User talk:Spinster

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Hello, welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian.

Here are some useful links in case you haven't already found them;

If you have any questions, see the help pages or add a question to the village pump. Angela 18:38, 1 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Hallo Spinster, nog een laat welkom als Nederlandstalige hier op de Engelse wikipedia en veel plezier gewenst. Ellywa 07:58, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hi Spinster ! I have started out on the Hasselblad Award, and - because they are this years winner - on Bernd and Hilla Becher. Feel free to continue !! P G Henning 21:02, 27 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]


Artist categories[edit]

Hi Spinster,
Nice to see someone else working on categorising artists. I take it that with your new category, Category:Contemporary artists, you are thinking of artists working in contemporary art as opposed to living artists or currently active artists. In which case it might be a good idea to move some of the other arts categories to be sub categories. eg;

Or were you looking at Category:Contemporary artists as being on the line of artistic periods alongside Category:Renaissance art, in which case I guess categories relating to the medium should be kept orthoganal to categories relating to the period. Any thoughts? -- Solipsist 13:52, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi Solipsist,
I see the Category:Contemporary artists as suitable for artists who fit into the description on the page about contemporary art; i.e. artists whose current work is not quite modern anymore. The definition of contemporary art will change in the future, and so will the related categories, but I don't see that as a problem.
Subcategories are of course very useful, the ones you mention are excellent examples. I think artists can belong to several categories and subcategories at the same time, such as Louise Bourgeois who has a long and diverse and still very active career. Spinster 14:11, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Looking at that further, the classifications: modern art = 19thC - 1970 and contemporary art = 1970 - present, suggests that we should treat Category:Contemporary artists as a period (perhaps moving it to Category:Contemporary art) and keep the working media categories (Category:Painters, Category:Sculptors, Category:Installation artists etc.) independent of the periods. Then by necessity, all Category:Video artists would have to be in Category:Contemporary art, but that wouldn't be true of Category:Painters. We would then need a few more period categories - Category:Baroque art, Category:Romantic art, Category:Prehistoric art as per Art history -- Solipsist 15:26, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
So, how about maintaining parallel period and artist categories... such as
Especially for more recent periods, I find it pretty valuable to maintain separate categories of artists, because this seems quite useful to me from a user's point of view. And indeed, media (and movement: Category:Conceptual artists) categories are independent from this system, though they can overlap and intersect in various ways with the periods.
Actually, I see these categories as rather flexible tools myself... shouldn't be too rigid, as long as users can find their way in them. Spinster 15:49, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Sounds good. I think we are converging on the same answer. A word of caution (if you haven't already come across it), the last time I looked it wasn't trivial to move a category. So you might need to get a sysops help if you want to move Category:Contemporary artists to Category:Contemporary art. Of course this is one of the obstacles to categories being flexible, which I think is a laudable aim.
That just leaves worrying about how to incoporate nationalities. On the whole I'm inclined to ignore them for the moment, but someone has made a start by following the pattern in other categories and creating Category:Dutch painters (half of whom I suspect are Flemish, but that doesn't seem to be troubling any one except me...) -- Solipsist 17:35, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Nationalities: I've also seen artists who are generically categorized under "people of country X", like Constantin Brancusi under Category:Romanian people. It makes sense to maintain Category:Flemish painters, but not that much to create Category:Romanian sculptors (yet?). So I think both systems can be used with common sense. Ah, and check Category talk:Dutch painters, you successfully triggered some patriottic feelings here ;D -- Spinster 18:21, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Picking up further discussion at Category talk:Art -- Solipsist 20:44, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Architecture and Architectural History[edit]

I'm trying to add some more depth to the History page (which was just a page of links) as well as to the Architecture page, which seems to be a rather dry discussion of form, function and aesthetics, any suggestions? Would like to entertain the role Architecture plays in ordering society. I see you're a fan dutch modernism, how about adding that dutch spin?

Dutch Wikipedia symposium in Rotterdam (27/11/2004)[edit]

Hi,

As a personal initiative I want to mention to you http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Symposium/Najaar_2004

There have been some voices that Dutch-speaking Belgian wikipedians might be underrepresented at that venue, so I took the liberty to post this message on the talk page of all people I found on Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Belgium.

