Hi! Exciting news! Is this type supposed to work already on test.wikidata.org? I tried a couple of properties and I always get "It is not possible to define a new value for a deleted property." when I try to add statement with this type. BTW, I imagine bots like pywikibot will have to be updated to support new types? Or they will work as strings still? Thanks, -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 10:16 PM Stas Malyshev <smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Can you try again please? And in an in-cognito window? I just tried it and it works for me: https://test.wikidata.org/wiki/Q649 We've had some issues with local store though. The datatype changes but the value type stays string. So depending on what they use they might need to be adapted. 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 27/029/42207.

Hi! Weird, does work for me incognito but not when logged in. RDF export seems to be fine, except that we need to update OWL and docs for new types, I'll check pywikibot a bit later. -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org

On 02.02.2016 23:31, Stas Malyshev wrote: That's an important point (which my question was aiming at): What are the datatype identifiers used in JSON for the two new types? And what will be used in RDF? Besides the information that the new types are both using string values, this is probably the first thing that consumers really need to know. Lydia, can you tell us? Cheers, Markus

It is a bit strange to defines a data type in terms of a library of functions in another language. Or is just me that thinks this is a bit odd? What about MathML? On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 12:06 PM, Markus Krötzsch < markus(a)semantic-mediawiki.org&gt; wrote:

Hoi, Do I understand that this is a special for English Wikipedia only ?? REALLY ?? Thanks, GerardM On 3 February 2016 at 13:52, Schubotz, Moritz &lt;schubotz(a)tu-berlin.de&gt; wrote:

Hoi, What does it do then? I understand that it is a dialect and the only use I understand is English WIkipedia. Thanks, GerardM On 3 February 2016 at 13:59, Daniel Kinzler &lt;daniel.kinzler(a)wikimedia.de&gt; wrote:

On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 12:05 PM Markus Krötzsch < markus(a)semantic-mediawiki.org&gt; wrote: Good point. Daniel is working on it: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T125648 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T125647 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 27/029/42207.

Am 03.02.2016 um 14:31 schrieb Markus Krötzsch: Markus, this TeX dialoect is not a new invention by Moritz. It's what the Math extension for MediaWiki has been using for over a decade now, and it's used on hundreds of thousands of pages on Wikipedia. All that we are doing now is making this same exact syntax available for property values on wikibase, using the same exact code for rendering it. I think having consistent handling for math formulas between wikitext and wikibase is the right thing to do. Of course it would have been nice for MediaWiki to not invent it's own TeX dialect for this, but it's 10 years to late for that complaint now. Moritz, I seem to recall that the new Math extension uses a standalone service for rendering TeX to PNG, SVG, or MathML. Can that service easily be used outside the context of MediaWiki? -- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

On 03.02.2016 14:38, Daniel Kinzler wrote: I do not agree with this argument. One could use a simplified version that is compatible with Wikipedia *and* with the rest of the world. We do not have MediaWiki markup in our text data, in spite of it being widely used on Wikipedia for many years -- instead, we now introduce a subset of it (the part you could put into <math>). If we have settled for a subset, why not use one that works with more commonly used tools as well? I don't think that MediaWiki LaTeX users would find it very hard to go back to the LaTeX they use elsewhere (in their own documents, on StackExchange, etc.). A question you should ask when making extensions to the Wikidata data model is how much it will cost your data users to keep supporting Wikidata content in full. Such little twists, for a few extra commands, are creating extra work for many people. The initial announcement one week before roll-out in the live system is not ideal either, adding some urgency to make this even more expensive. Now, four days later, even the final JSON datatype id for this has not been communicated yet ... we have 5 days left to update our code and make new releases. Of course, this schedule would leave no time for downstream users of our tools to update to the new version. Data model updates are costly. Don't make them on a week's notice, without prior discussion, and without having any documentation ready to give to data users. It would also be good to announce breaking technical changes more prominently on wikidata-tech as well. It would also be nice to include some motivation in your announcement (like "we expect at least 100K items -- 0.5% of current items -- to use properties of this type"). In the case of math, I could find some infoboxes that use LaTeX, so I guess this is what you are aiming for? I am not sure how many pages use such data though (inline math is of course very frequent, but it's not something you would store on Wikidata). If everybody can see why this is really needed, it will also increase acceptance in spite of some technical quirks. Regards, Markus

