Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2017/04

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Wikidata Query Examples

How do I run a query with all items without instance of (P31)? --Bigbossfarin (talk) 19:41, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

The best place for requesting queries is Wikidata:Request a query. Having all the requested queries at the same place makes it easier for people who look for inspiration to browse them. ChristianKl (talk) 20:07, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks!--Bigbossfarin (talk) 20:08, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 20:15, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Should maritime history (Q1516975) be splitted?

Hi,

Should maritime history (Q1516975) be splitted? XIIIfromTOKYO ask the question on the Wikidata:Bistro but I was the only one to answer... The problem (or not) is that the Wikipedia articles are very close but are a bit different, should they be on the same item or not? (the other problem is that I don't speak arabic, finnish or tamil and that Google translate is too crude for this kind of nuance).

Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 10:10, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Which of the Wikipedia articles aren't well labeled with the current property name of maritime history? ChristianKl (talk) 10:20, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: it's not a question of label but of scope and perimeter of the item, the article on English Wikipedia is quite wide « Maritime history » (not just ship, but navigation or seamen too), the dewiki is « Geschichte der Seefahrt » (not sure what it covers, seems close enough to « maritime » but Sea transport systems (Q2264757) is nearly empty) but the frwiki article is « Histoire des bateaux » (just ships according to the name, the article talks about navigation tools too). Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 11:02, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Can a class be part of a non-class?

How you do express that all members of some class are part of something? I am asking because of the existing statement list of political groups of the European Parliament (Q25796237)part of (P361)European Parliament (Q8889). It seems wrong to me to say that a class is part of something which is not a class, but how can else you say that all instances of list of political groups of the European Parliament (Q25796237) is part of European Parliament (Q8889)? Best regards, Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 10:36, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes, this is not an unusual situation. See Help:Basic membership properties for some other examples. ArthurPSmith (talk) 13:59, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for the link. Best regards, Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 14:12, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
NB there's a subtly different way of expressing the reverse of this — has part(s) of the class (P2670) vs has part(s) (P527). That the inverse of each of those is part of (P361) is a slight mismatch, and occasionally makes it slightly awkward to construct a query, but it seems to work well enough in most cases. --Oravrattas (talk) 12:02, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Beginner Question: Is it preferable to add pictures to wikidata instead of wikimedia? Do they appear automatically in Wikipedia articles?

Hi, I like adding photographs of objects to Wikipedia. I use the Wikishootme-Tool to find articles without picture. The new tools helps me to easily add a picture to wikidata, which I prefer (because I don't have to add tags and categories as in Wikimedia). Now I tried it and the pictures is added to this Wikidata Object. But it's not (yet?) appearing on the corresponding Wikipedia Article. My Questions:

  1. Is it preferable to add pictures to wikimedia or to wikidata?
  2. Do I have to edit the corresponding articles manually so they show the image? Or will they be updated automatically and show the picture?

--Lothur (talk) 10:06, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata is part of Wikimedia the same way that Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia. If you link images in Wikidata you do it within Wikimedia.
Whether the image will show up in the Wikipedia article depends on the template that's used in the Wikipedia article. On Property talk:P18 you can expand "This property is being used by:" to see a list of all templates that use the image.
The template that's used on s:Ermita de Santa Bárbara (Tírig) doesn't seem to pull the image from Wikidata. I'm not sure how it works in detail on the Spanish Wikipedia but you can likely request that the template get's changed to use the Wikidata image when no local image is available. ChristianKl (talk) 11:37, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
I suspect that when the OP says "Wikimedia", they mean "Wikimedia Commons". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:31, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, so I understand that with the template and yes, I meant Wikimedia Commons. But besides the technical options in the given example: Where is the best place for the picture in general? Is there any agreed advice by the community to decide where to upload a photo? As far I understand it my guess is: Wikidata is preferable in all cases where one adds the first picture to a existing wikidata object (because it can be queried and used automated by scripts)? And one should use wikimedia commons if one wants to add a nice picture to an object with several existing pictures (to broaden the choices for human users)? --Lothur (talk) 19:57, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
ca appears to be working and es does not. if the template does not include a wikidata link it will not call it; if you have a blank field it may override a wikidata call. - you may have to manually add the image in the infobox, or modify the infobox. more template documentation here - [1] ; [2] -- Slowking4 (talk) 23:22, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata itself doesn't host photo's it just links to the images in Wikimedia Commons. In this example the image is stored on Commons at the url https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ermita_de_Santa_B%C3%A1rbara.jpg . From a Wikidata perspective it would be good if all images get linked in Wikidata and then the individual Wikipedia's have template that automatically import the image when there's no local image. I don't know the opinion of the Spanish Wikipedia community on the issue. ChristianKl (talk) 12:29, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks a lot, that answered my question! So I will continue to upload images this way so its always linked to wikidata. I'm just in holiday btw, german wikipedia is my main community also. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lothur (talk • contribs).
Plantilla:Ficha de edificio in es.wikipedia theoretically uses the P18 property, but it seems "spaces" or "not-filled-parameters" could be an issue here. This edit solved the problem. Thanks for your edits and photos. Strakhov (talk) 17:10, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Add photography information for cameras and other hardware

Hello. I was trying to make a query to show up models of cameras which does have a kind of resolution or video capabilities. But I realized that wikidata does not have any property to save that, or at least, I couldn't have been able to find them. Even high-end devices like Canon EOS 5D Mark III Canon EOS 5D Mark III (Q65054) does not have any information about its sensor, digital image processor, memory slot, shutter, etc...

Could wikidata be able to store this kind of information? If so, which steps should I take? Create some properties?

Thanks!

--Viferico (talk) 13:42, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

The information about the shutter could likely be stored with has part(s) (P527). As far as the resolution goes, that likely needs a new property. Feel free to propose a new property at Wikidata:Property proposal for those usages where no current property fits. ChristianKl (talk) 14:27, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
It might also be good to create a WikiProject around this issue. ChristianKl (talk) 19:00, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Redirects on Wikipedia and Wikidata?

Hi! What if one item on Wikipedia that has an item on Wikidata becomes redirected on Wikipedia to another article? How is that handled here on Wikidata? Should the redirect item go away somehow? //Mippzon (talk) 18:07, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

There's no reason to remove the redirect. It still leads the reader to the right article. ChristianKl (talk) 18:20, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Ok! This means that both the redirect and the "real" page has one Wikidata item each and both items has the same properties? //Mippzon (talk) 18:22, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Here are two items as an example: Otter Lake 2 (Q22358978) and Otter Lake 2 (Q22455259). Otter Lake 2 (Q22358978) is now a redirect on Swedish Wikipedia and Otter Lake 2 (Q22455259) is the "real" item. Is this correct from Wikidata standpoint? //Mippzon (talk) 18:25, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
The key question is whether the two items are the same. In this case I think they are bot created items and they later found out that both are about the same concept, so they merged it on the Swedish Wikipedia. In this case this means they can also be merged on Wikidata. ChristianKl (talk) 19:42, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

IMO no point of storing redirects on Wikidata. Stryn (talk) 18:53, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Georgian, Russian or Ukrainian speaker needed

Please can someone able to write in Georgian, Russian or Ukrainian translate the warnings in the last two or three sections at User talk:GiorgiXIII, and offer assistance there? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:46, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Significant change: new data type for geoshapes

Hello all,

We’ve been working on a new data type that allows you to link to the geographical shapes that are now stored on Commons. This data type will be deployed on Wikidata on April 24th.

This data type refers to the geographical shapes that are enabled on Wikimedia Commons since the beginning of this year. Here you can find more information about this.

The property creators will be able to create properties with this geoshape data type by selecting “Geographical shape” in the data type list.

When the property is created, you can use it in statements, and when filling the value, if you start typing a string, you can choose the name of a geoshape in the list of what exists on Commons.


One thing to note: We currently do not export statements that use this datatype to RDF. They can therefore not be queried in the Wikidata Query Service. The reason is that we are still waiting for geoshapes to get stable URIs. This is handled in this ticket.

Before the deployment, you can test it on http://test.wikidata.org (see for example the property “geotest” on Q22).

If you have any question, feel free to ask! Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 11:32, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

in a property proposal is the string to use for this data type "geo-shape"? This doesn't seem to be working at the moment... (the template translates it to "commons data not available"). ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:35, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Oh, just noticed this isn't coming until April 17th so it isn't available yet. Ok! ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:36, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for this notice anyway, I have updated the localization (previously, "commons data" was expected but we should call it "geo-shape"). Now it should link to Help:Data type#geo-shape, which needs to be updated. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:58, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Edit: due to Easter holiday and the server switch, the deployment is delayed to April 24th. Thanks for your patience. Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 08:15, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Hebrew calendar and other calendars

Can't find anything about it. We should integrate Hebrew calendar and other calendars to the system. The correct place in my opinion is a long side with the Julian calendar. Geagea (talk) 14:13, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree. As for units, one could imagine a kind of translator to pass from a given calendar to another one. Is there already a Phabricator ticket opened for that task? Pamputt (talk) 06:00, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
In a perfect world Wikidata would natively support all sorts of calendars. In the one we are living there are many areas of Wikidata that need work and I don't think focusing work on implementing a Hebrew calendar has a good return. Usecases like being able to specify the time of day seem more important to me. ChristianKl (talk) 07:12, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
With all the respect to the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar, I think it is bad idea to underestimate of the Hebrew calendar or any other calndar. My thread her was to ask if there already something in process in that matter. I don't think there is a doubt regarding the importance of adding those calendars to Wikidata. Many people using the Hebrew calendar in Israel and also around the world. a lots of media staff dated according to Hebrew calendar.Geagea (talk) 08:45, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
The use of the Swedish calendar is also often discussed and used on svwiki. I know it has been discussed, but I do not know if the involved developers are still in the project. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 12:20, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
See phab:T131593. --Yair rand (talk) 04:38, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #254

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • A warm welcome to our new intern, Lucas Werkmeister! You may now him for his work on queries as WikidataFacts. He will work in the team for the next months.
    • Attending to Wikimedia Conference, talking with Wikidata and Wiktionary users
    • Improving performance on Special:Entities pages (phab:T161631)
    • Tracking the number of identifier properties on an item in page_props (phab:T114617)
    • More work on Senses (phab:T161523) and Forms (phab:T160524)
    • Improving the autocompletions of Query Service (phab:T150950)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Cannot merge Q9677890 into Q8370667

I cannot merge these items. Could someone please help?--Jusjih (talk) 00:18, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

✓ Done  — billinghurst sDrewth 03:17, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. I just could not understand what kind of error prevented me from merging them.--Jusjih (talk) 16:20, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:35, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Problem with Flow and Authority Control.js

Hi,

I recently added User:Magnus_Manske/authority_control.js to my common.js. After that I couldn't send or reply to any messages in Flow. All I get is an error message saying "One or more dependencies failed to load". This fixed it but it is no solution.

