Hello all,
Thank you again for your all recent thoughts and feedback with regard to
the recent Wikidata: Query Service (WDQS) scaling update Aug 2021
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Query_Service_scaling_update_Aug_2021>,
and for everyone who has responded to the WDQS user survey
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2021/08#Wikidat…>.
As part of our ongoing work to scale WDQS, we will begin shipping the new
Flink-based Streaming Updater from test servers to production on 11 October
2021, with the entire data transfer process expected to finish by 18
October 2021.
The primary goal of this new Streaming Updater is to reduce update lag, and
throttling, of edits to Wikidata: going from an average of 10 edits/second
to an average of 88 edits/second. We are excited that this is almost a 9x
improvement in our ability to make sure that Wikidata Query Service has the
freshest updates from Wikidata, a priority that many of you ranked highly
in the recent survey. Additionally, the new update process will lessen the
impact on Blazegraph itself by moving diff reconciliation away from the
service. This update process will be more stable as a result, with more use
cases like un/deletes handled correctly.
In order to minimize risks of failure during the rollout of the Streaming
Updater, we will be moving individual servers over one at a time. During
the anticipated 7 days this data transfer process will happen (11-18 Oct),
it is possible that some users will see inconsistent behavior or other bugs
while querying. While we encourage these bugs to be filed, please note that
it may be difficult for the Search team to accurately diagnose the source
of these errors due to the nature of the process. We hope for a seamless
transfer, of course, in which users will not notice any errors during the
switchover.
We previously announced the new Streaming Updater being released to test
servers in March 2021
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2021/03#New_WDQ…>;
the changes announced there will now be effective for all WDQS users
effective 18 Oct 2021.
The changes that allow the new Streaming Updater to reduce update lag comes
with two notable changes, which have the potential to break current usage
and workflows:
1.
Blank nodes in Wikidata have been skolemized
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_Query_Service/Blank_Node_Skolemizat…>.
From a user perspective, (1) queries using isBlank() will need to be
rewritten; (2) queries using isIRI/isURI will need to be verified; (3)
WDQS results will no longer include blank nodes.
2.
Constraint Fetching -- specifically wikibase:hasViolationForConstraint
-- will be temporarily disabled until we are able to expose constraint
violations in a more production-ready way
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T192565>.
For more details on these changes, please refer again to our prior
announcement
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2021/03#New_WDQ…>
.
We find it encouraging that the new Streaming Updater has not caused major
relevant issues in the last six months while it has been on
https://query-preview.wikidata.org/. We understand these changes may not be
optimal for everyone. However, we believe the ability to greatly reduce
Wikidata’s edit lag will be a beneficial improvement for all editors.
We’re excited to ship the new Flink-based Streaming Updater to production,
and believe this is a significant step in scaling Wikidata and WDQS. As
always, we encourage you to report technical problems
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Report_a_technical_problem/WDQS_and_…>
and/or leave general comments/feedback in Project Chat
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat>.
Best,
WMF Search & WMDE
—
*Mike Pham* (he/him)
Sr Product Manager, Search
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
The Wikipedia & Education User Group invites you to attend our next Open
Meeting via Zoom on Wednesday, October 13, from 4 pm UTC to 5:30 pm UTC
(see your time zone here: https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1634140801).
As usual for our Open Meetings, we will provide updates from the Wikipedia
& Education User Group board, then leave most of the time for our guest
speakers.
Our guest speakers this month will be Amanda Rust and Amy Ruskin, who will
speak on their work with Wikidata in an educational library setting, and
Thomas Shafee, who will discuss the WikiJournals and their bridging of the
Wikipedia-academia divide.
Our speakers' biographies:
* Amanda Rust is the Associate Director for Services in the Digital
Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. She’ll speak
about how Wikidata fits into an initiative to collaboratively document
neighborhood public art data in Boston. By focusing on public art outside
of more well-known downtown areas, this initiative hopes to highlight the
history of art and artists in historically marginalized neighborhoods.
* Amy Ruskin is the Data Engineer in the Digital Scholarship Group in the
Northeastern University Library. She will discuss the process of setting up
the Boston neighborhood public art project in Wikidata, including
determining data models and creating a WikiProject page.
* Thomas Shafee is an evolutionary biochemist and data scientist based at
La Trobe Uni in Australia. He'll talk on the work he does on bridging the
Wikipedia-academia divide by forming compatible interfaces between the ways
the two communities operate. As part of this, he chairs the WikiJournal
User Group, and is Editor in Chief of the WikiJournal of Science and an
editor for PLOS Genetics. Through these, non-Wikimedian scholars can write
new high-accuracy Wikipedia pages, and existing Wikipedia pages are put
through external peer review.
