The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-03-14
--
How would we generate a text in Abstract Wikipedia such as the first sentence of the English Wikipedia article about Mariya Zerova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Zerova?
*“Mariya Yakovlevna Zerova, alternately Marija Jakovlevna Zerova, (April 7, 1902 - July 21, 1994) was a Ukrainian biologist and taxonomist known for her work in mycology.”*
There are plenty of interesting questions regarding generating this short sentence - the name, the biographical dates, the description. Today, let’s just focus on the name.
Given that Zerova was Ukrainian, was born in and has lived in Ukraine, her name was written using the Cyrillic alphabet, Марія Яківна Зерова. In her English Wikipedia article, her name in the Cyrllic alphabet is given in the Wikipedia infobox, but not in the text of the article. There are several ways to transliterate the name from the Cyrillyc alphabet to the Latin alphabet. Particularly, the letter я https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya_(Cyrillic) can be transliterated as *Ya* or *Ja* in English, which leads to the variation given in the English Wikipedia article.
Her Wikidata item https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12106673 states that her first name is Marija https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18603722, and not Maria https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q325872, Mariya https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q39897333, or Mariia https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q56433356 (all these three names are written as Марія in Ukrainian). Names are a difficult mess, and so it is not surprising that Wikidata is having trouble representing them. A big thanks and shoutout to the hard work by the Wikiproject Names on Wikidata https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Names, which aims to sort out this kind of issue. You should join them if you are interested in helping.
So, how would we get her name for Abstract Wikipedia for the different languages? Do we need Lexemes for every first name in every language? Such as the Lexeme Maria https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L414214 in English? And then how would we link the given name in Wikidata to the given name, and in turn the Lexemes link to that given name?
What about Yakovlevna, her patronym? Or Zerova, her family name? Both names are rarer than Mariya. Would we expect Lexemes for each of these names in Wikidata too, for each language individually? That seems like a lot of work.
In such cases I hope that the answer is no, and that we can figure out a way to avoid that. But what could that look like? As usual, I expect that as a community we will come up with a better solution than what I could come up with. Together we are smarter than any one of us. So think of this as a first, rough draft.
My first thought would be to have functions in Wikifunctions that take a name such as *“Yakovlevna”* as a string and can generate all necessary forms based on regular morphological functions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-09-10. Names that have irregular forms would still be Lexemes, but if a function can create the necessary forms, we should be able to use that directly based on a string. So if we need the genitive form of Yakovlevna’s name (as in this very sentence), a function would just generate it.
The same mechanism to generate the necessary forms may be helpful for many place names and other proper names. In addition, we will likely need functions that can transliterate between different alphabets, which is a hornets' nest in itself. Transliterations can differ from target language to target language: the transliteration of Зерова into German would be Serowa, not Zerova, as it is in English. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-for-Ukraine.png https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-for-Ukraine.png Ukrainian Wikipedia logo
But that’s not all. The astute reader might have already noticed that *Yakovlevna* is not a direct transliteration of Яківна. That would be *Yakivna* (or *Jakivna*). What happened here?
In addition to the name being *transliterated* (i.e. where we map from one script to another) the name was also *translated*, or backformed, in the way it would be formed in Russian. The English form *Yakovlevna* is based on the Russian form Яковлевна, and indeed, if we look in the Russian Wikipedia, the Russian name for the biologist is Мария Яковлевна Зерова https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%AF%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0 - a version of the name that is never mentioned on her native Ukrainian Wikipedia article https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%96%D1%8F_%D0%AF%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0 .
By the way, if you are surprised to find that names can be translated, enjoy seeing the names of Pope John Paul II https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q989 in different languages on Wikidata by clicking on “All entered languages”.
How would Abstract Wikipedia ever figure out that it should first translate Яківна to Russian and then transliterate it? Is this even the right thing to do? To be honest, I am entirely stumped here. Should Ukrainian names in general first be translated to Russian variants, and then be transliterated? Let’s take two other Ukrainians, who both have the same name: the President of Ukraine, and the brother of the Mayor of Kyiv, are both named Володимир, but English Wikipedia refers to the President as Volodymyr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy (a direct transliteration) and to the other as Wladimir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wladimir_Klitschko. In Ukrainian, they have the same name!
I guess in many of those cases the best we can do is to rely on Wikidata, and use the labels on the items as string input and the structured data around given and family names. This allows us to enter and fix the data manually, item by item, where there is evidence that an individual used a different form. Only if Wikidata does not offer the necessary data, would we need to use fallback functions. And the fallback functions could be different from language to language, so that in Russian, Zerova can be Яковлевна and in Ukrainian Яківна.
And maybe, just maybe, having to encode that explicitly will make us more aware of how names of people and places flow through our knowledge ecosystem, how they reflect power and inequity.