Hi Markus, with regard to the beta status: I think if word was open source it would be called word-beta. Mathoid can be installed locally, via npm install mathoid. If your application supports HTML5 you can just include the MathML returned by your local mathoid installation (or take the cached version from the service wmf provides for the public benefits. You could also install your own restbase instance for caching. However, this requires some technical skills. Gabriel Wicke and me are working on Docker Containers, to simplify the installation procedure. When you use MathML there are (in theory) no problems with the styling and the integration to your custom application. However, for devices that do not fully support HTML5 the fallback images are not optimal, since their shape is fixed. They look similar to the way how LaTeX would render the input and do not adjust to the layout. While LaTeX is appreciated by many scientists, web browsers are no TeX renders and display the declarative style information. Note, that this is a completely different approach from imperative TeX typesetting instructions. MathJax now tries to support imperative typesetting instructions within a declarative document. While this is a nice bridge technology, we should finally aim for full declaratively. Putting that in a broader picture, I completely share your initial skepticism in starting with this texvc dialect. The optimal way would certainly be to support content MathML to support all the formula semantics https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/chapter4.html . However, while this is a nice idea I think it's not very likely at the moment that people would enter content MathML expressions. Therefore, I think it's reasonable to start with the same format that used within Wikipedia, and keep the formats in sync. For the future one could image a tex dialect that includes semantic macros that link to the semantic concepts as defined in the MathML sepc For example the following input $ Z(t) = \exp@{\iunit \vartheta(t)} \RiemannZeta@{\tfrac{1}{2}+\iunit t} $ Which would be rendered as displayed here http://drmf.wmflabs.org/wiki/Formula:DLMF:25.10:E1 The input form above was used by the editors of the DLMF http://dlmf.nist.gov/ to produce a digital version of the Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene A. Stegun. While there are a lot of plans what could be done in the future like for instance - Identifier Namespaces in Mathematical Notation http://de.slideshare.net/AlexeyGrigorev/identifier-namespaces-in-mathematic…) - Wolfram Alpha integration https://www.dima.tu-berlin.de/menue/theses/open_theses/msc_integrating_comp… We still need to walk before we run. I.e. start with something simple and plan more advanced stuff for the future. The intermediate next steps are discussed here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T67397 If you think that there is an idea that is ready to implement please share it in the structured task tracker. Thank you again for all your input and the interest in that project. Moritz *Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student in the Database Systems and Information Management Group. While this message reflects my personal opinion, I might have been influenced from Database Research ideas. Moreover, I'm director of the MathML association and there committed to the association goals in enabling math rendering in all Web rendering engines http://mathml-association.org/ . In addition, I'm an offsite collaborator of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the USA and I really appreciate standards. Moritz Schubotz TU Berlin, Fakultät IV DIMA - Sekr. EN7 Raum E-N 741 Einsteinufer 17 D-10587 Berlin Germany Tel.: +49 30 314 22784 Mobil:+49 1578 047 1397 E-Mail: schubotz(a)tu-berlin.de Skype: Schubi87 ICQ: 200302764 Msn: Moritz(a)Schubotz.de -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Markus Krötzsch [mailto:markus@semantic-mediawiki.org] Gesendet: Donnerstag, 4. Februar 2016 08:20 An: Schubotz, Moritz; Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Betreff: Re: AW: AW: [Wikidata] upcoming deployments/features Hi Moritz, On 03.02.2016 15:25, Schubotz, Moritz wrote: This is the API you said "has been opened to the public just moments ago" and which describes itself as "currently in beta testing"? That seems a bit shaky to say the least. In your email, you said that this API was for extracting LaTeX package names and identifiers, not for rendering content, so I have not looked at it for this purpose. How does this compare to MathJax in terms of usage? Are the output types similar? It seems your solution adds the dependency on an external server, so this cannot be used in offline mode, I suppose? How does it support styling of content for your own application, e.g., how do you select the fonts to be used? I think we agree that real documentation should be a bit more than an unexplained link in an email. Anyway, it is not your role to provide documentation on new Wikidata features or to make sure that stakeholders are taken along when new features are deployed, so don't worry too much about this. I am sure your students did a good job implementing this, and from there on it is really in other people's hands. Cheers, Markus