Does anybody have a clue what's going on? Jonathan Groß (talk) 12:46, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Add a semicolon (;) at the end of line. --Edgars2007 (talk) 13:17, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
@Edgars2007: Like this? Thanks! Jonathan Groß (talk) 13:46, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:35, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Merging taxon synonyms

Should I merge two items if they are taxon synonyms? I mean obsolete: Saccharomyces carlsbergensis (Q20747163) and the current-name recipient: Saccharomyces pastorianus (Q726782). I moved correct sitelinks, statements etc. I don't know what to do with the identifiers – they point to the old items which may still exist in the databases, however those old items redirect to the current-name items. So, are they still useful? Should I keep them or delete everything in old item and redirect it to the recipient? PS I'm a newby here and will be grateful for the advice. --Forest37 (talk) 15:16, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

no. They are distinct. MechQuester (talk) 15:24, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
I restored the old versions. We do not mix sitelinks of heterotypic synonyms. --Succu (talk) 15:39, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks a lot for explanation. --Forest37 (talk) 16:36, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:37, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Monumental – cultural heritage monuments from wikidata in pretty

Hi all, today me and @Slaporte deployed on labs server Monumental, new Wikidata data consumer dedicated to cultural heritage. You can think of it as Reasonator, Wiki Loves Monuments map and Wikidata games combined.

Feel free to take a look, feedback welcomed: https://tools.wmflabs.org/monumental/

Application is currently on early stage, much more features will be introduced soon. On this page you can see examples and plans for this year. Yarl 💭  22:50, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

@Yarl: Very nice!
But please be very very careful with the Wikidata game for matching monuments to Commons categories. I've had to clear up far too many mistakes from a previous game where people were encouraged to merge items, and they ended up merging monuments that were often hundreds of miles apart, just because they had a similar name. (A problem made worse because the headline names that have been imported from the UK heritage registers are very generic -- eg just "Church of St Laurence", "National Westminster Bank", etc.)
As a start, before letting this out into the wild
  • There need to be blocks in place to stop people linking single monuments to Commons categories for lots of monuments -- ie if a Commons category contains any categories that have links to monuments, it should not be offered.
  • The Commons category should have a geographical category that matches the P131 for the monument -- and (for the UK), the value of that located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) should be at the level of a civil parish, eg civil parish (Q1115575) for England, not anything broader.
Also, at the moment the app simply doesn't give people the information they need to determine whether "Church Of St Mary And All Saints", given on the left with no further information, is the same as "Church Of St Mary And All Saints, Plymstock" offered on the right.
It's on my to-do list to try to improve some of the data and do as much automatic matching as I can in the next two or three weeks. As far as possible, I think that is a better approach than relying on Wikidata "games", at least for this data. Jheald (talk) 08:24, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
@Jheald: I'm not matching them based on name, algorithm is much simpler and, I think, more problem-free:
  1. give me list of monuments from country X with image (P18) but without Commons category (P373)
  2. get list of Commons categories from image set as image (P18)
If categorization on Commons is done properly and main picture is added/harvested properly, there should be no issues. I agree that game needs more protection system, I will work on that.
Game is displaying located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) and location (P276) under monument name, if they are set on Wikidata. You can also click on category to open it in the new tab. Yarl 💭  08:43, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
@Yarl: The trouble is that most of the categories being offered are too generic -- eg "Crosses in Wales" for a particular monumental cross. That can look a very plausible match to a casual game-player who doesn't realise the one-to-one specificity we're looking for. Jheald (talk) 08:54, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
@Jheald: Right, I will add alert to only match direct categories. Yarl 💭  08:58, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Nice. Good idea! I think we should have more such dedicated interfaces.
--- Jura 04:40, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata shows in the JSON of Open Library

I am really thrilled to inform you that in the JSON of Open Library you will now find the identifiers for both VIAF and Wikidata for authors. Their initial import is based on the subset of a Wikidata export where there is both a VIAF and an Open Library identifier.

It is a first step, a next step will be to export all our Open Library identifiers, maybe including the identifiers that are available from Freebase as well. Ultimately this enables Wikidata as an intermediary between Open Library and the OCLC and it may allow libraries worldwide to provide free e-books. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 21:40, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

That's great. I've added details Wikidata:Wikidata for authority control. Is there any chance they might expose details to human users, on the HTML page? I've posted a property proposal for their "Subject" IDs (see [3]): Wikidata:Property proposal/Open Library subject ID. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:17, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

@GerardM, Pigsonthewing: What can it do, what ISNI cannot? Any of the items involved has no ISNI? 85.180.179.43 20:59, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Whoever, when I look at ISNI I get data not information. The JSON of Open Library will lead us to free books to read. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:19, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Is there a strategy for representing processes inside Wikidata?

Hi! I wonder if Wikidata can be extended to model "process". Here's an example from Wikibooks:

And here is how the same "knowledge object" is represented in Wikidata:

This page includes the relation has_part chocolate. That is correct, but basically Q131442 does not tell me how to make the cake. Even if it listed all the ingredients as "has_part" relations, that is not the same as the recipe. The same basic question is related to the challenge of modelling proofs, for example, or any kind of algorithm. There are some formal approaches, such as the w:Process_Specification_Language -- has anyone attempted to incorporate this sort of thing into Wikidata yet? Would it be possible?

I come from a LISP background, where "code is data" and "data is code." I'd be really interested in being able to model processes (specifically proofs and algorithms) in Wikidata. I know there are other places where this sort of work takes place: on the one hand, there's ProofWiki, for "informal" mathematics; and on the other hand there are various "workflow" or "flowchart" systems that can run in the browser, e.g., ConCreTeFlows.

Very interested to know if there's anything related developing here. Arided (talk) 14:23, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Well, follows (P155) and followed by (P156) can be used to create a series of items in a sequence, so that would be one approach to describing a process, to describe each step separately and then put all the steps into some whole (as "part of"/"has part" I guess). Also series ordinal (P1545) can be used to number the parts in order. Is that the sort of thing you had in mind? I'm not aware that anybody's done this with something like a recipe though... ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:01, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
ArthurPSmith series ordinal (P1545) seems pretty suitable for putting things in order, but see my comment below dated 23:50, 2 April 2017 describing a somewhat more complicated data structure that says what the intermediate links look like. Arided (talk) 23:57, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
I think what you are asking for can be done using qualifiers on the links - the other option might be to have distinct properties for each type of link. It sounds like this is all very theoretical at the moment; perhaps it would be helpful for you to experiment a little more concretely on test.wikidata.org where you can create your own properties and try different ways of representing things? ArthurPSmith (talk) 13:28, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
That all sounds great. I didn't even know that test.wikidata.org exists. Yes, I'll have a try there. Thank you! Arided (talk) 10:32, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
Hi Arided, your use-case is very interesting. I see similar problems for representing the flow of an algorithm. However, the approach specified by ArthurPSmith can be used, but I haven't yet seen any example wikidata item. But how do we represent individual process in Wikidata? Jsamwrites (talk) 17:49, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
Could we try it with an example? Perhaps the Sacher Torte is too complicated for a first example. What about this truly simple recipe for "Scotch and Soda" http://cocktails.wikia.com/wiki/Scotch_and_Soda (CC-By-SA).
Ingredients
  • 1.5 oz scotch
  • 1 oz club soda
Directions
  • Pour the scotch in an Old fashioned glass with ice
  • Top off with club soda
Could someone take the lead on representing this? I'd be glad to follow along and comment. Arided (talk) 18:58, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
Hi Arided, What's your overall goal? Representing process? Representation of recipes? If it's the latter, it's better to start a new WikiProject under Wikidata:WikiProject Food titled WikiProject Recipe and understand the requirements (identifying the required properties, creating new ones etc. if necessary). My personal opinion is that the experience building this project will help you achieve the former goal. Jsamwrites (talk) 20:59, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
And we have fabrication method (P2079) that may help. Thierry Caro (talk) 22:26, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
Hi Jsamwrites - what I'm mainly interested in is representing proofs, which is discussed here: on the WikiProject Mathematics discussion page. But they seem to be getting stuck with no progress, so I thought it would be good to try something simpler. Just one or two examples would be good. I'm not too attached to the idea of "recipes" - what's important is that the idea generalises to a number of different domains that are process-based. Arided (talk) 08:38, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Considering into account all the above suggestions, for representing mathematical proofs (and assuming that each proof consists of multiple lines and each line is a mathematical expression), my suggestion is to make use of fabrication method (P2079) as the property for a given theorem/lemma. Property value will be multivalued. Each value is a mathematical expression (See example of worst-case space complexity (P3755)) and having the qualifiers follows (P155), followed by (P156) or even series ordinal (P1545). If Arided can give an example of a mathematical proof, I think we can try representing mathematical proofs in this manner. What do you think? I am interested to give it a try. Jsamwrites (talk) 10:48, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Q131442 is for generic Sacher Torte, and should have no recipe. The recipes that you and I use for Sacher Torte may be different, and - if anything - there should be an item for each (one of which might represent b:Cookbook:The Original Sacher Torte), with each item having a property that says it applies to Q131442. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:56, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
I don't think we currently have a good way to model processes. Maybe we need a new data type like "ordered item list" that can be used for this purpose? ChristianKl (talk) 18:31, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl That's the concern that motivated me asking here, and providing a range of different examples from different domains. And yes, I have yet to see an example of a process represented on Wikidata, so it makes sense to start simple. The recipe for making "Scotch and Soda" is such a simple process that if we can't represent that, we're not going to be in good shape with anything more complicated. Can the suggestion from Jsamwrites to use fabrication method (P2079) for proofs work for this extremely simple mixed drink? If not I think we have to go back to the drawing board. That said, for a source of many proofs that we could try to represent, I would suggest ProofWiki, and more specifically, https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Euclidean_Algorithm as an example to get started with. Back on the topic of cocktails, it is of course possible to get a computer to model the way they are made, and even to come up with new recipes! Cf. the recent paper "Generative Mixology: An Engine for Creating Cocktails". But yes, the question is how we can do anything with process within the Wikidata framework. Arided (talk) 12:22, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
There are two questions. ① How do you model a process with the current tools of Wikidata? ② How would you model it in Wikidata if you could introduce new datatypes?
The answer to ① is likely chain with a lot of followed by (P156) but I'm not sure that's satisfactory. It might be worthwhile to think about ② to get a good way to model mathematical proofs. The developer team is currently working on new datatypes to represent the meaning of words given that they are currently not well represented with the tools that Wikidata provides. Similarily I think it would be ideal to also have new datatypes for presenting processes. I think it makes sense to think about how representing processes should look like. ChristianKl (talk) 13:06, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl, your suggestion earlier, about an "ordered item list" data type seems more suitable than using followed by (P156), since followed by (P156) relates individual IDs, whereas in things like proofs and recipes, we want to relate "steps" within one object. I think we could do steps with series ordinal (P1545), which seems to be what it's intended for. However, at least for proofs it may be best to have something even a little bit more complicated: a kind of linked list, where each "arrow" also has a type. Something like: A –α–> B –β–> C –γ–> D. In other words, A, B, C, D are ordered items, but we have been explicit about how to get from A to B (via α) and from B to C, and so on. Intuitively, we move from proposition to proposition by way of valid inference rules. This is a quite formal and constraining way to write mathematics, but it may work well enough! I'll think some more too... Arided (talk) 23:50, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
When it comes to a solution that doesn't use existing datatypes, that solution was what I came up in five minutes. It might work but when creating a new solution for processes it likely makes sense to spend more time investigating and thinking through different solutions. That means looking at prior art and maybe creating a few wireframes about that show how a proof would be layed out. ChristianKl (talk) 08:13, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Polish edit war