If this doesn't apply to you (e.g. while French-speaking, or not interested in Dutch wikipedia,...) simply ignore this message.

--Francis Schonken 09:45, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hoi Francis, though I'm mostly active (and then, not even very much ;-) at the English Wikipedia, this sounds like an excellent initiative. So I'll try to be there, and will advertize it a bit more. - Spinster 20:54, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing[edit]

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

GLAMcamp 15-16 September London[edit]

Hi Shani, I notice that you have marked that you are interested in the GLAMcamp that Wikimedia UK is running. Please confirm your attendance by either booking on here, or emailing me for more info on daria.cybulska@wikimedia.org.uk. Thanks! Daria Cybulska (WMUK) (talk) 16:29, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Article Feedback deployment[edit]

Hey Spinster; I'm dropping you this note because you've used the article feedback tool in the last month or so. On Thursday and Friday the tool will be down for a major deployment; it should be up by Saturday, failing anything going wrong, and by Monday if something does :). Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 13 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for February 27[edit]

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Invitation to join the Ten Year Society[edit]

Dear Sandra,

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Ten Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for ten years or more.

Best regards, — Scott • talk 13:13, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the kind invitation! Spinster (talk) 18:24, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your submission at AfC Golovnin Incident was accepted[edit]

Golovnin Incident, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
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Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia!

MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:17, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for June 2[edit]

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Disambiguation link notification for June 21[edit]

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Thx![edit]

Ha Spinster, dank voor je welkomstboodschap! Voor zover je dat nog niet doorhad: ik meen ook te weten dat we elkaar in de echte wereld ook weleens hebben ontmoet, toen het hierover ging: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_Mutual_Heritage Gerritdeveer1597 (talk) 10:31, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Aha Ik was al benieuwd! Spinster (talk) 11:18, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your submission at Articles for creation: The Discovery of America has been accepted[edit]

The Discovery of America, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
The article has been assessed as B-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. Note that because you are a logged-in user, you can create articles yourself, and don't have to post a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for Creation if you prefer.

Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia!

FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 17:10, 4 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
All credits go to Pie7, who wrote the article! Thank you. Spinster (talk) 17:37, 4 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent article[edit]

Congrats on the article submitted. I was pleasantly surprised (we usually get garbage submitted every minute)! Regards, FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 17:53, 4 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

DYK nomination of The Discovery of America[edit]

Hello! Your submission of The Discovery of America at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! Yakikaki (talk) 19:37, 6 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for The Discovery of America[edit]

 — Crisco 1492 (talk) 21:03, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimania 2014 Meeting You[edit]

Hi.

We met at the hekp desk. Good to meet an art historian. I work on some woman artist biographies in Philadelphia. A lot of women artists are neglected on Wiikipedia, and I try to correct that. --DThomsen8 (talk) 10:34, 9 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Stichting Academisch Erfgoed[edit]

I am astonished by the article Stichting Academisch Erfgoed here in the English Wikipedia, as it is in Dutch! I am going to tag it as foreign language, but maybe you can help.--DThomsen8 (talk) 12:47, 11 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I finally got around to translating it - hesitantly, as I've been employed by the SAE, and am wary of POV language. It was very nice meeting you at Wikimania! Spinster (talk) 09:42, 19 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for January 19[edit]

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Invitation[edit]

Have you heard of the Kaffeeklatsch? It is a test area for women to hear and support each other. The idea came about as a result of a discussion at meta regarding my IdeaLab proposal (yet open) for WikiProject Women.

Now that the klatsch has survived an MfD and WMF legal has said that it does not violate the non discrimination policy,[1] I am looking for women editors who might like to join.