Hi Moritz, On 04.02.2016 12:08, Schubotz, Moritz wrote: :-D You sound like me when I was a student. However, let's be serious: there are quality criteria in software engineering, and "open source" is just a license model and has nothing to do with these. The site you linked says "beta", but the API input underneath says "unstable", which sounds as if it might change in incompatible ways in the future. This sounds like more work for me as a user who would need to rely on this. That's not what I meant. As I understand, you could have a Javascript application using MathJax that, once loaded, will be able to render all MathJax-compatile math even when you are offline, without requiring you to install anything on your machine. You could also provide these resources locally on your intranet without running a dedicated service. Also, to be clear: for me, this is not a question of "Mathoid vs MathJax". What I was suggesting was to use a subset of LaTeX that works in both, so that implementers have a choice of what they like most. I am sure they both have their pros and cons. I could not agree more, but for this very reason it is hard to see how TeX could be a good basis for this in general. Any tool that translates from TeX to MathML must make some sense of the spacial relationship of symbols as typeset by a LaTeX program, which can only ever be an approximate, heuristic process. This is all good, but as you put it, it is necessarily bridge technology. (yes, obviously, this is not a workable surface syntax) You are arguing as if we could change datatypes every month or so. Wikidata is a big, slow-moving project. People rely on it. When you introduce a new type of data, you get a significant number of people started entering such data, editing it, developing own quality criteria and guidelines for it, building external applications that use special libraries, and so on. Why is it so hard to build a visual editor for Wikipedia? It's not because there is no technical route to do it, it is because we have to deal with more than a decade of history in our databases. Your arguments above are only about technology, disregarding the users (it's like saying "Let's just start with Wikitext -- we can always move to a visual editor in a few years!"). It seems that, however, the move you make now is what will hinder and slow down the transition you are hoping for. I also have the feeling that you are not aware of the way in which Wikidata is used. Our data is not just an internal source code like the wikitext in Wikipedia might be -- it is our main content. Your mathoid display, however good it is, is just a UI. The real data is LaTeX now: you made it into the main *exchange format* for math on Wikidata. Don't get me wrong: it might still be for the best. Maybe a real, semantic math markup is so far away that we just cannot wait for it. Just like Wikipedia would never have happened if they would have waited for visual editors to become available. On the other hand, Wikipedia is also one of the last sites on the planet that will get to use such technology. There is always a trade-off. I have been (and still am) missing a discussion of the costs and benefits of this. This whole issue is a communication problem much more than a technical problem (in particular, don't apply my critique this to your programming work). I am not sure I really got all the "intermediate next steps" from the rather long bug discussion there, but thanks for the useful pointer to where this design has come into being (I had not seen this in previous discussions). Here is what I got: It all started with the desire to display and calculate, but the latter was given up. It seems that the option of using a smaller subset of LaTeX to improve compatibility with other tools has not been considered there. What I was also missing is some technical description of what the datatype should eventually contain (like a simple grammar that defines all strings that are permitted as input). There are some interesting confusions about what "semantics" of an operator would even mean. For example, there is the question whether the join and meet in a Boolean algebra are the same as the conjunction and disjunction in first-order logic (clearly not, and even less so than TomTom said already: one is a "semantic" operation on Boolean algebras while the other is an operator in a term algebra used to define the *syntax* of logic, which is not a Boolean algebra at all; the corresponding semantic operations in first-order logic would be a join and a union, which would agree with meet and join on the two-element Boolean algebra if you would define your semantics bottom up as in most logic textbooks -- and, yes, you could factorise the sytnax into a Lindenbaum algebra too, which gives you yet another way to get a Boolean algebra here). If you look at that case, you can see that the idea of a semantic markup might be hopelessly futuristic. I am ready to accept that layout is the only thing we can hope for in this domain, and that therefore LaTeX is the best choice. But then one could still use a standard format rather than one with those weird pseudo-semantic macros like \and and \or that pretend to refer to an operator when in reality they do not. It is interesting to note that LaTeX primarily uses command names that describe the shape of the glyphs and avoid any semantic connotation (\bowtie rather than \join, \wedge rather than \and, etc.). I think there is a lot of wisdom in that. Thanks for communicating ;-) Markus P.S. You mentioned that you are not on this mailing list. You really should be, given that you are apparently the main contact person for one of the (small number of) datatypes we have in Wikidata. It is a huge responsibility. P.P.S. I can see now in your footer that you are also involved with MathML. I find it quite ironic that I am trying to convince you that a custom LaTeX dialect is maybe not what we should have picked to exchange math on the Web. Do you realise that you could have pushed this whole thing into using MathML internally, offering LaTeX only as a surface syntax and compatibility mode for texvc? It even seems as if you have the technology ready to do this.