So many interesting things about just the first few words of this one sentence, and we haven’t even talked yet about whether her birth date is stated in the Gregorian, Julian, or another calendar!
And... how pronunciation and phonetic rules will sometimes play a part in how humans transliterate and put effort into translations. "Hmm, well it sounds like you are saying Z in English to my American English ears... so I'll transcribe it as such to make it sensical for English readers" etc. etc.
Where there has been work on phonetic mappings over the years, such as Metaphone3, what we borrowed and used in OpenRefine https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/master/main/src/com/google/ref...
Many, many rules in places all over the internet to be had and eventually encoded into functions or maps.
Thad https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/ https://calendly.com/thadguidry/
Hi,
The person's real name is the one given by his mother. Translations in other languages are subjective. For instance, François may be translated Francis, Frank or even Frances. Each translation is right. Nonetheless, medias usually stick to one translated form, which is still subjectively chosen.
So, the source for the proper translation is in newspapers (active persons) and history books. There's also less known people, people without international cover, which name has never been translated. I think offering the multiple main translated form is fair.
So, how can Wiki search automatically in the world's online newspapers, and digitized books, counting occurences to see the most popular form?
https://www.linguee.com/english-french/search?source=auto&query=mariya+y...
Le 2022-03-14 à 16:18, Thad Guidry a écrit :
And... how pronunciation and phonetic rules will sometimes play a part in how humans transliterate and put effort into translations. "Hmm, well it sounds like you are saying Z in English to my American English ears... so I'll transcribe it as such to make it sensical for English readers" etc. etc.
Where there has been work on phonetic mappings over the years, such as Metaphone3, what we borrowed and used in OpenRefine https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/master/main/src/com/google/ref...
Many, many rules in places all over the internet to be had and eventually encoded into functions or maps.
Thad https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/ https://calendly.com/thadguidry/
Abstract-Wikipedia mailing list --abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org List information:https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/abstract-wikipedia.lists.wikimed...
Dear friends i sm happy with thanks to you .i have been thr history anyhow now we are in tragedy feeling in Ukraine publics death's
Sor i am Dr -A.Jeyam CC Corona Scientist .we had good medine .one is to cure any corona patient's with any stages cure and save them in 24 hours . So we feel and assure think that any one corona patient's not nessasaries to death's. But the Government's careless or doing business the publics by Death's because we announce ment to the world from 2020 January to till but any one Countries nit care .my other one medicine to really stop thr viruses spreding in 3 to 4 hours .so we assure not nessasaries any one not infect the corona and their any Variant by infect .but its also they going business ?
Then another one formula to stop tje cancer cells growthing in 90 days. so any cancer patient'as not to death and not loose their any organ , and not need any one surgery .then our medicine by to fully cure in 120 days . If you need any details please ask we will sent to you .
On Tue, 15 Mar 2022, 00:59 Denny Vrandečić, dvrandecic@wikimedia.org wrote:
The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-03-14
--
How would we generate a text in Abstract Wikipedia such as the first sentence of the English Wikipedia article about Mariya Zerova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Zerova?
*“Mariya Yakovlevna Zerova, alternately Marija Jakovlevna Zerova, (April 7, 1902 - July 21, 1994) was a Ukrainian biologist and taxonomist known for her work in mycology.”*
There are plenty of interesting questions regarding generating this short sentence - the name, the biographical dates, the description. Today, let’s just focus on the name.
Given that Zerova was Ukrainian, was born in and has lived in Ukraine, her name was written using the Cyrillic alphabet, Марія Яківна Зерова. In her English Wikipedia article, her name in the Cyrllic alphabet is given in the Wikipedia infobox, but not in the text of the article. There are several ways to transliterate the name from the Cyrillyc alphabet to the Latin alphabet. Particularly, the letter я https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya_(Cyrillic) can be transliterated as *Ya* or *Ja* in English, which leads to the variation given in the English Wikipedia article.
Her Wikidata item https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12106673 states that her first name is Marija https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18603722, and not Maria https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q325872, Mariya https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q39897333, or Mariia https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q56433356 (all these three names are written as Марія in Ukrainian). Names are a difficult mess, and so it is not surprising that Wikidata is having trouble representing them. A big thanks and shoutout to the hard work by the Wikiproject Names on Wikidata https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Names, which aims to sort out this kind of issue. You should join them if you are interested in helping.
So, how would we get her name for Abstract Wikipedia for the different languages? Do we need Lexemes for every first name in every language? Such as the Lexeme Maria https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L414214 in English? And then how would we link the given name in Wikidata to the given name, and in turn the Lexemes link to that given name?
