Hoi,
Jura1 created a wonderful list of people who died in Brazil in 2015 [1]. It
is a page that may update regularly from Wikidata thanks to the
ListeriaBot. Obviously, there may be a few more because I am falling ever
more behind with my quest for registering deaths in 2015.
I have copied his work and created a page for people who died in the
Netherlands in 2015 [2]. It is trivially easy to do this and, the result is
great. The result looks great, it can be used for any country in any
Wikipedia
The Dutch Wikipedia indicated that they nowadays maintain important
metadata at Wikidata. I am really happy that we can showcase their work. It
is important work because as someone reminded me at some stage, this is
part of what amounts to the policy of living people...
Thanks,
GerardM
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Jura1/Recent_deaths_in_Brazil
[2]
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Jura1/Recent_deaths_in_the_Netherlands
Hey :)
Rollout of arbitrary access is going well. So we're continuing on more
projects. Here's the schedule for the next projects to get it:
11 June 2015: all Wikiquote, all remaining Wikivoyage
15 June 2015: arwiki, cawiki, eswiki, huwiki, kowiki, rowiki, ukwiki, viwiki
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
Hi.
I recently started following mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase on Gerrit,
and quite astonishingly found that nearly all of the 100 most recently
updated changes appear to be owned by WMDE employees (exceptions being
one change by Legoktm and some from L10n-bot). This is not the case, for
example, with mediawiki/core.
While this may be desired by the Wikidata team for corporate reasons, I
feel that encouraging code review by volunteers would empower both
Wikidata and third-party communities with new ways of contributing to
the project and raise awareness of the development team's goals in the
long term.
The messy naming conventions play a role too, i.e. Extension:Wikibase
<https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Extension:Wikibase&redirect=no>
is supposed to host technical documentation but instead redirects to the
Wikibase <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase> portal, with actual
documentation split into Extension:Wikibase Repository
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikibase_Repository> and
Extension:Wikibase Client
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikibase_Client>, apparently
ignoring the fact that the code is actually developed in a single
repository (correct me if I'm wrong). Just to add some more confusion,
there's also Extension:Wikidata build
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikidata_build> with no
documentation.
And what about wmde on GitHub <https://github.com/wmde> with countless
creatively-named repos? They make life even harder for potential
contributors.
Finally, the ever-changing client-side APIs make gadgets development a
pain in the ass.
Sorry if this sounds like a slap in the face, but it had to be said.
We currently rely on the Wikidata Query API to identify whether or not a
set of claims exists on a given property. Some of our previous bot runs has
created duplicates since recent additions didn't make it to the WDQ API yet.
In our efforts to prevent the creation of duplicate entries, I am trying to
better understand the WDQ-api.
The documentation of the WDQ-api states that [1] "Also, the data used here
is from WikiData "dumps", so it can be a few hours old.". However, when I
check on the datadumps they are either updated weekly with json dumps or
incremental daily dumps as xml [2].
Also, sometimes the WDQ-api seems to have instant behaviour with claims
being added, in the sense that they are immediately available through the
WDQ API.
How often is the WDQ api really being updated? Is it possible to query
wikidata live, with WDQ and if not, are there alternatives that would allow
this?
Regards,
Andra Waagmeester
[1] https://wdq.wmflabs.org/api_documentation.html
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Database_download
Hi everyone,
I have some bad news. We screwed up. I’m really sorry about this. I’d
really appreciate everyone’s help with fixing it.
TLDR: We have a bad mixup of calendar models for the dates in Wikidata
and we need to fix them.
==== What happened? ====
Wikidata dates have a calendar model. This can be Julian or Gregorian
and the plan is to support more in the future. There are two ways to
interpret this calendar model:
# the given date is in this calendar model
# the given date is Gregorian and this calendar model says if the date
should be displayed in Gregorian or Julian in the user interface
Unfortunately both among the developers as well as bot operators there
was confusion about which of those is to be used. This lead to
inconsistencies in the backend/frontend code as well as different bot
authors treating the calendar model differently. In addition the user
interface had problematic defaults. We now have a number of dates with
a potentially wrong calendar model. The biggest issue started when we
moved code from the frontend to the backend in Mid 2014 in order to
improve performance. Prior to the move, the user interface used to
make the conversion from one model to the other. After the move, the
conversion was not done anywhere anymore - but the calendar model was
still displayed. We made one part better but in the process broke
another part badly :(
==== What now? ====
* Going forward the date data value will be given in both the
normalized proleptic Gregorian calendar as well as in the calendar
model explicitly given (which currently supports, as said, proleptic
Gregorian and proleptic Julian).
