of another award she received. All six recipients had an Wikidata item and only one did not have publications associated with him. However, a merge of two items solved that issue.
It is wonderful to see prestigious organisations refer to Wikipedia articles. I do notice that we are still at a stage where Wikipedia information is not valued enough to mine it, curate it and finally share it with all our audience. We could share the knowledge that is available to us.
Thanks,
GerardM
Wikicite would be a big thing when it has room for growth. It should contain all the references used in Wikpedia, it could contain all the awards known to Wikipedia and all its recipients. It would be great when all publications referencing Wikipedia sources would be known; it would be a clue to how much Wikipedia readers are missing out on.
When we know about all the publications of the CDC scientists at Wikidata, thanks to a Scholia presentation we would know what America has developed so far. It is a lot, we could celebrate it.
This is the first blogpost for me for 2025. I still dream big but what I achieve is one edit at a time.
Thanks,
GerardM
As far as the English Wikipedia is concerned, there is no red nor a blue link for the 2024 awardees of the Brewster medal. Its information ends in 2021. The German Wikipedia is up to date. There are no articles for Renée A. Duckworth and for Juan C. Reboreda on both Wikipedias, the German has two red links.
When you maintain information like this, there are three options. You can include an awardee in text or as a link and as luck will have it the link will turn red or blue. This is complicated because a link may have homonyms. With a red link you will only know an homonym issue once an article is created, with a blue link you may know immediately.
The Wikimedia Foundation solved a similar problem a long time ago for another type of link, the "interwiki link". The solution is Wikidata. It works because there is only one identifier for every topic and every article needs a link to a Wikidata item to have a more global relevance.
Thanks to the ongoing development of Wikidata, there is the Wikibase. We should do a similar job for the red and blue links. It will do away with the false friends problems in Wikipedia. It will improve quality for each Wikipedia and it will improve the quality of Wikidata. Any data related updates that are not strictly local will remain at Wikidata because that helps us in the sharing of the sum of all knowledge.
When a new a link is to be added in any of the 333+ Wikipedias, it starts with disambiguation.. Is the subject already known in any of the other Wikipedias? If not a new Wikidata item will be created and extend options in any future disambiguation. If it is, available information and references are available from the start and consequently a Scholia, a Reasonator or any other generated view of the information may become available dependent on the policies of a Wikipedia.
Implementing such a Wikibase is not really problematic because all the blue links still refer through the local Wikipedia article to Wikidata. The red links are the more tricky bit. They are opened up once they are linked to a Wikidata item.
With such a Wikibase in place, we can start doing the smart things. The Brewster medal, Q612041, could have a red or blue link to all the awardees. When they don't the article is to be reported for maintenance..
Cool?
GerardM
Wikidata did not know the award.
The list of fellows on the RZS website is formatted in a "last name, first name" format. There are too many fellows so converting it by hand is inconvenient. As so many people are enamoured by ChatGPT, I gave it a spin. ChatGPT does NOT process websites for me. So I copy pasted the list and asked it to change the order of the surname and the first name.
I asked it who had a Wikipedia article. It could not tell me but it gave me a list of fellows who likely have a Wikipedia article. For many of them I added the award in Wikidata and for some fellows I added a new Wikidata item. For many of them I linked publications and this results in a nice Scholia for the award.
It would be really cool when there is a Wikimedia AI that will answer questions like: "for the people in this list change the order of the name and check if these Australian award winners have a Wikipedia article or a Wikidata item". Maybe start with a tool for editors and then open it up to the general public.
Given that Wikipedia is multilingual, what would be the effect of the data for the answers being all Wikipedias AND Wikidata.. Given that Wikifunctions is language agnostic, why not have functions that are a front end to such a Wikimedia AI?
Thanks,
GerardM
