User talk:Marjan Tomki SI

Welcome to Wikidata, Marjan Tomki SI!

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Best regards! ArthurPSmith (talk) 13:22, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

Call for participation in the interview study with Wikidata editors

Dear Marjan Tomki SI,

I hope you are doing good,

I am Kholoud, a researcher at the King’s College London, and I work on a project as part of my PhD research that develops a personalized recommendation system to suggest Wikidata items for the editors based on their interests and preferences. I am collaborating on this project with Elena Simperl and Miaojing Shi.

I would love to talk with you to know about your current ways to choose the items you work on in Wikidata and understand the factors that might influence such a decision. Your cooperation will give us valuable insights into building a recommender system that can help improve your editing experience.

Participation is completely voluntary. You have the option to withdraw at any time. Your data will be processed under the terms of UK data protection law (including the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018). The information and data that you provide will remain confidential; it will only be stored on the password-protected computer of the researchers. We will use the results anonymized (?) to provide insights into the practices of the editors in item selection processes for editing and publish the results of the study to a research venue. If you decide to take part, we will ask you to sign a consent form, and you will be given a copy of this consent form to keep.

If you’re interested in participating and have 15-20 minutes to chat (I promise to keep the time!), please either contact me on kholoudsaa@gmail.com or use this form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmmFHaiB20nK14wrQJgfrA18PtmdagyeRib3xGtvzkdn3Lgw/viewform?usp=sf_link with your choice of the times that work for you. I’ll follow up with you to figure out what method is the best way for us to connect.

Please contact me using the email mentioned above if you have any questions or require more information about this project.

Thank you for considering taking part in this research.

Regards

Kholoud

• @Kholoudsaa:

1. Kholoud, it is customary to sign your posts on talk pages with "~~~~". It both tells who left the message and when, and where his talk page is.
2. I am not regularly online. I also mostly don't use (different reasons, most security related from time before I retired from informtics profession) many of usual ways people connect online (google, FB, M$ etc. accounts).
3. I can cooperate to help your PhD project, but not regularly.
4. It is probable the contents of this discussion would be interesting to others working with WD, and it can probably start here. If it evolves and is of interest, the contents can be created a WD/WP project (and data from here can automatically be used at your PhD project, governed by [1],sharing policy noted at the bottom of the page that we here all agree to).

How I chose items I work on in Wikidata - general

1. Wikidata (latin plural) sem intended to help create and mantain contents of articles in several languages. When I encounter such data (usually in real world, not in digital one), that could be usefull to be entered in articles, and articles would be usefull in several languages, I try to enter it in Wikidata in such a way, that they would be represented in articles across languages. I am rather new here (but used to be IT pro elsewhere before retirement - had a lot of practice with normalization and normalization of data - and intended and unwanted side effects of both), so I don't know a lot of things about here yet. I also didn't find a lot of answers to questions I had, yet, in existing documentations.

I aloso suppose there exist ways WD acquires some data aklready existing in WP, but I didn't find documentation how that goes (also yet). If that doesn't yet exist, I intend to help create it.

How I chose articles and data for Wikipedia

There are several points, and ways, that catch my attention

Errors or missing data encountered in existing articles, while using WP

1. If such errors are minor, evident or I have reliable source, I make, or sometimes propose, corrections; If article is multilingual, I make change to WD (as far as I know how up to now - here my abilities increase).
2. If such errors are greater, or contents is expected to be disputable, I check reliable sources, and propose change on WP.
3. If I can't find and until such sources are found, I mark the problem on my to-do list to keep in mind if I encounter a suitable source

Data about articles I already have collected reliable sources

I am 60+ old, and was both always interested in almost everything, and trained to be sistematically working interdisciplinary. There are fields of knowledge that WP does not cover.

I understand reasons of encyclopedia (summary of notable knowledge) and side effects of too much detail, but policy in use has (IMO) unwanted side effects too. I also wholeheartedly agree with verifiable principle, but something verifiable by relativeliy trying should be admissible without having to have been published in reliable sources.

I was taught joy of using methods to sense, understand, and test and verify things, not factography (when who said or wrote something...), so I am interested in transfering those methods, and joy of using them, to next generations. I am also interested of transfering data about people who taught me, and their metods of doing so. And for those I am aware - mostly - of no reliable sources.

At my retiring, I intended to use half a year or so to write down (and get published) about my elder coleque (and boss for several years). A lot of that was notable (IMO). I was out of luck - he died before we started (he already preliminarily agreed, but I had to pass some qualifications for sailing teacher license and...). Now as he passed away, I can only tell anecdotes - orwrite my memories (might do that, if I live long enough and of clear mind after becoming unable to sail).