Although I have started a couple of discussions, they are not urgent. For now, the "Please introduce yourself" discussion is more important! I want to take it slow at first and build a small group before trying to address heavy topics or come up with big goals. For now, the klatsch is there as a sort of refuge. I hope you will consider joining, and invite other women editors, too, if you wish. Lightbreather (talk) 23:13, 11 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Art+Feminism in Brussels and NL[edit]

Dear Sandra, thank you for your message, it would indeed be interesting to exchange some information with each other! Your to do lists of wanted articles in NL is great! I will see if I can add some wikipedia articles to edit. How will the Google hangout work? I’ve never organized that… If you know people in Belgium/Brussels, can you share the link of the Brussels event? I will share yours with my contacts in the Netherlands! Let’s keep in contact, Lfurter (talk) 15:48, 16 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Points, points, points!![edit]

Sandra, if you upload 18 images but only use 2 in Wikipedia, the uploads still count, no? (didn't think of it before) Jane (talk) 10:54, 8 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I guess so :-) Spinster (talk) 11:40, 8 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

User:Spinster/Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon: Revision history[edit]

Hi, Spinster, are files added manually removed too? Thank you for your time. Lotje (talk) 10:48, 14 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Lotje! I'm not sure if I understand your question, so feel free to ask further. The list on that page is 100% automatically created and updated (daily) by a bot, ListeriaBot, created and maintained by Magnus Manske. The bot takes the contents from Wikidata. I think that manual additions to the list on my user subpage will be overwritten by the bot - so if you want to make changes, you have to do those edits on Wikidata. Spinster (talk) 15:31, 14 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom elections are now open![edit]

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:52, 23 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Notification about disabling the Wikipedia collections tool[edit]

Thank you for using the collections feature in Wikipedia beta! Due to technical and moderation issues, we will be turning off this experimental feature. Your collections will be available for viewing and export until March 1st. If you would like to save your collection as links on a special Wikipedia page, please fill out the following form. If you are interested in giving your feedback about Wikipedia Collections please do so here.

Thanks,

Jon Katz
Product manager, Wikimedia Foundation
Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 23:51, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure![edit]

Hi Spinster! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.

-- 08:09, Wednesday, March 2, 2016 (UTC)

Mission 1 Mission 2 Mission 3 Mission 4 Mission 5 Mission 6 Mission 7
Say Hello to the World An Invitation to Earth Small Changes, Big Impact The Neutral Point of View The Veil of Verifiability The Civility Code Looking Good Together

A page you started (The Art Gallery of Jan Gildemeester Jansz) has been reviewed![edit]

Thanks for creating The Art Gallery of Jan Gildemeester Jansz, Spinster!

Wikipedia editor Mduvekot just reviewed your page, and wrote this note for you:

What a great article. A joy to read. Thanks!

To reply, leave a comment on Mduvekot's talk page.

Learn more about page curation.

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open![edit]

Hello, Spinster. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. Mdann52 (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open![edit]

Hello, Spinster. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 2 – 13 July 2017[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 2 – 13 July 2017

Editorial: Core models and topics[edit]

Wikimedians interest themselves in everything under the sun — and then some. Discussion on "core topics" may, oddly, be a fringe activity, and was popular here a decade ago.

The situation on Wikidata today does resemble the halcyon days of 2006 of the English Wikipedia. The growth is there, and the reliability and stylistic issues are not yet pressing in on the project. Its Berlin conference at the end of October will have five years of achievement to celebrate. Think Wikimania Frankfurt 2005.

Progress must be made, however, on referencing "core facts". This has two parts: replacing "imported from Wikipedia" in referencing by external authorities; and picking out statements, such as dates and family relationships, that must not only be reliable but be seen to be reliable.

In addition, there are many properties on Wikidata lacking a clear data model. An emerging consensus may push to the front key sourcing and biomedical properties as requiring urgent attention. Wikidata's "manual of style" is currently distributed over thousands of discussions. To make it coalesce, work on such a core is needed.

Links[edit]


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Facto Post – Issue 3 – 11 August 2017[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 3 – 11 August 2017

Wikimania report[edit]

Interviewed by Facto Post at the hackathon, Lydia Pintscher of Wikidata said that the most significant recent development is that Wikidata now accounts for one third of Wikimedia edits. And the essential growth of human editing.

Internet-In-A-Box

Impressive development work on Internet-in-a-Box featured in the WikiMedFoundation annual conference on Thursday. Hardware is Raspberry Pi, running Linux and the Kiwix browser. It can operate as a wifi hotspot and support a local intranet in parts of the world lacking phone signal. The medical use case is for those delivering care, who have smartphones but have to function in clinics in just such areas with few reference resources. Wikipedia medical content can be served to their phones, and power supplied by standard lithium battery packages.