* The user interface will again indicate which calendar model the date
is given in. We will improve documentation around this to make sure
there is no confusion from now on.
* We made a flowchart to help decide what the correct calendar model
for a date should be to help with the clean up.
* We are improving the user interface to make it easier to understand
what is going on and by default do the right thing.
* We are providing a list of dates that need to be checked and
potentially fixed.
* How are we making sure it doesn’t happen again?
* We are improving documentation around dates and will look for other
potential ambiguous concepts we have.
==== How can we fix it? ====
We have created a list of all dates that potentially need checking. We
can either provide this as a list on some wiki page or run a bot to
add “instance of: date needing calendar model check“ or something
similar as a qualifier to the respective dates. What do you prefer?
The list probably contains dates we can batch-change or approve but
we’d need your help with figuring out which those are.
We also created a flowchart that should help with making the decision
which calendar model to pick for a given date:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikidata_Calendar_Model_Decision_Tr…
Thank you to everyone who helped us investigate and get to the bottom
of the issue. Sorry again this has happened and is causing work. I
feel miserable about this and if there is anything more we can do to
help with the cleanup please do let me know.
Let's please keep further discussion about this in one place on-wiki
at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#calendar_model_screwup
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
If 1 librarian in the USA added one fact or verified / qualified it per
work day in their spare 2 mins a day.
119,729 Libraries in USA
x
1 Librarian minimum per Library with internet access...mostly :-)
x
251 work days in a year
=
30,051,979 MILLION facts that could be added or verified
Get the word out,
Thad
+ThadGuidry <https://www.google.com/+ThadGuidry>
Hi,
There's a bikeshed about how "site link" should be spelled: with or without
space.
Currently almost all messages in the Wikibase software say "sitelink", and
so does the Wikidata glossary [1]
A counter-argument is that "site link" is a better English expression that
doesn't create an unnecessary neologism.
See the comments to these Gerrit patches:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/218272/https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/218272/
Though I committed the patch to make it "sitelink" everywhere in the UI, I
do not have a strong preference for either spelling. I do, however, have a
strong affinity to consistency in the spelling of translatable messages,
because this makes life easier for users and for translators.
Note, that this will only about the English spelling. Some languages (like
Hebrew) strongly prefer spelling of compound words with a space, and some
(like German) tend to spell them in one word. The translation is up to the
translators. Consistency in the English spelling is only supposed to make
it easier for the translators.
Can anybody please help resolve this bike shed?
Thank you!
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Glossary
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Hi Wikidatans,
We are organizing a Wikidata Editathon in order to encourage Wikidata
edits about San Sebastián (wikidata:Q10313) and its culture. The
motivation behind the event is that San Sebastián will be European
Capital of Culture in 2016. Moreover, we are organizing this event to
encourage people in our region to edit and use Wikidata.
We will work in teams and we will edit items of different topics (e.g.
music, literature, points of interest related to San Sebastián). We will
show participants the different use cases one can go through in
Wikidata. We will also discuss application ideas and talk about
collaborative systems.
The event will take place in San Sebastián (Spain), on July 3rd, at the
Faculty of Informatics (UPV/EHU). You can find more details (in Spanish)
here:
https://sites.google.com/site/donostiasansebastianenwikidata/
If anyone is interested in either participanting or helping out, please
let us know. We would be really happy to have you there.
You can write an email to: dssenwikidata(a)gmail.com
Kind regards,
Cristina Sarasua
--
Cristina Sarasua
Institute for Web Science and Technologies (WeST)
Universität Koblenz-Landau
Universitätsstraße 1
56070 Koblenz
Germany
e: csarasua(a)uni-koblenz.de
p: +49 261 287 2772
f: +49 261 287 100 2772
w: http://west.uni-koblenz.de
Hi all,
inspired by the recent works of Adam, I have now recreated the Wikidata
maps that Denny made some years ago:
https://ddll.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/Wikidata/Maps-06-2015/en
There are some interesting observations to be made there, and in any
case the images are quite pretty.
The code is available online as one of the Wikidata Toolkit examples [1]
for anyone who wants to create more/different maps. Building all of the
maps takes about half an hour on my laptop, once the dump is downloaded.
Cheers,
Markus
[1] https://github.com/Wikidata/Wikidata-Toolkit/tree/master/wdtk-examples
--
Markus Kroetzsch
Faculty of Computer Science
Technische Universität Dresden
+49 351 463 38486
http://korrekt.org/