I need a third opinion towards my edits in soft start (Q477208) and motor soft starter (Q2666306). I moved the Polish pl:Soft start to Q477208 because of the semantic difference of the topic. This edit was reverted without a comment. --Bigbossfarin (talk) 09:58, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

I did not see any edit war just a revert. It seems to me that soft start (Q477208) relates to "electric process" and motor soft starter (Q2666306) to electric hardware that uses it. pl:Soft start is about electric hardware and should stay in motor soft starter (Q2666306). This edit was in my opinion correctly reverted since we want interwiki links be managed by wikidata and not on polish Wikipedia. --Jarekt (talk) 13:13, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

What changed?

See here. It is quite misleading that the webpage prints in both cases the same dash/hyphen. --Jobu0101 (talk) 20:20, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

@Jobu0101: you were replacing a NO-BREAK SPACE (U+00A0) by a SPACE (U+0020). You can see this by exporting the item as XML file.--Bigbossfarin (talk) 06:54, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Massive Widar data insertion disaster on comunas of Italia - not fixed since 2015

some examples:

85.180.179.43 20:54, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

 Info: This is User:Tamawashi. --Succu (talk) 20:59, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
"Disaster"? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:40, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

New RfC, Proposed client side disambiguation page

I've added a RfC, Wikidata:Request for comment/Proposed client side disambiguation page. Not sure why this hasn't been added a long time ago. Jeblad (talk) 15:58, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

#100wikidatadays !

Wikidata editor! You, too, can receive a ##100wikidays barnstar!

Friends! There's now also a #100wikidays challenge on Wikidata, aptly named #100wikidatadays! Participate!

It is a personal challenge in which a person very significantly improves (at least) one Wikidata items per day, for 100 days in a row. There was already a version of the challenge on various Wikipedias, on Commons and on Wikisource - now on Wikidata as well! Spinster 💬 21:14, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Spinster, what means very significantly? --Succu (talk) 20:46, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
Hi Succu - #100wikidays is most of all a challenge against yourself; you are the one who decides how hard you'll make it and how much effort you'll invest. I have personally decided to choose items that are pretty empty and to add quite a lot of new sourced statements to them. At least 10-15 sourced statements perhaps, and also - where necessary - adding and editing other items that are related to the item you're working on? Spinster 💬 20:54, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
I'm familiar with the concept and I think I did'nt edit at least one item in my last 100days. So what's the challenge about? --Succu (talk) 21:07, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Community notification of grant application

Hi all

I'm applying for a grant from WMF to continue my work at UNESCO from September this year, please take a look, let me know what you think and endorse if you want.

The main goals are:

  1. UNESCO’s publication workflows incorporate sharing open license content on Wikimedia projects.
  2. Support other Intergovernmental Organisations and the wider public to share content on Wikimedia projects.
  3. Support Wikimedia contributors to easily discover and use UNESCO content and the documentation produced.

We plan to work on creating and improving Wikidata documentation (as we have previously done with the Wikidata:Data Import Hub, Wikidata:Data donation, Wikidata:Data Import Guide and Wikidata:Partnerships and data imports) and import 1000s of items from UNESCO data sources including the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 20:18, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Sign me up to help. MechQuester (talk) 22:48, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

  • Quote form the grant application: "Promote the use of the official data import process to make sure community members are aware of it's existence and using it as the primary work flow".
    I don't even think we have that.
    --- Jura 04:54, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for spotting this Jura, I changed it to "Promote the use of the Wikidata:Data Import Hub data import process" --John Cummings (talk) 05:59, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks MechQuester, please click on the Join button (in blue) at the top of the grant application. --John Cummings (talk) 05:59, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

New filters for Recent Changes - Beta deployment scheduled

Hello!

(Sorry to write in English for non English-speakers. Please help translate to your language and also inform everyone about this change, thanks!)

The Collaboration team is going to launch a new Beta feature on your wiki, ⧼eri-rcfilters-beta-label⧽. This deployment would happen on April 11 (to be precised). This Beta feature is an improvement of the current ORES Beta feature.

What it this new feature?

This feature improves Special:RecentChanges and Special:RecentChangesLinked by adding new useful features that will ease vandalism tracking and support of newcomers:

  • Filtering - filter recent changes with easy-to-use and powerful filters combinations.
  • Highlighting - add a colored background to the different changes you are monitoring, to quickly identify the ones that matter to you.
  • Quality and Intent Filters - user ORES predictions to identify real vandalism or good faith intent contributions that need assistance.

What will happen?

At the moment, the ORES beta feature is available in your Beta preferences. We the deployment will be done:

  • Users who has enabled the ORES beta feature are now using the New filters for RC Beta feature (no action needed, unless if you want to opt-out).
  • ORES predictions highlighting is activated by default for all users (not in Beta anymore).
    • It is symbolized by a "r" in the RecentChanges pages, for all users.
    • Users who want to change the accuracy level of ORES predictions or opt-out can do so in their preferences.

How to prepare this change?

You can discover the purpose of this project by visiting the quick tour help page. Also, please check the documentation (and help to translate it). Please also have a look at the translations of the interface on translatewiki.net. The messages are prefixed as rcfilters- and ores-rcfilters-.

For an early trial, the new filters will be available on mediawiki.org, Polish Wikipedia and Portuguese Wikipedia as a Beta feature, on March 28, 13:00 UTC.

You can ping me if you have questions. I'll reply on Monday.

All the best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:46, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

We have created a FAQ, listing the most asked questions concerning the new filters change. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 08:36, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

New filters for Recent Changes - Beta deployment rescheduled

Hello!

Sorry to write in English. Please help translate to your language if necessary! Please also inform everyone about this schedule change.

The Collaboration team planned to launch a new Beta feature on your wiki, ⧼eri-rcfilters-beta-label⧽. This deployment was scheduled for April 11 as previously announced.

This deployment is postponed to May 9.

The new filters are based on ORES predictions (that you have as a Beta feature at the moment). Our tests have revealed that the actual performance of the ORES models on your wiki is different from our assumptions. There is a high risk to have the same edit marked as "bad" and "good" at the same time when you would have to use the new filters. We don't want you to experience it and we are currently working on fixing this issue.

Thank you for your understanding. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:08, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

First comparison with DBpedia for birth dates

This is a list of birth dates where there is a difference between Wikidata and DBpedia (in effect also a Wikipedia). It is "a bit hackly" it says in the tweet where I was told about it.

It is great development in having actual attention for "Living Persons" information and being able to curate where attention is worthwhile. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:04, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

This is great, thanks. There are a number of false positives, where e.g. 1988-02-27 and 1988-2-27 are understood as different values even though they are the same. It would be nice to get that cleaned up, before manually going through it. --Denny (talk) 17:52, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
Giving some context, this is a simple proof of concept script that compares Wikidata, Dutch Wikipedia and Greek Wikipedia though DBpedia for person birth dates. the '0' should be handled correctly on the data but the data is based on 2016-04 release which is close to 1 year old. A slightly better revision of the data is here --Jimkont (talk) 20:03, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
I noticed a false positive where the Wikipedia article had both the Julian calendar and Gregorian calendar dates but Wikidata had only the Julian calendar date. Didn't write down which one it was. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:08, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Need help for short translation

Hello all,

As you may know, our development team is working on providing interlanguage links for Wiktionaries. Even if it's not directly related to Wikidata, this will help for the next steps of our lexicographical data project.

I'm about to announce this feature to the Wiktionaries, and I'd like to do that in their main languages, as much as possible. So, if you have five minutes to help me translating this message in any language you speak, this would help me a lot.

Thank you very much :) Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 09:28, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Help getting property proposal for Australian Honours

Would someone more conversant with proposing properties plug together the information so we can add the Australian Honours that are currently sitting in mix'n'match.

I see examples are Gough Whitlam (Q23333) receiving Companion of the Order of Australia (Q9680541) (link 884426 as evidence); and receiving Centenary Medal (Q2393205) (link 1112594 as evidence). So each awarded honour will have one reference link within the system. The website for the honours is described at It's an Honour (Q6091377). Thanks to anyone who can string this together.  — billinghurst sDrewth 03:16, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Hoi, I do not understand the problem.. Both awards were already part of Mr Gough Whitlam. So what is your problem ? Really interested to see more background to Mix'n Match as well.. Thank,  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by GerardM (talk • contribs) at 5 April 2017, 16:17 (UTC).
@GerardM: I know Gough has the references added, it was meant to be illustrative to have the references added as means of an external identifier, rather than a straight paste of the url (base url always better handled through a specific item than raw url).

