Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Forgive me for writing here, you can delete this after reading it. I left a comment on the Talk page of Ufahamu, but I have never figured out how to insert the editor's name, so that it comes to that person's attention. So, first, how do I hail an editor properly on a talk page? And second, can you see my question about "stub class" there? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wendybelcher (talk • contribs) 15:03, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi Wendy, you can either include a link to their name, like this: Wendybelcher, or if you're using the source editor you can use a template: {{ping|Wendybelcher}}. I didn't see your question, but will check. – SJ +18:35, 23 February 2017 (UTC)Reply
This is the third newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise.
(To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below)
Request:
In order to improve communication between genealogy interested wikipedians, as well as taking new, important steps towards a creation of a new project site, we need to make communication between the users easier and more effective.
At Mail list on meta is discussed the possibility of creating a genealogy-related Wikimedia email list. In order to request the creation of such a list, we need your voice and your vote.
In order to create a new list, we need to put a request it in Phabricator, and add a link to reasoning/explanation of purpose, and link to community consensus. Therefore we need your vote for this now, so we can request the creation of the mail list.
Read more about this email list at Meta; Wikimedia genealogy project mail list where you can support the creation of the mail list with your vote, in case you haven't done so already.
Cheers from your WikiProject Genealogy coordinator Dan Koehl.
Participation:
This is the fourth newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise.
(To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below)
Mail list is created:
The project email list is now created and ready to use!
Latest comment: 7 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hello!
I recently went on to Stel Pavlou's article, and made some much needed additions to get the page updated. I believe you are the originator of the article. So, I am coming to you for help. After my edits, there is an editor named Davey2010 who is challenging Stel Pavlou's notoriety and requesting that the page be taken down. When I tried to engage him, he became be verbally abusive, using profanity. This whole thing has turned into a circus, with him now filing for my removal as a sock puppet. I don't understand what I have done wrong. But, I am hoping you can go into the discussions and participate by defending Mr. Pavlou's site. I feel awful that my hard work of trying to update is possibly going to get his page removed.
With all due respect 4/5 accounts had all appeared at once defending the article and considering 2 other established editors had also filed the SPI I was clearly not in the wrong to file one,
Lastly you accused me of having some sort of personal issue with the bloke[1] (and then I was accused of having a personal vendetta!)so it's no wonder I got a bit rattled,
Hello to you both. Michellabellla is correct, I created the article long ago; I am not a random editor (though I also haven't kept up with the article since :). Michellabellla thanks for your recent edits; please note that it's not appropriate to hype an upcoming publication on a biography page. Davey2010 thanks for attending to the article, it certainly needed some cleaning up. I am sure some of the recent attention is related to the new novel being released in late 2017; it seems publishing houses have started asking authors to "make sure their WP articles are up to date" with information about new books coming out, which is... inappropriate in all but the most restrained sense. That said, contacting neutral Wikipedians with an existing interest in the topic is actually a good way to go about settling such content issues; worth distinguishing from canvassing. You don't need to threaten that sort of activity with blocking. Warmly, – SJ +23:41, 22 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
With the greatest of respect SJ an IP had created the article so how in gods name would I know it was you?, One editor related to all of this had gone to a random editor and tried getting the article kept so obviously I assumed the same was happening here,
Davey2010 A more than fair point :-) And I sympathize with the gut reaction to shut down self-promotion, patrolling is what keeps this project remotely useful for articles like this. (Also a source of rare wiki-humor... the edit summary about being from the same hometown was priceless.) Much appreciated & warm regards, – SJ +01:51, 23 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
You appeared on my radar due to your comment on Wikiversity becoming an unrefereed warehouse for junk, and that led me to suspect you have high standards and caused me to peek at your user page. Then, your interest in physics and One Laptop per Child really piqued my interest. Regarding your comment, I personally feel it will be easier to let Wikiversity allow anything that is not dangerous. Since it is a place where students can write, we need to expect childish efforts. Policing Wikiversity might be as futile as trying to rid the world-wide-web of nonsense. I remain flexible on that matter, and would never oppose an effort to clean up Wikiversity.