Am 04.02.2016 um 08:03 schrieb Markus Krötzsch: I agree that it would be nice to have a "strict TeX mode" for the math extension. I'm not sure whether we would enable that on wikidata. While it would make the life of consumers easier, it would make the life of people importing from wikipedia harder. But perhaps it would be worth it, especially if the use of "extra stuff" is actually rare on wikipedia. Moritz, how hard would it be to add a "strict mode" that would disallow any non-standard syntax? -- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

Daniel Kinzler, 04/02/2016 19:02: I second the question, which I think warrants a new thread. Remember to file a task in Phabricator when the dust settles down. :) Nemo

Hi Markus, regardless of the beta label of mathoid: If something is broken, report it on Phabricator and it will be fixed quite soon. Maybe it would be wise, if we released mathoid 1.0, to get rid of that label. I think semantic math is possible, but not today. I invite you to discuss the efforts in building a global digital mathematical library, but maybe this is not the best thread for that. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata thus data from Wikipedia can be exported to wikidata and displayed on Wikipedia thereafter. What we are doing here is supporting math according to the definition of <math> tag in wikitext. Nothing more and nothing less. I'm convinced that starting with this approach is the best thing we can do. Writing a script that would convert that to MathML in the future is well studied. Going back from MathML to TeX is currently not possible, to the best of my knowledge. Best Moritz Moritz Schubotz TU Berlin, Fakultät IV DIMA - Sekr. EN7 Raum E-N 741 Einsteinufer 17 D-10587 Berlin Germany Tel.: +49 30 314 22784 Mobil:+49 1578 047 1397 E-Mail: schubotz(a)tu-berlin.de Skype: Schubi87 ICQ: 200302764 Msn: Moritz(a)Schubotz.de -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Markus Krötzsch [mailto:markus@semantic-mediawiki.org] Gesendet: Donnerstag, 4. Februar 2016 18:47 An: Schubotz, Moritz; Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Betreff: Re: AW: AW: AW: [Wikidata] upcoming deployments/features Hi Moritz, On 04.02.2016 12:08, Schubotz, Moritz wrote: :-D You sound like me when I was a student. However, let's be serious: there are quality criteria in software engineering, and "open source" is just a license model and has nothing to do with these. The site you linked says "beta", but the API input underneath says "unstable", which sounds as if it might change in incompatible ways in the future. This sounds like more work for me as a user who would need to rely on this. That's not what I meant. As I understand, you could have a Javascript application using MathJax that, once loaded, will be able to render all MathJax-compatile math even when you are offline, without requiring you to install anything on your machine. You could also provide these resources locally on your intranet without running a dedicated service. Also, to be clear: for me, this is not a question of "Mathoid vs MathJax". What I was suggesting was to use a subset of LaTeX that works in both, so that implementers have a choice of what they like most. I am sure they both have their pros and cons. I could not agree more, but for this very reason it is hard to see how TeX could be a good basis for this in general. Any tool that translates from TeX to MathML must make some sense of the spacial relationship of symbols as typeset by a LaTeX program, which can only ever be an approximate, heuristic process. This is all good, but as you put it, it is necessarily bridge technology. (yes, obviously, this is not a workable surface syntax) You are arguing as if we could change datatypes every month or so. Wikidata is a big, slow-moving project. People rely on it. When you introduce a new type of data, you get a significant number of people started entering such data, editing it, developing own quality criteria and guidelines for it, building external applications that use special libraries, and so on. Why is it so hard to build a visual editor for Wikipedia? It's not because there is no technical route to do it, it is