Yesterday Katherine Maher unveiled the draft Wikimedia 2030 strategy, featuring a picturesque metaphor, "roads, bridges and villages". Here "bridges" could do with illustration. Perhaps it stands for engineering round or over the obstacles to progress down the obvious highways. Internet-in-a-Box would then do fine as an example.

"Bridging the gap" explains a take on that same metaphor, with its human component. If you are at Wikimania, come talk to WikiFactMine at its stall in the Community Village, just by the 3D-printed display for Bassel Khartabil; come hear T Arrow talk at 3 pm today in Drummond West, Level 3.

Link[edit]

  • Plaudit for the Medical Wikipedia app, content that is loaded into Internet-In-A-Box with other material, such as per-country documentation.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:55, 12 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 4 – 18 September 2017[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 4 – 18 September 2017

Editorial: Conservation data[edit]

The IUCN Red List update of 14 September led with a threat to North American ash trees. The International Union for Conservation of Nature produces authoritative species listings that are peer-reviewed. Examples used as metonyms for loss of species and biodiversity, and discussion of extinction rates, are the usual topics covered in the media to inform us about this area. But actual data matters.

Dorstenia elata, a critically endangered South American herb, contained in Moraceae, the family of figs and mulberries

Clearly, conservation work depends on decisions about what should be done, and where. While animals, particularly mammals, are photogenic, species numbers run into millions. Plant species lie at the base of typical land-based food chains, and vegetation is key to the habitats of most animals.

ContentMine dictionaries, for example as tabulated at d:Wikidata:WikiFactMine/Dictionary list, enable detailed control of queries about endangered species, in their taxonomic context. To target conservation measures properly, species listings running into the thousands are not what is needed: range maps showing current distribution are. Between the will to act, and effective steps taken, the services of data handling are required. There is now no reason at all why Wikidata should not take up the burden.

Links[edit]

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:46, 18 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017

Editorial: Annotations[edit]

Annotation is nothing new. The glossators of medieval Europe annotated between the lines, or in the margins of legal manuscripts of texts going back to Roman times, and created a new discipline. In the form of web annotation, the idea is back, with texts being marked up inline, or with a stand-off system. Where could it lead?

1495 print version of the Digesta of Justinian, with the annotations of the glossator Accursius from the 13th century

ContentMine operates in the field of text and data mining (TDM), where annotation, simply put, can add value to mined text. It now sees annotation as a possible advance in semi-automation, the use of human judgement assisted by bot editing, which now plays a large part in Wikidata tools. While a human judgement call of yes/no, on the addition of a statement to Wikidata, is usually taken as decisive, it need not be. The human assent may be passed into an annotation system, and stored: this idea is standard on Wikisource, for example, where text is considered "validated" only when two different accounts have stated that the proof-reading is correct. A typical application would be to require more than one person to agree that what is said in the reference translates correctly into the formal Wikidata statement. Rejections are also potentially useful to record, for machine learning.

As a contribution to data integrity on Wikidata, annotation has much to offer. Some "hard cases" on importing data are much more difficult than average. There are for example biographical puzzles: whether person A in one context is really identical with person B, of the same name, in another context. In science, clinical medicine require special attention to sourcing (WP:MEDRS), and is challenging in terms of connecting findings with the methodology employed. Currently decisions in areas such as these, on Wikipedia and Wikidata, are often made ad hoc. In particular there may be no audit trail for those who want to check what is decided.

Annotations are subject to a World Wide Web Consortium standard, and behind the terminology constitute a simple JSON data structure. What WikiFactMine proposes to do with them is to implement the MEDRS guideline, as a formal algorithm, on bibliographical and methodological data. The structure will integrate with those inputs the human decisions on the interpretation of scientific papers that underlie claims on Wikidata. What is added to Wikidata will therefore be supported by a transparent and rigorous system that documents decisions.