[4] enables the presentation list of the awards. To my view, the straight use of mix'n'match and application of link is not appropriate, as here the external-id is actually an award (award type, date, person) rather than a typical straight identifier of a person, especially as some people will appear multiple times (eg. Whitlam). I will be back to annoy Magnus about how we could utilise the database through an alternate presentation to apply the awards and data, but either way having the ability to have linking through a property enables better checking, and data manipulation, and can be manually or systemically applied.  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:26, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

ːˑ Mr Cough has multiple awards and by finding the link, adding an item it is possible to identify one person once and add multiple awards lager.. I think this is an appropriate way not to abuse the time of people too often. Thanks, ~~ ~

Wikidata editor for Wikipedia

I would like to announce my grant proposal for the development of a gadget for editing Wikidata information (primarily used in the infoboxes) without leaving the Wikipedia page. My goal is to make one simple gadget helpful for all users which cover 80-90% of the needs, even if not everything is available for editing. In simpler terms, it's about creating an editor for "Wikidata infoboxes". Please write your opinion and wishes on the grant page. —putnik 01:03, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Help with Perl

Could anyone please check if the Perl format of DBC author ID (P3846) is correct? It's supposed to say "14 digit number, first 2 '87', then 12 others". Jonathan Groß (talk) 09:38, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Is it always a 14 digit number? In that case, it should be 87\d{12}. Jsamwrites (talk) 10:57, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
I believe it is. Thank you! Jonathan Groß (talk) 11:03, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:59, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

QuickStatements - setting ranks?

Is possible to set ranks with QuickStatements? If not, is there another tool to do that for a number of claims at once? (Why would this be helpful? If somebody updates any property to its actual value, one would like to set this value also as the preferred one.) 123 (talk) 00:08, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

You can make use of qualifiers (series ordinal (P1545)). Quickstatements does support qualifiers. Jsamwrites (talk) 08:46, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
@123: As far as I know, the answer is: no, it doesn't; and I'm not aware of any tool that does. (Having recently deprecated a couple of hundred statements for withdrawn identifiers by hand, because I couldn't think of an easy mechanised way to do it.) Jheald (talk) 15:03, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for clarifying. But this greatly reduces the utility of the tool. Would be great, if this feature could be added ... 123 (talk) 22:43, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jsamwrites: Even for Jhealds clarification I tried a bit around with qualifiers like series ordinal (P1545), but really didn't get anywhere. Do you have a working example for setting ranks? 123 (talk) 21:18, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

When a "comune of Italy" change name

Luni (Q270220) will change its name April 20 (pdf source) how to manage this change? On wiki we move the page, but here? --ValterVB (talk) 17:13, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

For UK administrative entities where this has happened, I tend to change the label to the new name, with the old name given as an alias; and also to record both names in statements with official name (P1448), with the old name qualified with end time (P582) and the new one with start time (P580). Jheald (talk) 18:39, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Associating a publication with a museum

This book How the West Was Worn (Q29192837) was published by Abrams Books (Q4669411) "in association with" Autry Museum of the American West (Q4827110). It is related to an exhibition, but it is not a catalogue of the exhibition. How can I show the relationship between the museum and the publication? - PKM (talk) 00:06, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Notification about "Information extraction and replacement"

One of my crazy ideas; Information extraction and replacement, it is about supervised learning of patterns that encapsulates facts. This is the first step on extracting facts, and identification of sources, both on Wikipedia and external pages. (The whole thing is well-known language processing stuff, and is not pushing edges anywhere. In short, boooring!) Jeblad (talk) 00:13, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Start of the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections

Please accept our apologies for cross-posting this message. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, I am pleased to announce that self-nominations are being accepted for the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections.

The Board of Trustees (Board) is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long-term sustainability of the Wikimedia Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. More information about this role can be found on Meta-Wiki. Please read the letter from the Board of Trustees calling for candidates.

The candidacy submission phase will last from April 7 (00:00 UTC) to April 20 (23:59 UTC).

We will also be accepting questions to ask the candidates from April 7 to April 20. You can submit your questions on Meta-Wiki.

Once the questions submission period has ended on April 20, the Elections Committee will then collate the questions for the candidates to respond to beginning on April 21.

The goal of this process is to fill the three community-selected seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The election results will be used by the Board itself to select its new members.

The full schedule for the Board elections is as follows. All dates are inclusive, that is, from the beginning of the first day (UTC) to the end of the last.

  • April 7 (00:00 UTC) – April 20 (23:59 UTC) – Board nominations
  • April 7 – April 20 – Board candidates questions submission period
  • April 21 – April 30 – Board candidates answer questions
  • May 1 – May 14 – Board voting period
  • May 15–19 – Board vote checking
  • May 20 – Board result announcement goal

In addition to the Board elections, we will also soon be holding elections for the following roles:

  • Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
    • There are five positions being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.
  • Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson (Ombuds)
    • One position is being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.

Please note that this year the Board of Trustees elections will be held before the FDC and Ombuds elections. Candidates who are not elected to the Board are explicitly permitted and encouraged to submit themselves as candidates to the FDC or Ombuds positions after the results of the Board elections are announced.

More information on this year's elections can be found on Meta-Wiki. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the election talk page on Meta-Wiki, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-elections(at)wikimedia.org.

On behalf of the Election Committee,
Katie Chan, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Joe Sutherland, Community Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, 03:36, 7 April 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

Please delete Q29382660

I just created Q29382660 to link my some locales of my user page, but I just understand I mustn't do this.
I'm glad to delete it. Thank you.
(Sorry, my English isn't so well, maybe. I'm trying not to use a translater)
--59RY (talk) 18:13, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

 Not done, there is a valid site link. If the page gets deleted, then the item will be deleted. MechQuester (talk) 18:37, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

@MechQuester:As far as I can tell, it's a Wikipedia user page. Those are not eligible for items, per se. Jonathan Groß (talk) 18:44, 13 April 2017 (UTC)


@Jonathan Groß:, wait, I just double checked. You're right. It can be deleted.. MechQuester (talk) 18:51, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
✓ Deleted Matěj Suchánek (talk) 18:57, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 18:57, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

QuickStatements tool not working for me lately

Calls like this done with quick_statements tool are not working for me lately. I click the button and nothing happens: no edits, no request to log in with oAuth and no error messages. I see 3 possibilities: (1) tool is broken, (2) I am doing something silly and the tool is properly "saving" me from making a mistake, or (3) something is wrong with my setup, state of oAuth, browser, etc. Does quick_statements tool work for others and is so can someone execute this commend to add Commons Creator page (P1472) to Alexander Hausch (Q18325071)? --Jarekt (talk) 13:00, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Looks like QS is broken. I get this in console (when I'm logged in, if that matters):
Uncaught ReferenceError: toggleHowto is not defined
XMLHttpRequest cannot load https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/?action=get_rights&botmode=1. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://tools.wmflabs.org' is therefore not allowed access.
OK, the first one isn't related, but toggling is also broken. Pinging Magnus Manske (talk • contribs • logs). --Edgars2007 (talk) 13:24, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
That version seems to work --Ghuron (talk) 13:56, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
Also niosh fork of quick_statements works. --Jarekt (talk) 11:43, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

63.143.226.149

Here is this IP again with the addition of [ethnic group-america] to items. MechQuester (talk) 02:53, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

QuickStatements - problems with quantities without unit

The standard version of QuickStatements ([5]) doesn't allow to add references or qualifiers to quantities ([6]). A partial solution comes with the niosh fork: All works fine as long one uses quantities with units. But using quantities without units results in two problems:

  1. Again references and qualifiers are not added.
  2. Numbers are extended with many additional digits. (For instance 0.641 becomes 0.6410000000000000142108547152020037174224853515625)

The first problem I can solve by using https://tools.wmflabs.org/quickstatements/ But I didn't find a solution for the second problem. Any suggesion? 123 (talk) 00:50, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

I will give it a look, as I'm responsible for [7], [8] and [9]. Additional digits looks like a floating point (Q117879) issue beyond Quick Statements though: numbers are sent as-is to Widar. --EdouardHue (talk) 11:10, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Is it possible to identify the terms for "disambiguation" in different languages?

Is it possible to identify the terms for disambiguation in different languages (e.g. Spanish desambiguación, French homonymie, German Begriffsklärung...), so that a new disambiguation page for a word in a specific Wikipedia, marked as such, will be added to existing ones in Wikidata automatically? At the moment, they need to be added manually (at least in case of German, but I think it's the same for other languages). --KnightMove (talk) 18:51, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure if is what you ask, but disambiguation page in every wiki include the magic word __DISAMBIG__ (more info on mediawiki.org). So is very easy detect what is a disambiguation and what is not a disambiguation. We have also a script that show if sitelink in an item are disambiguation or not.
As far as I can see, no disambiguation page in German or English Wikipedia contains __DISAMBIG__ - anyway, my question is about automated identification. Assume an English page Xxx (disambiguation) with counterparts in some other languages, sharing an entry in Wikidata. When I create a German Xxx (Begriffsklärung), I'd like it to be added automatically to that Wikidata entry - without a separate one being created. Is this possible? --KnightMove (talk) 09:41, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
 Comment Every disambiguation uses __DISAMBIG__ by using the template. --Bigbossfarin (talk) 10:28, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Probably misspelled taxon names

Because we talk about quality judging elsewhere: Batch #234 run by QuickStatements did not cite any reference as requested by Wikidata:Bots and introduced at least more than 200 misspelled values for taxon name (P225) (e.g. Ipomoea pes-caprae (Q28935685), Carex halleriana (Q28934858), ...). The batch was commanded by Magnus Manske, operator of User:QuickStatementsBot too. Resolving the issue (mapping a misspelled taxon name to a real one) without a reference (aka a reason why a item was created) is hard. It involves guessing or knowledge and it's a waste of time of human ressources (in this case of mine). Did we (as Wikidata) learned something from cases like the Tamawashi-incident, a massive tool misuse? --Succu (talk) 21:33, 8 April 2017 (UTC) PS: Not a single item I checked until now had a matching Wildflowers of Israel ID (P3746). --Succu (talk) 21:45, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