What about Yakovlevna, her patronym? Or Zerova, her family name? Both names are rarer than Mariya. Would we expect Lexemes for each of these names in Wikidata too, for each language individually? That seems like a lot of work.
In such cases I hope that the answer is no, and that we can figure out a way to avoid that. But what could that look like? As usual, I expect that as a community we will come up with a better solution than what I could come up with. Together we are smarter than any one of us. So think of this as a first, rough draft.
My first thought would be to have functions in Wikifunctions that take a name such as *“Yakovlevna”* as a string and can generate all necessary forms based on regular morphological functions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-09-10. Names that have irregular forms would still be Lexemes, but if a function can create the necessary forms, we should be able to use that directly based on a string. So if we need the genitive form of Yakovlevna’s name (as in this very sentence), a function would just generate it.
The same mechanism to generate the necessary forms may be helpful for many place names and other proper names. In addition, we will likely need functions that can transliterate between different alphabets, which is a hornets' nest in itself. Transliterations can differ from target language to target language: the transliteration of Зерова into German would be Serowa, not Zerova, as it is in English. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-for-Ukraine.png https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-for-Ukraine.png Ukrainian Wikipedia logo
But that’s not all. The astute reader might have already noticed that *Yakovlevna* is not a direct transliteration of Яківна. That would be *Yakivna* (or *Jakivna*). What happened here?
In addition to the name being *transliterated* (i.e. where we map from one script to another) the name was also *translated*, or backformed, in the way it would be formed in Russian. The English form *Yakovlevna* is based on the Russian form Яковлевна, and indeed, if we look in the Russian Wikipedia, the Russian name for the biologist is Мария Яковлевна Зерова https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%AF%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0 - a version of the name that is never mentioned on her native Ukrainian Wikipedia article https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%96%D1%8F_%D0%AF%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0 .
By the way, if you are surprised to find that names can be translated, enjoy seeing the names of Pope John Paul II https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q989 in different languages on Wikidata by clicking on “All entered languages”.
How would Abstract Wikipedia ever figure out that it should first translate Яківна to Russian and then transliterate it? Is this even the right thing to do? To be honest, I am entirely stumped here. Should Ukrainian names in general first be translated to Russian variants, and then be transliterated? Let’s take two other Ukrainians, who both have the same name: the President of Ukraine, and the brother of the Mayor of Kyiv, are both named Володимир, but English Wikipedia refers to the President as Volodymyr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy (a direct transliteration) and to the other as Wladimir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wladimir_Klitschko. In Ukrainian, they have the same name!
I guess in many of those cases the best we can do is to rely on Wikidata, and use the labels on the items as string input and the structured data around given and family names. This allows us to enter and fix the data manually, item by item, where there is evidence that an individual used a different form. Only if Wikidata does not offer the necessary data, would we need to use fallback functions. And the fallback functions could be different from language to language, so that in Russian, Zerova can be Яковлевна and in Ukrainian Яківна.
And maybe, just maybe, having to encode that explicitly will make us more aware of how names of people and places flow through our knowledge ecosystem, how they reflect power and inequity.
So many interesting things about just the first few words of this one sentence, and we haven’t even talked yet about whether her birth date is stated in the Gregorian, Julian, or another calendar! _______________________________________________ Abstract-Wikipedia mailing list -- abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org List information: https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/abstract-wikipedia.lists.wikimed...
If you need name ?
On Tue, 15 Mar 2022, 17:11 Jvp Dengue Cancer Scientist, < jvpcancerdengue@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear friends i sm happy with thanks to you .i have been thr history anyhow now we are in tragedy feeling in Ukraine publics death's
Sor i am Dr -A.Jeyam CC Corona Scientist .we had good medine .one is to cure any corona patient's with any stages cure and save them in 24 hours . So we feel and assure think that any one corona patient's not nessasaries to death's. But the Government's careless or doing business the publics by Death's because we announce ment to the world from 2020 January to till but any one Countries nit care .my other one medicine to really stop thr viruses spreding in 3 to 4 hours .so we assure not nessasaries any one not infect the corona and their any Variant by infect .but its also they going business ?
Then another one formula to stop tje cancer cells growthing in 90 days. so any cancer patient'as not to death and not loose their any organ , and not need any one surgery .then our medicine by to fully cure in 120 days . If you need any details please ask we will sent to you .
On Tue, 15 Mar 2022, 00:59 Denny Vrandečić, dvrandecic@wikimedia.org wrote:
The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-03-14
--
How would we generate a text in Abstract Wikipedia such as the first sentence of the English Wikipedia article about Mariya Zerova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariya_Zerova?
*“Mariya Yakovlevna Zerova, alternately Marija Jakovlevna Zerova, (April 7, 1902 - July 21, 1994) was a Ukrainian biologist and taxonomist known for her work in mycology.”*
There are plenty of interesting questions regarding generating this short sentence - the name, the biographical dates, the description. Today, let’s just focus on the name.