We hope you can join us!
The meeting will be hosted via this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81371223837?pwd=K3dQZnh3WU9TYTY3MzBOV1l4WnBiZz09
Meeting ID: 813 7122 3837
Passcode: 153195
If you would like to be added to the Google Calendar invite, please send me
an email offlist.
Wikidata,
Abstract Wikipedia,
Hello. I am recently thinking about objectivity and subjectivity with respect to natural language generation, in particular in the contexts of story generation using historical data [1][2].
In the near future, digital humanities scholars – in particular historians – could modify collections of data and finetune generation-related parameters, watching as resultant multimodal historical narratives emerged and varied. In these regards, we can envision both computer-aided and automated historical narrative generation tools and technologies.
Could AI be a long-sought objective narrator for historians? Is all narration, or all language use, inherently subjective? What might the nature of “generation-related parameters” and “finetuning” be for style and subjectivity [3][4][5][6][7][8] when generating natural language and multimodal historical narratives from historical data [1][2]?
Thank you. Hopefully, these topics are interesting.
Best regards,
Adam Sobieski
[1] Metilli, Daniele, Valentina Bartalesi, and Carlo Meghini. "A Wikidata-based tool for building and visualising narratives." International Journal on Digital Libraries 20, no. 4 (2019): 417-432.
[2] Metilli, Daniele, Valentina Bartalesi, Carlo Meghini, and Nicola Aloia. "Populating narratives using Wikidata events: An initial experiment." In Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 159-166. Springer, Cham, 2019.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivity
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_(philosophy)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_subjectivity
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focalisation
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_view_(philosophy)
Hi all,
Join the Research Team at the Wikimedia Foundation [1] for their monthly
Office hours next Tuesday, 2021-10-05, at 16:00-17:00 UTC (9am PT/6pm
CEST). To participate, join the video-call via this link [2]. There is no
set agenda - feel free to add your item to the list of topics in the
etherpad [3] (You can do this after you join the meeting, too.), otherwise
you are welcome to also just hang out. More detailed information (e.g.
about how to attend) can be found here [4]. Through these office hours, we
aim to make ourselves more available to answer some of the research related
questions that you as Wikimedia volunteer editors, organizers, affiliates,
staff, and researchers face in your projects and initiatives. Some example
cases we hope to be able to support you in: - You have a specific research
related question that you suspect you should be able to answer with the
publicly available data and you don’t know how to find an answer for it, or
you just need some more help with it. For example, how can I compute the
ratio of anonymous to registered editors in my wiki? - You run into
repetitive or very manual work as part of your Wikimedia contributions and
you wish to find out if there are ways to use machines to improve your
workflows. These types of conversations can sometimes be harder to find an
answer for during an office hour, however, discussing them can help us
understand your challenges better and we may find ways to work with each
other to support you in addressing it in the future. - You want to learn
what the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation does and how we can
potentially support you. Specifically for affiliates: if you are interested
in building relationships with the academic institutions in your country,
we would love to talk with you and learn more. We have a series of programs
that aim to expand the network of Wikimedia researchers globally and we
would love to collaborate with those of you interested more closely in this
space. - You want to talk with us about one of our existing programs [5].
Hope to see many of you, Emily on behalf of the WMF Research Team [1]
https://research.wikimedia.org [2]
https://meet.jit.si/WMF-Research-Office-Hours [3]
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Research-Analytics-Office-hours [4]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
[5] https://research.wikimedia.org/projects.html
--
Emily Lescak (she / her)
Senior Research Community Officer
The Wikimedia Foundation
Hello everyone,
Wikimedia is participating in the winter edition of this year's Outreachy <
https://www.outreachy.org/> [1] (December 2021–February 2022)! The deadline
to submit projects on the Outreachy website is *September 30th, 2021*.
If you would like to share an idea for a project that you would like to
mentor or you are not familiar with the program and want to learn anything
more about it, feel free to reply to this email or leave a note on <
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T289893> [2].
*About the Outreachy program*:
Outreachy offers three-month internships to work remotely in Free and Open
Source Software (FOSS), coding and non-coding projects with experienced
mentors. These internships run twice a year–from May to August and December
to March. Interns are paid a stipend of USD 5,500 for the three months of
work. They also have a USD 500 stipend to travel to conferences and events.