QuickStatements - references

I happen to think that entries into wikidata should be supported by sources as described in Help:Sources. But neither the standard version of QuickStatements ([10]) nor the niosh fork seem to allow to add the full array of necessary entries. (Cf. the related, though not identical issues 52, 46 or 31.) I experimented a little bit with https://tools.wmflabs.org/quickstatements/ but I didn't succeed. I'm wondering whether in principle it would be possible to add the full array of entries (title, date, accessdate, author, editor, publisher ...) and if so, if anybody could provide me with a recipe? 123 (talk) 00:42, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Run the newest version and use the syntax from the original version: Each statement can be followed by an unlimited number of "source pairs" of source property TAB value. I can confirm it works. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:25, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
In the case of printed sources, or sources where the editor wants to give a more complete and permanent reference than just a URL, the editor would use the stated in (P248) property. Some information that would differ among the various citations to the source, such as the page number(s), would be contained in the item that has a statement citing the source. But other information about the source, such as the title, author(s), publisher, publication date, etc., would be contained in the item describing the source. So when using stated in (P248) it's going to be necessary to search to see if the item for the source already exists, and if not, create it, before the source can be cited. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:47, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, this helps: I can now pinpoint the problem somewhat better. I tried to include a title (as string: S1476 "Some Title" or with an item: S1476 World Economic Outlook (Q8035662)). This gives me always an error. Author works if I use an item, but not with strings. (It should be possible to include titles and authors as strings, as surely not every article, and probably not every author merits an item.) 123 (talk) 17:32, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
Actually, this was just discussed on this page at Wikidata:Project chat#Scientific papers - Author's items. As I read it, the consensus was that if a work is cited to support a claim, that creates a structural need to create an item for the author. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:23, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
You should read more carefully: For a monolingual string, prefix it with the language and a colon, e.g. en:"Some text". This applies to title (P1476). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 18:46, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks a lot. This way titles work. (Authors obviously need an item.) 123 (talk) 19:28, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Duplicated items - Q28208784 and Q11737225

Both items about Lake Nyos disaster. Please delete one.

✓ Done. MechQuester (talk) 00:00, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Scientific papers - Author's items

I have created an item of a scientific paper, but I face the issue that some authors are not known or famous (phd students). Should I create items for them to include them in the author fields or not? Maybe it is also good to know who exactly fulfills the requirements to have a wikidata item. Would be thankful for any reference to this issue --Sky xe (talk) 10:29, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

@Sky xe: For those cases there is author name string (P2093). You can also specify the order in which the names appear on the paper. See for example:
--Micru (talk) 11:33, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
What if the author string is ambiguous? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:01, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
I asked this question in the past and was told an item for the author should be created because "it fulfills some structural need". Jc3s5h (talk) 14:13, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jc3s5h: On one of the examples cited above there are ~600 authors. In those cases it is not practical to create items for all of them. Normally it is better to use your own criteria than any fix rule.--Micru (talk) 11:17, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
In my opinion, even if the article has ~600 authors, it is important to create item for each author since sometimes the authors may have other publications in the future. The creation of such items satisfies the Wikidata:Notability criterion pointed out by Jc3s5h). Also it is easier to search other articles by the author. Tools like QuickStatements can be used for bulk item creation. Jsamwrites (talk) 11:31, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
and if those authors have previously been added to wikidata then what? How do you link them up? Are we planning to have every publishing researcher (ORCID has over 3 million) in wikidata? ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:03, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
I know it's a bit difficult task (but not undoable) to verify whether there are already existing items. But that brings to the second part of the question on whether or not we are interested in having all the ORCID identifiers here on Wikidata? Jsamwrites (talk) 17:37, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
Should is too strong. I would say "It may be created". Notability is established through the structural need but that doesn't mean that you have to add items for the authors if you don't want to put in the effort. ChristianKl (talk) 09:20, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
If we use good references, most of the time we can create an item for the authors because good references are written by experts which write several articles or books. Snipre (talk) 12:25, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Busts

It looks like there is a little mess in two of these elements (interwiki, properties. categories and so on): bust (Q241045) and bust (Q17489160). And I cannot understand if they should be merged or not. --Stolbovsky (talk) 16:37, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

They shouldn't be merged. Fr.Wiki has articles for both of them. bust (Q17489160) is only about scultures. bust (Q241045) is about scultures as well as paintings. ChristianKl (talk) 15:59, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Should I revert all edits made on Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have (Q5460604)

At this rate, the page is going to be unreadable. And it defeats the purpose of the said item. PokestarFan (talk • contribs • SUL • Block log • User rights log • User rights) 17:49, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I'd say yes. - Brya (talk) 13:37, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
Done and protected already. MechQuester (talk) 00:01, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
Yes. --Succu (talk) 06:54, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
BTW: More of him #Advice needed, tools broken for lists of 1000 articles every Wikipedia should have. --Succu (talk) 21:34, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

en:Grand coalition (Germany)(Grand coalition (Q5595255)) and de:Schwarz-rote Koalition(Black-red coalition, Grand coalition (Q28794318))

Should we interwiki them? Black-red coalition includes hypothetical improbable coalition between en:CDU/CSU and The Left. Futhermore de:Schwarz-rote Koalition article includes Austrian political coalition. --Ticgame (talk) 05:07, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

I believe the geographical coverage difference is enough to warrant two separate items unless the former article talks about Austrian politics as well. Mahir256 (talk) 23:20, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Subclass

I think these statements are wrong, could someone fix them (keeping in mind that there might be many in the same case) or tell me whether they are actually OK?

Thanks a lot! Syced (talk) 11:42, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Looks like there are about 15 numbers defined as subclasses of something. Syced (talk) 11:52, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
By the way, I am also rather uncomfortable with stock market index (Q223371) being a sub-sub-class of number (Q11563). Syced (talk) 11:57, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for remarks. Added criterion used (P1013) orders of magnitude (Q1191085). -0.000001 uses other criterion used (P1013). About set/subsets: 0.000001 is one of the representations (views, forms and so on) of a number. Other forms: 0.000 001; 1/1 000 000; 1/1000000; 0.000001; 0,000001; 0,000 001; .000001; .000 , 001; 1000⁻²; 1x10⁻⁶; ... --Fractaler (talk) 13:15, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #255

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Preparing for making more ArticlePlaceholder indexable by search engines on Welsh Wikipedia (phab:T162244)
    • Preparing the deployments of Cognate and geoshape data type
    • Lexemes: starting adding sections for forms and senses

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Fusionproblems

Can someone fusion de:Homosexualität in Portugal (Q13427064) with en:LGBT rights in Portugal (Q2007877) ? 92.76.106.150 19:56, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Until the Spanish articles are merged or one of them is deleted (notwithstanding the differences between 'LGBT rights' and 'homosexuality'), this would not be appropriate. Mahir256 (talk) 23:20, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata item quality labeling drive

Is Wikidata high quality? What items are due for promotion to the showcase? Answering these questions would require reviewing millions of items on a regular basis and that would take far too long. So we're training machine learning models to evaluate the quality of items in Wikidata automatically. In order to train these machine learning models, we need to label a bunch of items by their quality level. I'm posting to invite you to join our working group.

We're trying to get ~5,000 items labeled. We'll use this labeled data to train a machine learning model for m:ORES and use it to categorize the rest of items in Wikidata, look for trends & coverage biases, etc. We've built similar quality models for English, French, and Russian Wikipedia and they have been used to do a bunch of cool things (e.g. content coverage dynamics, helping students write articles, and helping WikiProjects prioritize re-assessments). So, we think this'll be a great thing for Wikidata too.

If you want to help us train the model, see our labeling campaign information page and sign up list.

-- Glorian WD, EpochFail, and Ladsgroup 19:30, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Is the stats page supposed to be as it is now? Just plain text? --Micru (talk) 16:49, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
Micru, yeah, it should be updated as more items have been labeled :) --Glorian WD (talk) 19:33, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Glorian WD, EpochFail, and Ladsgroup, how about using the 1000 items every Wikipedia should have? They are from different areas of interest, and several Wikipedias work on having articles for all of them. Russian has it completed. 78.55.15.204 21:17, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data center in Dallas. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 19 April 2017. On Wednesday, 3 May 2017, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for approximately 20 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 19 April and Wednesday, 3 May. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 20 April and Thursday 4 May).
  • If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
  • There will be code freezes for the weeks of 17 April 2017 and 1 May 2017. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:34, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

This work will cause long-running scripts at Wikidata to stop. Please plan to re-start scripts and check bots once the sites are online again. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

SPARQL federation - more of the same

Hi!

I've added more endpoint to SPARQL federation whitelist, including attribution-licensed ones. Please see the full list in the User Manual. All endpoints are acknowledged at WDQS Licensing page.

You are welcome to nominate new endpoints at Wikidata:SPARQL federation input. I've made some cleanups and edits there to make nominating easier, hopefully that helps. Examples and links to any materials showing how to integrate data between endpoints are very welcome too.

--Smalyshev (WMF) (talk) 19:43, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Coordinates

On the main site I have a hidden category named: Category:Coordinates not on Wikidata. How might I go about fixing this? Semmendinger (talk) 23:22, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

on a wikipedia article, go to the left side and look for "wikidata item". click on it. Go down a bit and look for the "+add" all by itself in white. Click on it and add coordinates (if it is not provided already). Then add. MechQuester (talk) 23:45, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
I must be blind as I don't see that option anywhere on the left side bar in either the article or editing page. It is however showing up on other pages just not the one I want to link.Semmendinger (talk) 23:53, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
Mind if I ask for the wikipedia article? If there isn't one, I'll create one. MechQuester (talk) 23:57, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks Mech, I think I just created one successfully, I don't really know how WikiData works. The Wikipedia article is at this link. But I think I just created one here? Semmendinger (talk) 00:00, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
Fantastic creation @Semmendinger:!. Now to the article. Since the library system has 2 branches, I would suggest imputing 2 sets of coordinates. I have added the 2nd location from Palmer location to the item. MechQuester (talk) 02:22, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
Great point - appreciate your help! This will go a whole lot smoother on the next data entries now! :) Semmendinger (talk) 02:36, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
@MechQuester: value in adding subject named as (P1810) as qualifiers to each to differentiate?  — billinghurst sDrewth 05:53, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Quoted text in an item description

Can a description be copied directly from a dictionary or, in the case of the item being a published work, from the preface of that work or any other publication? If so, how do we demonstrate that this is a quotation and not original text? Martinvl (talk) 18:54, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Copyright, wise I don't think that's possible. Try to write your own description. ChristianKl (talk) 12:09, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: I have done a little more reading around the subject and this example suggests to me that use if dictionary definitions is "fair use". The example also shows how to format such use. Martinvl (talk) 11:58, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
I don't think anything written in the link suggests usage in Wikidata and it's derivative works would be fair use, especially when we are talking aout more than a single item. ChristianKl (talk) 12:10, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Who else is interested in item datasets?