Given that Zerova was Ukrainian, was born in and has lived in Ukraine, her name was written using the Cyrillic alphabet, Марія Яківна Зерова. In her English Wikipedia article, her name in the Cyrllic alphabet is given in the Wikipedia infobox, but not in the text of the article. There are several ways to transliterate the name from the Cyrillyc alphabet to the Latin alphabet. Particularly, the letter я https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya_(Cyrillic) can be transliterated as *Ya* or *Ja* in English, which leads to the variation given in the English Wikipedia article.
Her Wikidata item https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12106673 states that her first name is Marija https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18603722, and not Maria https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q325872, Mariya https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q39897333, or Mariia https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q56433356 (all these three names are written as Марія in Ukrainian). Names are a difficult mess, and so it is not surprising that Wikidata is having trouble representing them. A big thanks and shoutout to the hard work by the Wikiproject Names on Wikidata https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Names, which aims to sort out this kind of issue. You should join them if you are interested in helping.
So, how would we get her name for Abstract Wikipedia for the different languages? Do we need Lexemes for every first name in every language? Such as the Lexeme Maria https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Lexeme:L414214 in English? And then how would we link the given name in Wikidata to the given name, and in turn the Lexemes link to that given name?
What about Yakovlevna, her patronym? Or Zerova, her family name? Both names are rarer than Mariya. Would we expect Lexemes for each of these names in Wikidata too, for each language individually? That seems like a lot of work.
In such cases I hope that the answer is no, and that we can figure out a way to avoid that. But what could that look like? As usual, I expect that as a community we will come up with a better solution than what I could come up with. Together we are smarter than any one of us. So think of this as a first, rough draft.
My first thought would be to have functions in Wikifunctions that take a name such as *“Yakovlevna”* as a string and can generate all necessary forms based on regular morphological functions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-09-10. Names that have irregular forms would still be Lexemes, but if a function can create the necessary forms, we should be able to use that directly based on a string. So if we need the genitive form of Yakovlevna’s name (as in this very sentence), a function would just generate it.
The same mechanism to generate the necessary forms may be helpful for many place names and other proper names. In addition, we will likely need functions that can transliterate between different alphabets, which is a hornets' nest in itself. Transliterations can differ from target language to target language: the transliteration of Зерова into German would be Serowa, not Zerova, as it is in English. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-for-Ukraine.png https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-for-Ukraine.png Ukrainian Wikipedia logo
But that’s not all. The astute reader might have already noticed that *Yakovlevna* is not a direct transliteration of Яківна. That would be *Yakivna* (or *Jakivna*). What happened here?
In addition to the name being *transliterated* (i.e. where we map from one script to another) the name was also *translated*, or backformed, in the way it would be formed in Russian. The English form *Yakovlevna* is based on the Russian form Яковлевна, and indeed, if we look in the Russian Wikipedia, the Russian name for the biologist is Мария Яковлевна Зерова https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%AF%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0 - a version of the name that is never mentioned on her native Ukrainian Wikipedia article https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%96%D1%8F_%D0%AF%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0 .
By the way, if you are surprised to find that names can be translated, enjoy seeing the names of Pope John Paul II https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q989 in different languages on Wikidata by clicking on “All entered languages”.
How would Abstract Wikipedia ever figure out that it should first translate Яківна to Russian and then transliterate it? Is this even the right thing to do? To be honest, I am entirely stumped here. Should Ukrainian names in general first be translated to Russian variants, and then be transliterated? Let’s take two other Ukrainians, who both have the same name: the President of Ukraine, and the brother of the Mayor of Kyiv, are both named Володимир, but English Wikipedia refers to the President as Volodymyr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy (a direct transliteration) and to the other as Wladimir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wladimir_Klitschko. In Ukrainian, they have the same name!
I guess in many of those cases the best we can do is to rely on Wikidata, and use the labels on the items as string input and the structured data around given and family names. This allows us to enter and fix the data manually, item by item, where there is evidence that an individual used a different form. Only if Wikidata does not offer the necessary data, would we need to use fallback functions. And the fallback functions could be different from language to language, so that in Russian, Zerova can be Яковлевна and in Ukrainian Яківна.
And maybe, just maybe, having to encode that explicitly will make us more aware of how names of people and places flow through our knowledge ecosystem, how they reflect power and inequity.
So many interesting things about just the first few words of this one sentence, and we haven’t even talked yet about whether her birth date is stated in the Gregorian, Julian, or another calendar! _______________________________________________ Abstract-Wikipedia mailing list -- abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org List information: https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/abstract-wikipedia.lists.wikimed...
abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org