An example of the possible future scope of annotation, for medical content, is in the first link below. That sort of detailed abstract of a publication can be a target for TDM, adds great value, and could be presented in machine-readable form. You are invited to discuss the detailed proposal on Wikidata, via its talk page.

Links[edit]

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:46, 17 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017

WikidataCon Berlin 28–9 October 2017[edit]

WikidataCon 2017 group photo

Under the heading rerum causas cognescere, the first ever Wikidata conference got under way in the Tagesspiegel building with two keynotes, One was on YAGO, about how a knowledge base conceived ten years ago if you assume automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished: the mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, to be taken off the hands of its author Magnus Manske by the WMF; a Wikibase incubator site is on its way. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development on Wikidata is now not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate automated compilation of dictionaries.

WD-FIST explained

And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops, through to 11 pm on Saturday. Wikidata applies to GLAM work via metadata. It may be used in education, raises issues such as author disambiguation, and lends itself to different types of graphical display and reuse. Many millions of SPARQL queries are run on the site every day. Over the summer a large open science bibliography has come into existence there.

Wikidata's fifth birthday party on the Sunday brought matters to a close. See a dozen and more reports by other hands.

Links[edit]

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2017 election voter message[edit]

Hello, Spinster. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017

A new bibliographical landscape[edit]

At the beginning of December, Wikidata items on individual scientific articles passed the 10 million mark. This figure contrasts with the state of play in early summer, when there were around half a million. In the big picture, Wikidata is now documenting the scientific literature at a rate that is about eight times as fast as papers are published. As 2017 ends, progress is quite evident.

Behind this achievement are a technical advance (fatameh), and bots that do the lifting. Much more than dry migration of metadata is potentially involved, however. If paper A cites paper B, both papers having an item, a link can be created on Wikidata, and the information presented to both human readers, and machines. This cross-linking is one of the most significant aspects of the scientific literature, and now a long-sought open version is rapidly being built up.

The effort for the lifting of copyright restrictions on citation data of this kind has had real momentum behind it during 2017. WikiCite and the I4OC have been pushing hard, with the result that on CrossRef over 50% of the citation data is open. Now the holdout publishers are being lobbied to release rights on citations.

But all that is just the beginning. Topics of papers are identified, authors disambiguated, with significant progress on the use of the four million ORCID IDs for researchers, and proposals formulated to identify methodology in a machine-readable way. P4510 on Wikidata has been introduced so that methodology can sit comfortably on items about papers.

More is on the way. OABot applies the unpaywall principle to Wikipedia referencing. It has been proposed that Wikidata could assist WorldCat in compiling the global history of book translation. Watch this space.

And make promoting #1lib1ref one of your New Year's resolutions. Happy holidays, all!

November 2017 map of geolocated Wikidata items, made by Addshore

Links[edit]

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018

Metadata on the March[edit]

From the days of hard-copy liner notes on music albums, metadata have stood outside a piece or file, while adding to understanding of where it comes from, and some of what needs to be appreciated about its content. In the GLAM sector, the accumulation of accurate metadata for objects is key to the mission of an institution, and its presentation in cataloguing.

Today Wikipedia turns 17, with worlds still to conquer. Zooming out from the individual GLAM object to the ontology in which it is set, one such world becomes apparent: GLAMs use custom ontologies, and those introduce massive incompatibilities. From a recent article by sadads, we quote the observation that "vocabularies needed for many collections, topics and intellectual spaces defy the expectations of the larger professional communities." A job for the encyclopedist, certainly. But the data-minded Wikimedian has the advantages of Wikidata, starting with its multilingual data, and facility with aliases. The controlled vocabulary — sometimes referred to as a "thesaurus" as term of art — simplifies search: if a "spade" must be called that, rather than "shovel", it is easier to find all spade references. That control comes at a cost.

SVG pedestrian crosses road
Zebra crossing/crosswalk, Singapore

Case studies in that article show what can lie ahead. The schema crosswalk, in jargon, is a potential answer to the GLAM Babel of proliferating and expanding vocabularies. Even if you have no interest in Wikidata as such, simply vocabularies V and W, if both V and W are matched to Wikidata, then a "crosswalk" arises from term v in V to w in W, whenever v and w both match to the same item d in Wikidata.