But here is the real reason I am contacting you: While your interest in One Laptop per Child suggests in interest in childhood education, my interests are focused on adults seeking a college education. College students are focused on grades and degrees and view education competitively. For that reason, I am beginning to work on the private-wiki-farm v:Miraheze. I have well over 50 college students, and am attempting with having them work on private wikis that only I and the individual student can see. That way only the best material goes onto Wikiversity, and students cannot peek into each others efforts for inspiration until their efforts have been graded. My node to these student wikis is at
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I take it you've talked w/ the miraheze team about this idea, and they're happy with generating 50 new wikis each year that later get deleted? If it's just a single student working w/ you on each page, and material not meant to be public, why not use something like a google-drive folder instead? – SJ +00:49, 23 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
Miraheze gave me wikimaking privileges, so I can create the wikis myself. Also, I intend to recycle the 100 wikis by changing the password. I am basically a sock and/or dual user of the accounts user:wsul001, user:wsul002, ... . The seem to be operating on a shoestring budget, so a modest donation from my university made them very happy with me.
Regarding your Google drive folder idea, it essential that they write in wikitext so it can licensed under Creative Commons. Basically, I think CC-BY-SA wikitext should be the industry standard for textfiles in education. That way it is both convenient and legal for teachers to copy, edit, and reuse it. Sadly, I don't hear much about the Free Laptop education project, but perhaps they could also support wikitext if it ever gets off the ground(?)--Guy vandegrift (talk) 01:12, 23 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
We surely did support wikitext. And students + teachers produced cc-licensed materials that they shared; mostly in Spanish. (OLPC was mainly active 2007-2012!) You don't have to use a wiki to generate CC text, but I understand your concern there. Good luck wih your project; I like the idea of bringing the best material out of those private wikis to wikiversity / wikieducator. – SJ +01:21, 23 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
⚠ Thanks for uploading File:Pulcinellopedia.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).
This would involve evaluating a translated article on the English Wikipedia by comparing it to the original German article, and marking it "Pass" or "Fail" based on whether the translation faithfully represents the original. Here's the reason for this request:
There are a number of articles on English Wikipedia that were created as machine translations from different languages including German , using the Content Translation tool, sometimes by users with no knowledge of the source language. The config problem that allowed this to happen has since been fixed, but this has left us with a backlog of articles whose accuracy of translation is suspect or unknown, including some articles translated from German. In many cases, other editors have come forward later to copyedit and fix any English grammar or style issues, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the translation is accurate, as factual errors from the original translation may remain. To put it another way: Good English is not the same as good translation.
If you can help out, that would be great. Here's a sample of the articles that need checking:
All you have to do, is compare the English article to the German article, and assess them "Pass" or "Fail" (the {{Pass}} and {{Fail}} templates may be useful here). (Naturally, if you feel like fixing an inaccurate translation and then assessing it, that's even better, but it isn't required.) Also please note that we are assessing accuracy not completeness, so if the English article is much shorter that is okay, as long as whatever has been translated so far is factually accurate.
If you can help, please {{ping}} me here to let me know. You can add your pass/fails above, right next to each link, or you may indicate your results below. Thanks! Mathglot (talk) 06:28, 11 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
Wikimedians interest themselves in everything under the sun — and then some. Discussion on "core topics" may, oddly, be a fringe activity, and was popular here a decade ago.
The situation on Wikidata today does resemble the halcyon days of 2006 of the English Wikipedia. The growth is there, and the reliability and stylistic issues are not yet pressing in on the project. Its Berlin conference at the end of October will have five years of achievement to celebrate. Think Wikimania Frankfurt 2005.
Progress must be made, however, on referencing "core facts". This has two parts: replacing "imported from Wikipedia" in referencing by external authorities; and picking out statements, such as dates and family relationships, that must not only be reliable but be seen to be reliable.
In addition, there are many properties on Wikidata lacking a clear data model. An emerging consensus may push to the front key sourcing and biomedical properties as requiring urgent attention. Wikidata's "manual of style" is currently distributed over thousands of discussions. To make it coalesce, work on such a core is needed.