I find this proposal by Jheald quite interesting. It would be more practical to work with sets of items than with individual items. Even for maintenance, it would be easier to watch a tree of items and see which items have been added or removed to that tree. I find that, due to the nature of Wikidata, the watchlist is not enough to maintain large amount of items. Is there anyone else interested in discussing this?--Micru (talk) 16:56, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're proposing exactly - a watchlist computed from a SPARQL query perhaps? But yes this seems useful. I maintain an occasional watch over the 4000+ regular nuclides in wikidata where this sort of thing would definitely be helpful. ArthurPSmith (talk) 12:34, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Merge Q2379041 and Q18353249

wikipedia:de:Sänger (Raumtransportsystem) and wikipedia:en:Saenger (spacecraft) are the same topic so their Q-pages should be merged -- 70.51.200.162 01:40, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

✓ Done MechQuester (talk) 01:52, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:25, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Useful resources on structured data on Congress

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the Wikimedia community but am attending an edit-a-thon at the Library of Congress and wanted to share some possible resources with you.

I coordinate the Congressional Data Coalition, which is focused on making legislative information available to the public. Our website is here.

One thing we have done is gathered a list of structured data (both in bulk and via API) of information about Congress. It includes the chairs/ranking members of all committee, photos of all members of congress, legislation going back decades, enacted bills going back centuries, roll call votes, and much more. You can find my constantly-updating list at this hackpad page. I also publish all recent Congressional Research Service reports here.

Considering the volume of information about Congress that is regularly updated on wikipedia pages, it may make sense to automatically pull that information. For example, you could pull the official photos of all members of Congress, or all of the members of a committee, and update it automatically whenever it changes.

Happy to chat about this more. Thanks!

Daniel  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Luminousenchiladas (talk • contribs) at 18:44, 7 April 2017‎ (UTC).

Hi Daniel - this sounds great. Is this data essentially public domain, so we don't have to worry about copyright (wikidata is supposed to be CC-0)? We have a number of properties that seem relevant to what you are offering - the basic image (P18) for photos, for example. If every member of congress does not currently have an english wikipedia page you may have to create a new item in wikidata for each, either way we need to link your record to the wikidata one. You might want to (or have somebody else) propose a specific property to link your identifiers with wikidata ids. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:01, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
Every member of Congress back to at least the 1970s already has a Wikidata item (I suspect it's complete even further back than that, but that's all I've verified so far). US Congress Bio ID (P1157) already exists, and is currently set for over 12,000 people. So as long as a data-source can be cross-referenced with that, it should be fairly simple to import, at least in terms of simple biographical information, and positions held (though I suspect many of the committee positions themselves would need to be created as separate items first). I'm not sure what the Wikidata position is regarding legislation — do we actually want an item for every Bill in every jurisdiction? I suspect not, though I'd be happy to be wrong on that! Even for significant bills that are included, I'm not sure there's been any/much thought yet on whether / how to record how individual politicians voted on those. --Oravrattas (talk) 07:25, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Subsection about modeling legislative bodies in Wikidata

RELATED: I have a bigger question for the Wikidata community - Do we have a good example in Wikidata of modeling all the committees and subcommittees of a legislative body? (I was at yesterday's edit-a-thon in Washington DC, where I met Daniel @Luminousenchiladas: and chatted about Wikidata, and can vouch for the usefulness of his site.) However, we noticed that the US House and Senate committees and subcommittees that had Wikidata items had no properties that fully captured their relationships within Congress. I took a look at the en.wp and Wikidata entries for UK government and EU parliament, and found they are no better. What is the best built-out national legislature in Wikidata that we can use as an exemplar? Thanks. (Pinging: @econterms, Slowking4: ) -- Fuzheado (talk) 11:38, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

hmmm, i don't think there is one that has enitre information but I could start working on some of them.MechQuester (talk) 04:19, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
I'm also unaware of any, though would also be willing to help out on such modelling. I would note, however, that it's often easier to model this sort of thing after sufficient data has been entered, than before — i.e. it's always possible to create a relatively bare entry for each Committee, even if you're not sure how exactly to tie it up to the legislative body. In fact, if all you want to capture initially is someone's membership of a committee, you don't even need the committee itself to exist yet — you could just create a "Member of the United States Senate Committee on Finance" item (for example), and then start setting it as the position held (P39), and wait for someone to create the committee later (In this case, United States Senate Committee on Finance (Q2985424) does already exist; this is just an example). As long as the data is entered reasonably consistently, it's always possible to come along later and fill in the missing committees and their relationships, etc. --Oravrattas (talk) 06:20, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
I'm interested to follow up. My local chapter, Wikimedia DC, has had events with the Cato Institute to help include and standardize legislation references on Wikimedia. I do not think all bills deserve a Wikidata item. It would be good to get official legislative committees into Wikidata, and I don't know how it's been done. And, more my speed to make sure all Congressional Research Service reports are in Wikidata. They are valuable and reliable on certain important topics for which it is hard to find other references. -- econterms (talk) 20:02, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
yes, if we had any structured data about legislatures, that would be a useful model. i see there was one editor interested in executive orders, but that is a small subset of government publications available. we may be looking to import what data we have about US congress. Slowking4 (talk) 03:35, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
I don't see a reason why a specific bill wouldn't deserve a Wikidata item. Bills are important documents and it's useful to be able to query all bills that a congressperson authored. ChristianKl (talk) 13:41, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
all bills are at congress.gov, where you can search by person or congress. english WP tends to consider laws notable not bills, with some exceptions. Slowking4 (talk) 02:26, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Can anyone here help sort out presumed IP ban for ongoing Wikidata hackathon in Suriname?

Please see this message to wikidata-l for the details I have so far. Thanks, --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 21:29, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@Daniel Mietchen: To lift the account throttle, please use the IRC channel #wikimedia-tech on freenode to contact a system administrator.--Jasper Deng (talk) 21:44, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. I did that — so far no response. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 22:01, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
I also tried phab:T162751. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 22:24, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
After a while, I got some helpful responses via Phabricator and the wikimedia-tech IRC, but then the hackathon crew did not respond to me any more. In any case, I think we should have better mechanisms to deal with problems arising during ongoing Wikidata-centric events. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 23:17, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
this is an ongoing problem, where vandal fighting is valued more than collaboration with new users. we have various techniques to route around the filters and throttles, but a newbie would have no clue. Slowking4 (talk) 03:28, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
@Daniel Mietchen: Anyone organising a hackathon should be organising for one or two experienced/trusted users to have "account creator" rights for the duration of the hack, OR to have IP addresses isolated from the throttle restriction. I am not sure whether local 'crats here can allocate creator rights, or whether we rely on stewards from m:SRP, either way it would normally need a discussion somewhere. [Stewards can always allocate that right in an emergency at their discretion]. Noting that anyone with advanced rights (sysadmin and above) at wikis will get that ability bundled into their rights anyway (per Special:ListGroupRights). I would think that mw:Hackathons should cover this topic matter and I have popped a note on the talk page to have it considered.
@Billinghurst: The only ones with account creator(-equivalent) rights here are the sysops, we don't have any provisions for otherwise doling out the right.--Jasper Deng (talk) 06:34, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jasper Deng: Pretty certain that it is part of the default account type for all wikis (you can check by looking at an account via Special:UserRights and if it is a greyed out option, then it is available to someone to allocate), as such stewards can do it for any wiki. So for us it is just the process of saying YesY please assign date-to-date. For us it is being certain that the user is trusted with email account details (need for creations) and able to work within the boundaries of blacklists and anti-spoof.  — billinghurst sDrewth 07:53, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
But accounts are global, they can be created on any project.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:58, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
@Ymblanter: Yes, the impacts are global; as with any admin at any wiki when they create accounts (stated that above); however, if we wish to allocate that right to a person (the right has to be given at a wiki), stewards would expect a local conversation if we are asking them to undertake that.  — billinghurst sDrewth 08:33, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: Sure, my point was that since we do not have account creator flag here (and we would need an RfC to create it - may be someone can start it), a legit workaround seems to be having a couple of account creators on another project in the team.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:48, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
I don't think that you need an RfC to allocate the right on a temporary needs basis. If someone wants it, they ask here ahead of requirement, it sits open for up to a week, and is approved or not. And Ymblanter, I don't disagree that a conversation and rights allocation can take any place. A user could just as easily have the conversation at m:SRGP and have stewards make a decision. However, if it is important to this community, then owning the conversation and solution is better than leaving it to stewards to make up their minds in their time.  — billinghurst sDrewth 08:58, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: But technically I (as a crat) can not assign account creation rights. The panel just says "rights you can not assign". I assume it is either not available or only available to stewards. This can be changes by holding an RfC and, if it is successful, filing a Phabricator request, but I do not see how it can be changed otherwise.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:59, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
Ah, gotcha. Completely right, they would require a consensus for a phabricator; again not certain whether an RfC is required or just the evidence of the conversation.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:10, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
If "a phabricator" means "a task in Phabricator", general documentation for consensus requirements for configuration changes is available. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:50, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Letters and Correspondence

I welcome advice on the difference between letter (Q133492) and correspondence (Q1784733) and when it is appropriate to use them. correspondence (Q1784733) seems to be used both for individual letters such as Franklin D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill (March 29, 1941) (Q23533314) and Letter from Alexander Henry Haliday to John Curtis undated (Q19096518) as well as collections of correspondence such as Letters of Charles Lamb (Q6533761) and The Letters of William Blake (Q19092346). correspondence (Q1784733) is also attached to people, such as Pavel Kohout (Q163557) and Mademoiselle Aïssé (Q275947): it seems that this property is being stretched. It would be nice to have letter (Q133492) used for each individual piece of correspondence, and correspondence (Q1784733) attached to collections of correspondence, or works of fiction written in the form of correspondence. Thanks in advance for any help, MartinPoulter (talk) 16:41, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

(my thoughts only) I see that it is the conundrum of minutiae of difference which becomes more problematic in multiple languages. I see a letter as one piece of correspondence, ie. I write you a letter, we have correspondence. So if it is just the letters written by someone, then it is letters; if it is the letters and the replies, then it is correspondence.