For metadata mobility, match to Wikidata. It's apparently that simple: infrastructure requirements have turned out, so far, to be challenges that can be met.

Links[edit]

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:38, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
m:Grants:Project/ScienceSource is the new ContentMine proposal: please take a look.

Wikidata as Hub[edit]

One way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites.

Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8.

Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL.

Links[edit]

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

Milestone for mix'n'match[edit]

Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal.

Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders.

These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more.

For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading.

Congratulations to Magnus, our data Stakhanovite!

Links[edit]

3D printing
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

The 100 Skins of the Onion[edit]

Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that.

Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron.

Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF.

Red onion cross section

From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart.

Links[edit]

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

ScienceSource funded[edit]

The Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.

A medical canon?

The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen.

The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm.

Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help.

Links[edit]

OpenRefine logo, courtesy of Google
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Respecting MEDRS

Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions.

Close to home also, a template, called {{medrs}} for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter.

This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog.

Evidence pyramid leading up to clinical guidelines, from WP:MEDRS
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Plugging the gaps – Wikimania report

Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources.

Hackathon mentoring table wiring

Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume.

If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online".

Plugbar buildup at the Hackathon
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Neglected diseases
Anti-parasitic drugs being distributed in Côte d'Ivoire
What's a Neglected Disease?, ScienceSource video

To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases.

A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list.

From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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The science publishing landscape

In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings.

The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web.

The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Wikidata imaged

Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock.

Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists.

Gran Teatro, Cáceres, Spain, at night

It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more.

And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more.

Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake.

Birthday logo
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2018 election voter message[edit]

Hello, Spinster. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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WikiCite issue

GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California.

Wikidata training for librarians at WikiCite 2018

In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point.

Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.

Links
Account creation is now open on the ScienceSource wiki, where you can see SPARQL visualisations of text mining.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Learning from Zotero

Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support.

Zotero logo

Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects.

Zotero demo video

There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine.

Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.

Links
Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Everything flows (and certainly data does)

Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?).

Amazon Echo device using the Amazon Alexa service in voice search showdown with the Google rival on an Android phone

Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making.

Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness.

There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.

Links
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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What is a systematic review?

Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources.

PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help?

File:Schittny, Facing East, 2011, Legacy Projects.jpg
2011 photograph by Bernard Schittny of the "Legacy Projects" group

Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen.

Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 28 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiproject United Nations: We need you![edit]

Dear Spinster, I noticed your name was under the participants' list of WikiProject United Nations. I wanted to invite you to contribute to the advancement of this project. Here's how you can do so: 1. Select the latest CC BY SA publications for which no articles have been created yet available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_Nations/Open_Access_text/Education_publications 2. Follow the instructions available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Adding_open_license_text_to_Wikipedia 3. Add the text to Wikipedia (either by creating new articles or adding content to existing ones). Since these are available under CC BY SA, you can copy/paste content and/or edit if need be. 4. Attribute the text using the 'Free-content attribution' template in the 'Sources' section. 5. Add your contribution in the table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_Nations/Open_Access_text/Education_publications Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions! Looking forward to working with you on enriching Wikipedia, one article at a time:)! C.recalde   — Preceding unsigned comment added by C.recalde (talk • contribs) 11:27, 7 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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When in the cloud, do as the APIs do

Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook.

File:Cloud-API-Logo.svg
Logo of Cloud API on Google Cloud Platform

The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API.

APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web.

Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:46, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Completely clouded?
Cloud computing logo

Talk of cloud computing draws a veil over hardware, but also, less obviously but more importantly, obscures such intellectual distinction as matters most in its use. Wikidata begins to allow tasks to be undertaken that were out of easy reach. The facility should not be taken as the real point.

Coming in from another angle, the "executive decision" is more glamorous; but the "administrative decision" should be admired for its command of facts. Think of the attitudes ad fontes, so prevalent here on Wikipedia as "can you give me a source for that?", and being prepared to deal with complicated analyses into specified subcases. Impatience expressed as a disdain for such pedantry is quite understandable, but neither dirty data nor false dichotomies are at all good to have around.