WikiFactMine project pages on Wikidata, including a SPARQL library (in development).
Fatameh tool for adding items on scientific papers to Wikidata, by User: T Arrow. It has made a big recent impact. Offline for maintenance as we go to press, it is expected back soon.
Interviewed by Facto Post at the hackathon, Lydia Pintscher of Wikidata said that the most significant recent development is that Wikidata now accounts for one third of Wikimedia edits. And the essential growth of human editing.
Internet-In-A-Box
Impressive development work on Internet-in-a-Box featured in the WikiMedFoundation annual conference on Thursday. Hardware is Raspberry Pi, running Linux and the Kiwix browser. It can operate as a wifi hotspot and support a local intranet in parts of the world lacking phone signal. The medical use case is for those delivering care, who have smartphones but have to function in clinics in just such areas with few reference resources. Wikipedia medical content can be served to their phones, and power supplied by standard lithium battery packages.
Yesterday Katherine Maher unveiled the draft Wikimedia 2030 strategy, featuring a picturesque metaphor, "roads, bridges and villages". Here "bridges" could do with illustration. Perhaps it stands for engineering round or over the obstacles to progress down the obvious highways. Internet-in-a-Box would then do fine as an example.
"Bridging the gap" explains a take on that same metaphor, with its human component. If you are at Wikimania, come talk to WikiFactMine at its stall in the Community Village, just by the 3D-printed display for Bassel Khartabil; come hear T Arrow talk at 3 pm today in Drummond West, Level 3.
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello,
Beginning in September 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation Anti-harassment tool team will be conducting a survey to gauge how well tools, training, and information exists to assist English Wikipedia administrators in recognizing and mitigating things like sockpuppetry, vandalism, and harassment.
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Dorstenia elata, a critically endangered South American herb, contained in Moraceae, the family of figs and mulberries
Clearly, conservation work depends on decisions about what should be done, and where. While animals, particularly mammals, are photogenic, species numbers run into millions. Plant species lie at the base of typical land-based food chains, and vegetation is key to the habitats of most animals.
ContentMine dictionaries, for example as tabulated at d:Wikidata:WikiFactMine/Dictionary list, enable detailed control of queries about endangered species, in their taxonomic context. To target conservation measures properly, species listings running into the thousands are not what is needed: range maps showing current distribution are. Between the will to act, and effective steps taken, the services of data handling are required. There is now no reason at all why Wikidata should not take up the burden.
Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
You uploaded, File:Secret-man.jpg, a number of years ago, apparently prior to the current procedures for verifying the permissions concerned. Currently this file is "grandfathered".
It would be appreciated, (for the avoidance of any doubts as to the status of the media) you could re-confirm any relevant permission you obtained at the time, to the relevant OTRS queue. Please read Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission, which advises on how to confirm the permission you obtained from a third party.
Latest comment: 7 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Can you provide an exact source link for the above image that you uploaded? I can't seem to find it on the page and it seems to be a crop of [2] which has an All Rights Reserved copyright license. Thanks! --Majora (talk) 00:39, 10 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi Majora, the Flickr source looks like correct author attribution; deletion appropriate, thanks for the catch. I'd found it in a video while doing some quick sandboxing. – SJ +00:10, 12 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Annotation is nothing new. The glossators of medieval Europe annotated between the lines, or in the margins of legal manuscripts of texts going back to Roman times, and created a new discipline. In the form of web annotation, the idea is back, with texts being marked up inline, or with a stand-off system. Where could it lead?
1495 print version of the Digesta of Justinian, with the annotations of the glossator Accursius from the 13th century
ContentMine operates in the field of text and data mining (TDM), where annotation, simply put, can add value to mined text. It now sees annotation as a possible advance in semi-automation, the use of human judgement assisted by bot editing, which now plays a large part in Wikidata tools. While a human judgement call of yes/no, on the addition of a statement to Wikidata, is usually taken as decisive, it need not be. The human assent may be passed into an annotation system, and stored: this idea is standard on Wikisource, for example, where text is considered "validated" only when two different accounts have stated that the proof-reading is correct. A typical application would be to require more than one person to agree that what is said in the reference translates correctly into the formal Wikidata statement. Rejections are also potentially useful to record, for machine learning.
