Hello all,

I am a librarian at the New York Botanical Garden and manage the Plants and People project. (Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/PlantsAndPeople/Lists_of_Articles).

Having use of the catalog feature within Wikidata to manage the Plants and People project has been enormously helpful. This categorization has allowed for us to manage Wikipedia articles that we plan to edit or create related to both individuals and species. Using Wikidata for project management has also meant that project participants have been actively adding content to Wikidata, going beyond the model of a traditional Wikipedia editathon.

Although this project began as being focused on creating and enhancing biographical articles, (primarily for under-represented groups such as women in science), the scope has increased to include botanical taxonomy--an international field of research.

An aspect of this project is a pilot with the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium to upload digitized type specimens into Wikimedia Commons and create Wikidata items associated with the types. This project is in final preparations and will involve participants contributing data to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. Being able to tie the project work together through something like the catalog field is therefore essential not only for project management but also because of the fact that Wikidata is multilingual. Botanical taxonomy is a also a multi-language discipline and having a platform that is not restricted to English (such as Wikidata) allows for the project to have farther-reaching impact. It also encourages non-English speakers to participate in the project, moving towards a common goal and adding content to the Wiki projects.

I have appreciated the great help that editors such as Gerard, Erika and others have afforded me, and I firmly support the argument that having use of a field like the catalog field to tie projects such as Plants and People together is extremely important so that these projects can be productive, attract editors from different language backgrounds, and so that expert editors and contributors can better enhance the Wikimedia projects, including Wikidata.

Thanks for your attention.

Regards,
Esther Jackson

On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 4:40 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

Hoi,
Jane, you fail to understand it. We do not "just publish a catalog somewhere" that is EXACTLY not what is done, Wikidata is given a purpose. The purpose is to prepare editathons for Wikipedia articles. This implies that all the entries have English Wikipedia notability. It implies that there is no list. The Listeria list is prepared as a result of the work done on Wikidata.

So no, we do not publish a catalog somewhere.

What we end up with is trust. The question is, do we trust recognised organisations like the Black Lunch Table, the Smithsonian, the library of the botanical garden of New York, the Cisneros Foundation to work in this way. As we fail to understand the issues, as we fail to trust the intentions of people like myself who help them to realise objectives in the Wikimedia ecosystem we get into adversarial behaviour and the victim is the diversity of the content of Wikidata.

The data build using the "catalog" property can easily be converted once a "proper" property is available. This is why I find it unconscionable that the data was removed by a data professional whose business it is to convert data as and when needed. But let us not dwell on this and come to an understanding. Have a property for the development of data to be used in Wikimedia projects. To make it plain, in such situations it is always possible to have one or multiple people who are the spokes persons for their project.
Thanks,
GerardM

On 5 January 2018 at 09:18, Jane Darnell <jane023@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes to exactly this part of your email: "Gerard and I thought we had consensus on this, but apparently not. We need to find some solution that will address all concerns."
The rest of your email is irrelevant to using the property for "catalog" on person items on Wikidata when there is no catalog. Please just publish the catalog somewhere and then link to it from your "Black Lunch Table" item. If you don't have a catalog and the project itself is building the catalog, then this property is definitely the wrong way to go. I have tried to read through the material you made available, but I still don't see why this project needs any special property at all when you can create listeria lists from unordered lists of item numbers. If you have a list anywhere on a Wikipedia project, you can also run queries using Petscan.

On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 6:12 AM, Brill Lyle <wp.brilllyle@gmail.com> wrote:
First off, thanks so much for the support and assistance in understanding the work being done here. Thanks to those editors who restored the wholesale deletion of the catalog property.

Secondly: While the Black Lunch Table is unique in both its scope and outreach, other projects are using the category in actual "real-world things." They are not internal WikiProjects.

An example of this is the GLAM project for Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC). CPPC is a large and active private Latin American art collection that is improving coverage of Latin American artists on the projects, with the intention of adding at minimum articles in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Which is why Wikidata is so helpful, for it's language neutral interchangeability of the scaffolding of metadata and the establishment of notability via VIAF and other identifiers.

The CPPC GLAM project has multiple task lists and SPARQL queries in Listeria tables. CPPC also plans on doing an image donation to the Commons in the next 6-12 months as the project develops and as full metadata is collected and implemented in the most robust Wikidata-centric way. But first the publications and artist metadata needed to be populated.

Here's the task lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Colección_Patricia_Phelps_de_Cisneros/Tasks

This is not a WikiProject, but is a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) initiative.

So should GLAM outreach and Wikipedia:Meetup projects like BLT have something specially created to cover this type of outreach?

I believe that other potential outreach institutional partners would want to be implementing usage of Wikidata in this way as well. With this Wikidata-in-a-Box approach, the idea is to expand and improve upon common outreach requirements (like task lists), setting up a replicable structure and process that reduces administrative burden and doesn't require re-inventing the wheel over and over again. Because the fact is that there is definitely an exponential need for this work -- and this need is only going to increase and expand in scope, hopefully. As long as things like what happened here don't happen again and discourage this work and destroy outreach efforts.

So it would help to have consensus of some type to support this outreach going forward.

Gerard and I thought we had consensus on this, but apparently not. We need to find some solution that will address all concerns.

Thanks again,

- Erika

Erika Herzog
Wikipedia User:BrillLyle

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 11:21 AM, James Heald <jpm.heald@gmail.com> wrote:
Better to use P4570, or a new bespoke property, since the things these people are being tagged to be part of, or participants in, like "Black Lunch Table", are not external real-world things, but internal wiki-world projects.

It is useful to maintain a distinction between the two -- it helps to avoid the confusion that has been the root of the issue with P972.

-- James.

On 04/01/2018 16:10, Thad Guidry wrote:

"relatedness" or "tagging" is typically handled generically in Wikidata
through the use of "part of" and "has part" properties.
They work terrifically well to apply some generic classification needs such
as those of the Black Lunch Table efforts.

So, an alternative to the current modeling could be...

Are they only persons ? if so, mark them as "participant of" ->
"Q28781198" Black Lunch Table
Are the topics needing some "tagging" for classification sometimes more
than persons ? if so, mark them as "part of" -> "Q28781198" Black Lunch
Table

-Thad

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Esther Marie Jackson

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