There is a problem with definition of notability (that WP policy uses). In one generation, some knowledge is common sense (everyone knows it, and so think that it has always been so, and shall be so forever), and is so seen as not notable. It is implicit, often not written down. They are not aware of when that knowledge was discovered and defeloped, or are interested in history, at all. Then that generation dies out, and next generation knows nothing about it. And because of that "not notability", much of that aspect was not documented, and concurrent historians seem to see it as uninteresting (also being unsourced unusable for scientific method, and couldn't get financing for research, and also could'nt get it published because of not notable).

Some next - or tenth, or hundredth - generation of scientists shall try to guess what was happening eons ago, to reinvent old ways - and may get chastised for their guesswork as "unscientific". I know of that - a lot of data on work I did seem to have disapeared. Library, librarian and archivist posts in the institution I did that work for were abolished, paperwork and paper manuals were not digitized (I have no one to confirm either way, yet) and were probably sent to recycling, programs that were the framework for central register of population probably also don't exist anywhere (people I asked even didn't know who should I ask about that).

I worked in IT from 1976 or so, and there was a senior coleque before me, who knew every content of every magnetic tape in that istitutions (several hundreds possibly even thousands of that), and even each label, format and position on multifile tapes. Then something happened to him (never heard what) and he got drunk, and didn't get sober for a week or two, and for that period essentially no computer processing was possible.

Until then, none of his colegues - or his bosses - thought about need of documentation, and about single point of failure (what would they do if he died in a trafic accident?). After that, library of tapes and other computer data (metadata) was introduced and systenatically manained. And encountering that story, I documented everything I completed and moved on from.

So a lot of knowledge about (IMO notable) people, and stories that could help people evade repeating similar experiences were transfered by word of mouth only, as far as I know, and shal probably cease to exist when my generation dies out.

Examples of such data I am hunting for sources, or already have sources

1. A internationally notable Slovenian retired female physician died in fall 2020 of the consequences of CoViD-19; I added statement about her death, and found out that several complete aspects were either entirely missing, or barely mentioned. Those included her pre WWII music career (with her sisters), struggle to get educated in medical profession (was hard for females at the time), her WWII role in resistance medical service; her medical and educator career after WWII was better outlined, but political viewes on resistance and collaboration (well documented in reliable sources, but needed research) were not.

When I looked into that, I found out that the entire cathegory of women like her were either not represented, or some aspects (like with her) were missing or mentioned only at most.

1. My late grampa from mother's side was notable (linguist, historian... WP article exists in several languages), and that is valid for several his children, and grandchildren too. But complete list of his (13) children doesnt exist (even when the size of family had notable consequences), and by WP policies, couldn't be entered without reliable published sources. I already have such sources - and with the problem you se me asking about probably solved, I intend to enter that.
2. My grampa was a polyglote (admitted to be able to use about 15 languages, others added another ten to that). I knew of several other people (some of his colegues, some I knew otherwise about) that are polyglotes, too. I saw need of creation of such cathegory, and of updating that across all those people articles.
3. As a polyglote, he was a linguist, and classical scholar. I looked into that and saw a lot of missing with others of that cathegory (entirely missing notable people, stubs only, people with articles, but not in cathegoryies I knew they belonged to
4. Several of my teachers (including some that were grampa's pupils) were also notable, and also have articles in (most sl:) WP, and many of those articles are also stubs, and/or miss a lot of info.
5. I also have reliable data about other - now living - people, but sometimes must also wait for consent (live people), or to get data published in WP reliable sources.

Almost whenever I use Wikipedia, I encounter something that could be added. Most of that waited, because up to now I couldn't find info on constranints and procedures to enter some classes of data (not yet known family names, not yet known value types for a property, etc.). To test procedures learned today shall be next step, use (and document them for next newbies) the one after that.

Example of a problem, where I can't enter correction (didn't get consensus yet)

In SL WP there is an article about "sl:gliser", that would be in English "en:Hydroplane (boat", but data and description is for hydrofoil, and that is quite a different technology and different part of hydrodinamics (if you are interested, compare en articles). .

As it is, sl article is not only useless, it's misleading for a novice, and ridiculous for anyone knowlegeble about sea vessels.

I proposed correction and was answered by local patrolers, that the published language authority about Slovenian language the current contents to be correct. By WP policies, WP represents knowledge, as represented by accepted, published reliable sources, and Slovenian Dictionary of Literary Language is seen as such source by patrolers. The linguist that worked on that part of ditionary didn't seem to know about marine technolog, or the entry was 5o+ years old, and I gave up until I get "reliable sources" for the change I proposed (which might include update in that dictionary, but CoVid-19 procedures slow down that).

Problem is current contents is useless, and if I die today, might stay so for a while.

Conclusion up to now

WP and other Wikimedia projects have policy defined limits I intend to abide to in editing articles. Because of what I wrote in sections above, I shall contribute here occasionally, but my main effort shall be teaching methods, and teaching joy of using them, at sailing (and talks, whenever winds would be so light that sailing alone would become boring...). I hope I wasn't boring this time and here, and ood luck to you and your team, Kholoud, --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 13:11, 25 May 2021 (UTC)