As a contribution to data integrity on Wikidata, annotation has much to offer. Some "hard cases" on importing data are much more difficult than average. There are for example biographical puzzles: whether person A in one context is really identical with person B, of the same name, in another context. In science, clinical medicine require special attention to sourcing (WP:MEDRS), and is challenging in terms of connecting findings with the methodology employed. Currently decisions in areas such as these, on Wikipedia and Wikidata, are often made ad hoc. In particular there may be no audit trail for those who want to check what is decided.
Annotations are subject to a World Wide Web Consortium standard, and behind the terminology constitute a simple JSON data structure. What WikiFactMine proposes to do with them is to implement the MEDRS guideline, as a formal algorithm, on bibliographical and methodological data. The structure will integrate with those inputs the human decisions on the interpretation of scientific papers that underlie claims on Wikidata. What is added to Wikidata will therefore be supported by a transparent and rigorous system that documents decisions.
An example of the possible future scope of annotation, for medical content, is in the first link below. That sort of detailed abstract of a publication can be a target for TDM, adds great value, and could be presented in machine-readable form. You are invited to discuss the detailed proposal on Wikidata, via its talk page.
Under the heading rerum causas cognescere, the first ever Wikidata conference got under way in the Tagesspiegel building with two keynotes, One was on YAGO, about how a knowledge base conceived ten years ago if you assume automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished: the mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, to be taken off the hands of its author Magnus Manske by the WMF; a Wikibase incubator site is on its way. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development on Wikidata is now not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate automated compilation of dictionaries.
And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops, through to 11 pm on Saturday. Wikidata applies to GLAM work via metadata. It may be used in education, raises issues such as author disambiguation, and lends itself to different types of graphical display and reuse. Many millions of SPARQL queries are run on the site every day. Over the summer a large open science bibliography has come into existence there.
At the beginning of December, Wikidata items on individual scientific articles passed the 10 million mark. This figure contrasts with the state of play in early summer, when there were around half a million. In the big picture, Wikidata is now documenting the scientific literature at a rate that is about eight times as fast as papers are published. As 2017 ends, progress is quite evident.
Behind this achievement are a technical advance (fatameh), and bots that do the lifting. Much more than dry migration of metadata is potentially involved, however. If paper A cites paper B, both papers having an item, a link can be created on Wikidata, and the information presented to both human readers, and machines. This cross-linking is one of the most significant aspects of the scientific literature, and now a long-sought open version is rapidly being built up.
The effort for the lifting of copyright restrictions on citation data of this kind has had real momentum behind it during 2017. WikiCite and the I4OC have been pushing hard, with the result that on CrossRef over 50% of the citation data is open. Now the holdout publishers are being lobbied to release rights on citations.
But all that is just the beginning. Topics of papers are identified, authors disambiguated, with significant progress on the use of the four million ORCID IDs for researchers, and proposals formulated to identify methodology in a machine-readable way. P4510 on Wikidata has been introduced so that methodology can sit comfortably on items about papers.
This is the fifth newsletter sent by mass mail to members in Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy, to everyone who voted a support for establishing a potential Wikimedia genealogy project on meta, and anyone who during the years showed an interest in genealogy on talk pages and likewise.
(To discontinue receiving Project Genealogy newsletters, please see below)
A demo wiki is up and running!
Dear members of WikiProject Genealogy, this will be the last newsletter for 2017, but maybe the most important one!
You can already now try out the demo for a genealogy wiki at https://tools.wmflabs.org/genealogy/wiki/Main_Page and try out the functions. You will find parts of the 18th Pharao dynasty and other records submitted by the 7 first users, and it would be great if you would add some records.
And with those great news we want to wish you a creative New Year 2018!