Where I have reproduced published works like The conscience clause (Q28062744) I have aligned it with letter as that is what the author/editor has called it.  — billinghurst sDrewth 22:55, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

We could think more of applying the data in Wikidata

Hoi, Pasleim created a wonderful tool that makes it easy to add all kinds of BLP information to Wikidata based on information in a Wikipedia. I blogged about it. In my opinion we should consider more how we can utilise our data and thereby engage as many people as possible.

In this example it is not to make Wikipedia editors in consumers of our data but we use our data to signal where we think there may be an issue with their article or our data. Obviously I expect our data to be 94% correct as usual. By using our data to focus attention we proactively use our data and enable people to concentrate their attention where it makes the biggest difference. This will help us (communities in the Wikimedia movement) to gain and retain our editors. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:24, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

I asked the Dutch Wikipedia if they would care for a tool that seeks a known date of death in their articles and they indicated they are interested. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:39, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Labels in watch list and recent changes

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54672

The watch list and recent changes speciel pages show the label for changed items and properties instead of just the Q and P numbers. Is it possible somehow to also show the label for edits in the corresponding talk pages so it is not just something like "Talk:Q1234567890" in your watch list? It would be nice as I cannot memorize the numbers for the items in my watch list. Best regards, Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 10:31, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

BLP policy?

There is currently an RfC on the English Wikipedia to remove the mobile view page description which is pulled from Wikidata. One of the biggest problems noted is Wikidata's lack of wikipedia:WP:BLP policy, which allows potentially libellous and defamatory material to be written about living people. Wikidata should have a BLP policy, both to assuage concerns of editors and to avoid lawsuits. Cheers, Laurdecl talk 09:21, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

There are two things here. Problems with descriptions and having a BLP policy.
It is easiest to consider Wikidata descriptions. They are not that good. They are typically added by bots based on information that is often later updated making the information more complete and accurate. There are automated descriptions, they are based on existing statements and they have been generated in English for years now. They are my preferred way to do disambiguation using Reasonator.
Nominally there is a BLP policy as the WMF has a policy that is applicable to all projects. However, having a policy and insisting on a practice are two things. Much of the work at Wikidata is done in an automated or in a half automated way and issues with for instance descriptions or labels are often found thanks to the functionality that registers it but the problem is that there is a flood of changes at Wikidata much higher than at en.wp. So if you see anything, fix it. Wikidata is your project too. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 10:39, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
"Wikidata should have a BLP policy, both to assuage concerns of editors and to avoid lawsuits." it may need a policy, but "what concerns" and what lawsuits?" it is unclear that fear of action by others is a roadmap. rather wikidata might consider a quality circle to improve data quality about living people. Slowking4 (talk) 23:22, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

We are bound by the Wikimedia Foundation resolution regarding Wikimedia's handling of material in biographies of living people (BLPs). This predates Wikidata, as it was passed on 9 April 2009 (there have been amendments since, but they don't affect what follows). It noted that there are problems with some BLPs being overly promotional in tone, being vandalized, and containing errors and smears. The Foundation urges that special attention be paid to neutrality and verifiability regarding living persons; that human dignity and personal privacy be taken into account, especially in articles of ephemeral or marginal interest; and that anyone who has a complaint about how they are described on the project's websites be treated with patience, kindness, and respect.

It also "urges the global Wikimedia community to uphold and strengthen our commitment to high-quality, accurate information, by [among other things] Ensuring that projects in all languages that describe living people have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles of neutrality and verifiability in those articles". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:40, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