Issue 13 and Issue 21, respectively on WP:MEDRS and systematic reviews, talk about biomedical literature and computing tasks that would be of higher quality if they could be made more "administrative". For example, it is desirable that the decisions involved be consistent, explicable, and reproducible by non-experts from specified inputs.

What gets clouded out is not impossibly hard to understand. You do need to put together the insights of functional programming, which is a doctrinaire and purist but clearcut approach, with the practicality of office software. Loopless computation can be conceived of as a seamless forward march of spreadsheet columns, each determined by the content of previous ones. Very well: to do a backward audit, when now we are talking about Wikidata, we rely on integrity of data and its scrupulous sourcing: and clearcut case analyses. The MEDRS example forces attention on purge attempts such as Beall's list.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Invitation to join the Fifteen Year Society[edit]

Dear Spinster,

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Fifteen Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for fifteen years or more. ​

Best regards, Urhixidur (talk) 16:40, 9 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]


Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019[edit]

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
Text mining display of noun phrases from the US Presidential Election 2012
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Semantic Web and TDM – a ContentMine view

Two dozen issues, and this may be the last, a valediction at least for a while.

It's time for a two-year summation of ContentMine projects involving TDM (text and data mining).

Wikidata and now Structured Data on Commons represent the overlap of Wikimedia with the Semantic Web. This common ground is helping to convert an engineering concept into a movement. TDM generally has little enough connection with the Semantic Web, being instead in the orbit of machine learning which is no respecter of the semantic. Don't break a taboo by asking bots "and what do you mean by that?"

The ScienceSource project innovates in TDM, by storing its text mining results in a Wikibase site. It strives for compliance of its fact mining, on drug treatments of diseases, with an automated form of the relevant Wikipedia referencing guideline MEDRS. Where WikiFactMine set up an API for reuse of its results, ScienceSource has a SPARQL query service, with look-and-feel exactly that of Wikidata's at query.wikidata.org. It also now has a custom front end, and its content can be federated, in other words used in data mashups: it is one of over 50 sites that can federate with Wikidata.

The human factor comes to bear through the front end, which combines a link to the HTML version of a paper, text mining results organised in drug and disease columns, and a SPARQL display of nearby drug and disease terms. Much software to develop and explain, so little time! Rather than telling the tale, Facto Post brings you ScienceSource links, starting from the how-to video, lower right.

ScienceSourceReview, introductory video: but you need run it from the original upload file on Commons
Links for participation

The review tool requires a log in on sciencesource.wmflabs.org, and an OAuth permission (bottom of a review page) to operate. It can be used in simple and more advanced workflows. Examples of queries for the latter are at d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource project/Queries#SS_disease_list and d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource_project/Queries#NDF-RT issue.

Please be aware that this is a research project in development, and may have outages for planned maintenance. That will apply for the next few days, at least. The ScienceSource wiki main page carries information on practical matters. Email is not enabled on the wiki: use site mail here to Charles Matthews in case of difficulty, or if you need support. Further explanatory videos will be put into commons:Category:ContentMine videos.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2019 election voter message[edit]

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ArbCom 2020 Elections voter message[edit]

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"New" page[edit]

I see you have just moved your sandbox to Verbena incompta. I have no problem with the article, but the long sandbox history of other subjects is unfortunate. Could you perhaps rename it back and then recreate the article with a clean history? Lithopsian (talk) 15:43, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @Lithopsian, you are totally right. I moved and then recreated the article! Best, Spinster (talk) 20:36, 6 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reply[edit]

Thanks for message. I can't see how the sandboxed version is an improvement. Although it adds more about how the software works, it gives no indication of how it meets notability guidelines, it still doesn't have any independent verifiable sources since the supposed third-party refs are written by the software creators. It's worse than the original in that it now has in-text external links that are permitted and a claim about it being "especially powerful" sourced to its creators! Having looked at the original article, that has no proper refs or evidence of notability, and if I'd seen it before I would have taken it to WP:AFD, which I might still do. What's the point of a Wikipedia article if I'm supposed to go to Google Scholar to find any real info? I'll restore the text, but remove some of the content, please don't replace it Jimfbleak - talk to me? 12:29, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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