because we have to deal with more than a decade of history in our databases. Your arguments above are only about technology, disregarding the users (it's like saying "Let's just start with Wikitext -- we can always move to a visual editor in a few years!"). It seems that, however, the move you make now is what will hinder and slow down the transition you are hoping for. I also have the feeling that you are not aware of the way in which Wikidata is used. Our data is not just an internal source code like the wikitext in Wikipedia might be -- it is our main content. Your mathoid display, however good it is, is just a UI. The real data is LaTeX now: you made it into the main *exchange format* for math on Wikidata. Don't get me wrong: it might still be for the best. Maybe a real, semantic math markup is so far away that we just cannot wait for it. Just like Wikipedia would never have happened if they would have waited for visual editors to become available. On the other hand, Wikipedia is also one of the last sites on the planet that will get to use such technology. There is always a trade-off. I have been (and still am) missing a discussion of the costs and benefits of this. This whole issue is a communication problem much more than a technical problem (in particular, don't apply my critique this to your programming work). I am not sure I really got all the "intermediate next steps" from the rather long bug discussion there, but thanks for the useful pointer to where this design has come into being (I had not seen this in previous discussions). Here is what I got: It all started with the desire to display and calculate, but the latter was given up. It seems that the option of using a smaller subset of LaTeX to improve compatibility with other tools has not been considered there. What I was also missing is some technical description of what the datatype should eventually contain (like a simple grammar that defines all strings that are permitted as input). There are some interesting confusions about what "semantics" of an operator would even mean. For example, there is the question whether the join and meet in a Boolean algebra are the same as the conjunction and disjunction in first-order logic (clearly not, and even less so than TomTom said already: one is a "semantic" operation on Boolean algebras while the other is an operator in a term algebra used to define the *syntax* of logic, which is not a Boolean algebra at all; the corresponding semantic operations in first-order logic would be a join and a union, which would agree with meet and join on the two-element Boolean algebra if you would define your semantics bottom up as in most logic textbooks -- and, yes, you could factorise the sytnax into a Lindenbaum algebra too, which gives you yet another way to get a Boolean algebra here). If you look at that case, you can see that the idea of a semantic markup might be hopelessly futuristic. I am ready to accept that layout is the only thing we can hope for in this domain, and that therefore LaTeX is the best choice. But then one could still use a standard format rather than one with those weird pseudo-semantic macros like \and and \or that pretend to refer to an operator when in reality they do not. It is interesting to note that LaTeX primarily uses command names that describe the shape of the glyphs and avoid any semantic connotation (\bowtie rather than \join, \wedge rather than \and, etc.). I think there is a lot of wisdom in that. Thanks for communicating ;-) Markus P.S. You mentioned that you are not on this mailing list. You really should be, given that you are apparently the main contact person for one of the (small number of) datatypes we have in Wikidata. It is a huge responsibility. P.P.S. I can see now in your footer that you are also involved with MathML. I find it quite ironic that I am trying to convince you that a custom LaTeX dialect is maybe not what we should have picked to exchange math on the Web. Do you realise that you could have pushed this whole thing into using MathML internally, offering LaTeX only as a surface syntax and compatibility mode for texvc? It even seems as if you have the technology ready to do this.