Interns often find employment after their internship with Outreachy
sponsors or jobs that use the skills they learned during their internship.
This program is open to both students and non-students. Outreachy expressly
invites the following people to apply:
- Women (both cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people.
- Anyone who faces under-representation, systematic bias, or
discrimination in the technology industry in their country of residence.
- Residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are
Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American/American Indian,
Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.
See a blog post highlighting experiences and outcomes of interns who
participated in a previous round of Outreachy with Wikimedia <
https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2021/06/02/outreachy-round-21-experiences-an…>
[3]
Some tips for mentors for proposing projects:
- Follow this task description template when you propose a project in
Phabricator: <
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/outreach-programs-projects/> [4].
Add #Outreachy (Round 23) tag to it.
- Remember, the project should require an experienced developer ~15 days
to complete and a newcomer ~3 months.
- Each project should have at least two mentors, and one of them should
hold a technical background.
- When it comes to picking a project, you could propose one that is:
- Relevant for your language community or brings impact to the
Wikimedia ecosystem in the future.
- Welcoming and newcomer-friendly and has a moderate learning curve.
- A new idea you are passionate about, there are no deadlines
attached to it; you always wanted to see it happen but couldn't
due to lack
of resources help!
- About developing a standalone tool (possibly hosted on Wikimedia
Toolforge), with fewer dependencies on Wikimedia's core
infrastructure, it
doesn't necessarily require a specific programming language.
See roles and responsibilities of an Outreachy mentor <
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Mentors> [5].
We look forward to your participation!
Cheers,
Srishti
(On behalf of the organization team)
[1] https://www.outreachy.org/
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T289893
[3]
https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2021/06/02/outreachy-round-21-experiences-an…
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/outreach-programs-projects/
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Mentors
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello all,
The Wikidata ecosystem is a huge galaxy of exciting content, tools,
projects, powered by the communities as well as organizations working with
the software and the data. For seven years, people are gathering, starting
projects, developing tools, improving the editors' workflows, filling
various gaps, working all together to give more people more access to more
knowledge.
In the frame of the WikidataCon 2021, we are organizing the *WikidataCon
community awards
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2021/Contribute/Communit…>*
to
celebrate the work of people and groups involved in Wikidata, and highlight
some projects nominated by the community.
Until *October 10th*, you can participate and *nominate one or several
Wikidata-related projects* that you like, that are useful for you or for
the community. Such a project can be for example: a community gathering or
other initiative that led to great results (WikiProject, event,
editathon…), a tool (gadget, script, external tool…) or any other action
that led to improving Wikidata’s data, the workflow of its editors or the
outreach.
The nomination process is taking place publicly and collaboratively on this
talk page
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikidataCon_2021/Contribute/Com…>.
You can also help improving the description of projects that are already
nominated. After October 10th, the awards committee will select a few
projects that particularly caught their attention, and will present them
during the Wikidata community awards ceremony taking place during the first
day of the WikidataCon
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2021/Program/Day_1_-_Mai…>
.
In order to reach out to the broader audience as possible, feel free to
share this message on the talk pages, social media groups or other channels
where you are active and people from various groups and experiences on
Wikidata can participate. Thanks in advance for your help!
For the Awards committee,
Cheers,
--
Léa Lacroix
Community Engagement Coordinator
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 27/029/42207.
Greetings!
We hope that this email finds you well.
The Afrocine project core team is happy to inform you that the “Months of
African Cinema” Contest is happening again this year in October and
November. We invite Wikimedians all over the world to join in improving
content related to African cinema on Wikipedia!
Please list your username under the participants’ section
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AfroCine/Months_of_Afri…>
of the contest page to indicate your interest in participating in this
contest.[1] The term "African" in the context of this contest, includes
people of African descent from all over the world, which includes the
diaspora and the Caribbean.
The following prizes would be recognized at the end of the contest, as gift
cards.
-
Overall winners
-
1st Prize - $500
-
2nd Prize - $200
-
3rd Prize - $100
-
Diversity Winner - $100
-
Gender-gap Filler - $100
-
Language Winners - up to $100*
For further information about the contest, the prizes, and how to
participate, please visit the contest page here. [2] For further inquiries,
please leave comments on the contest talk page. We look forward to your
participation!
Best regards,
Eben Mlay
Community Liaison, Afrocine project
1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AfroCine/Months_of_Afri…
2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AfroCine/Months_of_Afri…