While that resolution is a lovely thing, and provides some ... direction, it has not been "translated" to and made actionable in the Wikidata community. There is nothing like en-WP's BLP here and nothing like discretionary sanctions here. What does that resolution mean in Wikidata? The commons had to translate BLP notions into what they meant for images of identifiable people, right? So what does "BLP" mean here in this realm of data and phrases? Does content about living people that someone contests stay up while being contested, or come down immediately? How would such disputes even be resolved -- on what grounds? Many questions like that are not worked out here yet. I reckon they will be, eventually, as this community encounters problems, comes to consensus ways to solve them, and those consensuses (sp?) solidify into policy. But no WMF community can just write a policy de novo and enforce it all the sudden. That is not how WMF communities work, as far as I know. Jytdog (talk) 05:50, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Jytdog, the Commons guideline that you refer to pre-dates the WMF resolution, so it cannot have been created as a way to apply that resolution to Commons. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
User:WhatamIdoing Good point but irrelevant. The Commons has a policy (and yes, an actual policy) that translates the notion of being very careful about living people (which long predated the board resolution) to images. Something this project is not even close to. The point is that this project has no governance concerning data about living people. Jytdog (talk) 18:06, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
That depends upon what you mean by "policy". If by policy you mean "written page that says 'policy' at the top", then they don't, because c:COM:BLP says "official guideline" at the top. But if policy you mean ""course or method of action selected from among alternatives and in light of given conditions to guide and determine present and future decisions", then Commons has such a policy – and Wikidata might, too. In the hypothetical example below about the person being wrongly tagged as a criminal, it appears that everyone has agreed that the wrong data must be removed. "Remove bad data when we learn about it" appears to be the policy here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:55, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
We should make WD:BLP a policy. Laurdecl talk 07:33, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Hell no, this is still a Wikipedia centred proposal. What if there is no article for a person in any Wikipedia but only secondary information.. Mr Blp won the Whatever award in 2002.. ? We have many such items. The problem is that these items are inherently needed to complete the information in Wikidata. What Wikipedia has is often just a name in text, a red link. These things are not even considered in the Wikipedia BLP. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:01, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for providing that link! I had looked and not found it. So.. proposed since 2013. That is the germ of what one day might be a BLP policy here. Jytdog (talk) 15:45, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Hell yes. It's a Wikimedia-centred proposal. If there is no article for a particular living person on any Wikipedia, then you'd better make damn sure that any claims you make about them on Wikidata have reliable sourcing and that reliable sourcing is present in the item's entry. You'd also better be certain that you're not riding roughshod over a marginally notable individual's expectation to privacy. This project needs a BLP policy. --RexxS (talk) 16:56, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Right, and what you do is parrot Wikipedia thinking. I care about "Sources" and less about "sources". When an award winner has as much as an item and the fact of the winning of the award, I am completely satisfied when the person is known through a red link or a text on a Wikipedia page. For me, the fact that we have a back log of humans who died is something that I want you to focus on. It is the kind of problem that we have largely solved but there is a lack of volunteers doing this. When you say BLP, my challenge to you is will we make sure that we get such basic facts right. The basics in Wikidata are typically hardly controversial. so what do you mean, we need a policy.. First we need to get to grips with the issues that a BLP covers and make sure that we at the very least have basic facts as good as they get. Once we have done let us talk about sources. Let us talk about it once we do the basic things. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 19:14, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Sources are basic things, and without them you don't know whether the facts are right. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:32, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
From a Wikipedia point of view, sure. But when we have to spend our time on improving quality at Wikidata, there is a different priority. When "Sources" agree, I do not need "sources" to tell me what to concentrate on. A BLP has its place but as long as we do not have accurate practices to maintain who lives and who is dead we have our priorities wrong. When Wikid oidata agrees on this with Wikipedias, we may not have "source" information at Wikidata but through the "sources" on our "Sources" we are good. Of primary importance is that we focus our effort so that BLT issues do not arise at this stage of our development it is not sources. So let us focus on what facts in a BLP are relevant and get procedures for those. We are doing really good with the date of death (thanks Pasleim) but when we know, should we not ensure that ALL Wikipedias register death accurately, is that not a much more effective way of having a proper BLP? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:35, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jasper Deng, RexxS, Jytdog, Laurdecl: Maybe it's time for another RFC here along the lines of this one: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Verifiability and living persons (but maybe with some better prep work as that basically crashed and burned in the community). I agree something like this is really really needed here. Something wikidata-specific. Labels and descriptions and aliases don't allow sourcing, so should they be purely automatic from sourced statements for living people? Are there properties that should always have a verifiable source for a living person? How do we enforce? etc. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:57, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
I appreciate the invitation but I am really an en-WP person; i don't understand the culture of this place and i would be of no help. and i have no wish to force the ways of en-WP on this place. We need to respect our differences and support each other in ways that are appropriate. :) Jytdog (talk) 20:09, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
I know this might sound vindicative, but I will be brutally and completely honest: the problem of us not having a living persons policy can be blamed on the failure of that RfC and by extension the community members who caused it to fail (including this instance of blatant off-wiki canvassing by User:Magnus Manske). Those community members should absolutely be ashamed of themselves (yes, this is a harsh statement, but completely true). The fact is, while it is true that we want to include as much information as possible, and as freely as possible, what good is a knowledgebase that has no standard for the veracity of its information?
With that said, to ensure a future RfC better takes into account everyone's concerns, we need to talk more about them here. My intent with the original RfC was that no one has business complaining about the RfC if they did not partake in the discussion that originally spurred it. This statement should not be taken literally. Rather, the discussion here is the chance to craft a proposal most likely to get the support of our community.
@GerardM: Verifiability problems on other wikis, or verifiability problems in general, are red herrings with respect to the subject of BLP's. Just because we have to work on sourcing basic information in general does not mean we can ignore the importance of living people in particular. The foundation resolution binds us to this. The fact is, living people need to have the information on them correct, period. We are not allowed to ignore that for any reason.--Jasper Deng (talk) 10:26, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: As a further rebuttal of your comments, I do not understand why you believe "The basics in Wikidata are typically hardly controversial". That is simply nonsense. Even something innocuous as the description of an item is susceptible to BLP violations. There is no attribute of a living person that does not fall under the umbrella of BLP -- not even if it would seem uncontroversial at first glance.
I don't think you understand the purpose of "BLP". BLP is not the problem of deciding who is living and who is not. BLP means making sure information on living people is accurate, because the information we host on them is public and therefore can have real-life consequences. Remember, our information is used by Google in its search results pages. You agree that we want our information to be correct, right? If this is not policy, then there is no reason for that to be honored here.--Jasper Deng (talk) 10:38, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
The proposal in that RfC was to have much stricter policy than en.Wiki has. I think there are good reasons for why such a policy would be bad for Wikidata. en.Wiki uses the wording "any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be supported by an inline citation to a reliable, published source."
Any policy document has to have clear standards that indicate to whom it applies. En.Wiki has "Anyone born within the past 115 years is covered by this policy unless a reliable source has confirmed their death". A good way to write a policy would be to stay roughly with the standards layed out in the English BLF. There's no reason to be stricter. ChristianKl (talk) 12:58, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: A potentially valid objection, though I fail to see how "living people" is not a well-defined set. But again, the question is, why was it not raised during the initial discussion before the RfC began? Only one user raised an issue about the RfC on its talk page before it went live, and I took care to talk to him about the proposal. That is why I am frustrated. My entire point is that we are not going to make another proposal that fails due to objections that were not raised during the crafting of the proposal.--Jasper Deng (talk) 18:27, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jasper Deng: The EnWiki BLP policy takes 150 words to explain what they mean with living person. Why do they do that? Otherwise it's not clear whether a person where the last reliable source that says something about the person was published 20 years ago is supposed to count as alive or dead for the sake of the policy. ChristianKl (talk) 13:17, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
You claim to be "completely honest" and "completely true", and manage neither. The objections were to a badly flawed proposal, and included suggestions as to how it could be improved - suggestions about which you apparently did nothing. In any case, the tone of your statement is utterly unacceptable. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:24, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: Let me be a little more explicit. Any flaws in the proposal were a result of a lack of commentary whenever I opened a discussion on this page on the subject. Furthermore, at least in the initial stage of that RfC, anyone who didn't like the proposal was free to propose alternatives. It's not my responsibility to propose others' changes. Nothing excuses the canvassing in any case.--Jasper Deng (talk) 18:27, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
If I remember right it was my impression was that the RfC was started prematurely. ChristianKl (talk) 18:51, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Bullshit. You were the proponent - if there was a lack of commentary, then you acted prematurely in putting forward something for a vote. If you were not prepared to take on board constructive criticisms (which did include proposed alternatives), doubly so. Don't try to blame others for your own shortcomings. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:08, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: "Bullshit" - says the one who tries to call me on my tone here. No criticism that begins with "bullshit" is constructive criticism.--Jasper Deng (talk) 20:38, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
You'll notice that "bullshit" was the word I used to describe - accurately - your claims; unlike you, I did not denigrate individuals. But still, you avoid addressing the point I made; just as you failed to address the points I and others made during your RfC, and on its talk page. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:20, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
I am not vindictive but brutally honest when I notice that you do not understand the issues. First, quality and BLP are related. It is not only in "sources", it is also in "Sources". When BLP is infringed on in any of our projects it is a Wikimedia problem. Restricting it to one project is irresponsible. When you state that the descriptions are innocuous, I fail to agree. I prefer automated descriptions because they will improve with improved statements. Many descriptions are horribly incomplete.
Wikipedias are involved in "sources". Some Wikipedias only accept "sources" in their own language. Accepting policies are already problematic, accepting that what Wikipedia does has a similar effect on Wikidata is not possible. When "Sources" like the Wikipedias accept that a fact is true, for instance a date of death, an employment or whatever it follows that we can inherit / assume their source and not give such an aspect of a person attention. Not when there is so much where Wikidata / our projects are not in agreement on the facts.
When we focus on where there is disagreement, we focus our attention where problems are most likely, where quality / BLP issues exist. Our information needs to be correct but we gain quality by focusing our attention. Thinking in absolutes is silly.
When you ass-ume that there is only one way and that is by sourcing everything, you set us up to fail. By concentrating where quality issues are likely by comparing "Sources", we set ourselves up to succeed. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 13:58, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: Again, I don't think you understand what I mean. I don't care how it is achieved, but the information about living people must be verifiable, i.e. correct, and it must be a policy that we hold ourselves to that general principle. "Verifiable" is up to us to define. And you may prefer automated descriptions and data entry if you want, but this is a knowledgebase anyone can edit, so we have to be concerned about users changing it, such as in the example I cited.
Verifiability is a different question from the general question of living people. As someone who has done revision deletions of some serious BLP violations here and read and understood the foundation's resolution quite well, I think I understand the issue quite well.--Jasper Deng (talk) 18:27, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
"I don't care how it is achieved" That would explain the deficiencies in the RfC. Some of us who do care offered you advice there, which you ignored. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:12, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
If you do not care how it is achieved, should I care about your opinion? At issue is that a policy that is impossible to implement has little merit but good intentions. Effectively it is telling others what to do. When descriptions are factually misleading and a target for vandalism, when they do not scale well particularly not for other languages, what is the net value of descriptions anyway? The fact that anyone can edit does not mean that we have to have hand made descriptions and as you know they are mostly created by bots.
I do understand what you mean however I am of a totally different opinion, it is the basis for a plan that is actionable and will have a positive impact. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 19:20, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
I apologize if my pinging Jasper is starting a fight, that was far from my intention (and GerardM I suggest you read a little more carefully before arguing back). Moving on, the recent major discussion on this issue failed to come up with any statement of policy. The important thing here is how do we craft a policy that IS acceptable to the wikidata community while actually addressing BLP concerns? @ChristianKl: has a reasonably specific suggestion above based on enwiki's language. How do we translate it to wikidata? Are there certain types of statements that might routinely be "challenged or likely to be challenged", or could any statement fall in that category? Is "imported from" one of the wikipedias sufficient source information to meet BLP standards for such statements? Should vandalism on pages of living people be treated more aggressively? How do we treat items about people for which we don't have a birth or death date? ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:08, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
sexual orientation (P91), ethnic group (P172) and religion or worldview (P140) are properties where I can see a general need for sources.
When writing a good BLP policy verifiability also isn't the only concern. Privacy also matters (and Jasper's proposal didn't say anything about it). Given Wikidata's much wider notability standards we can't simply copy enwiki on that front. ChristianKl (talk) 18:34, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
This was meant to address the issue of hiding revisions. Our oversight policy already includes provisions for hiding libel and other violations of the foundation privacy policy, but I guess you want it to be more explicit.--Jasper Deng (talk) 18:38, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Libel isn't the only way to violate someone's privacy. It's possible to quote reliable sources about someone's home address and other doxxing informtion. We need a policy about when it happens to be okay to include the home address of a person. You don't violates Trump's privacy by saying that he lives in the White House and previously lived in Trump tower but if someone would include my home address in a Wikidata item about myself that would be a violation of my privacy. ChristianKl (talk) 18:51, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
I agree with you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
So, lets look at sexual orientation (P91), ethnic group (P172) and religion or worldview (P140). There are a lot of other sensitive data, like blood type blood type (P1853) or partner unmarried partner (P451) etc etc., but lets stick with sexual orientation (P91), ethnic group (P172) and religion (P140), because they even have explicit conditions for sources.
  • ethnic group: "Each P172 claim needs to have at least one (non Wikipedia) source". "subject's ethnicity (consensus is that a VERY high standard of proof is needed for this field to be used. In general this means 1) the subject claims it him/herself, or 2) it is widely agreed on by scholars, or 3) is fictional and portrayed as such)."
wd-analyst: Number of statements 17,637. unsourced statements 68%. Wikipedia references 31%.
  • sexual orientation: "Each P91 claim needs to have at least one (non Wikipedia) source". "the sexual orientation of the person — use IF AND ONLY IF they have stated it themselves, unambiguously, or it has been widely agreed upon by historians after their death")
wd-analyst: Number of statements 3,267. unsourced statements 78%. Wikipedia references 18,3%.
  • religion (P140): "Only if the person's religion is public information and important in his or her career."
wd-analyst: Number of statements 34,620. unsourced statements 80%. Wikipedia references 15%.
It's a disgrace. --Atlasowa (talk) 19:17, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
A disgrace for whom, Atlasowa? Wikidata? Careless tool users? But yes, sensible information should have a at least one solid reference. Otherwise the „information“ should be dropped. Gruß --Succu (talk) 19:40, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
@Succu: a complete taxon includes an author and a source. I am totally with you when we delete at the same of all information that "is not sensible" all deficient taxons. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:06, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
This subthread is about sensitive information not completeness. I'm fully aware that most of our more than 2,000,000 taxon names are lacking some basic information. --Succu (talk) 05:46, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
@Atlasowa: that doesn't look good - however, can you tell how many of those were for living people as opposed to historical data? ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:59, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
@ArthurPSmith: Wikidata:Request a query? Queries about references are not at all easy AFAIK. --Atlasowa (talk) 08:45, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

arbitrary break

Ok all, some good suggestions above on specifics. How about we continue this discussion on Wikidata talk:Living people and try to refine that page, which I just discovered has been around since 2013. ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:36, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
I cannot find all the good suggestions on that page. This is where the discussion is going on. I am not interested in yet another venue for this discussion where arguments are ignored. I have blogged yet again about quality and BLP.. An obvious additional point is that at Wikidata we are not in the business of biographies so there is no reason for a BLP. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 18:39, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
GerardM that is why the page here is called Living people and not "Biographies of living people". I have tried to consolidate the concrete suggestions from this discussion on that page; if you think I have missed something please consider adding it. I read your blog post, you are quite right that a lack of completeness through missing statements can be almost as harmful as statements made that are not valid. Nevertheless there is an issue here and it HAS resulted in some complaints particularly from enwiki people. There must be a happy medium. I am not advocating for, nor do I think anybody who wants such a policy is advocating for the mass removal of existing statements. If what we are doing now works, let's codify that so it can keep working. But these issues of potentially controversial or privacy-violating statements are real, so there has to be some areas where we need to both push for greater care and find ways to enforce that. I don't have a magic answer here, I'm just hoping as a community we can come together on this because it has been an issue that needs addressing for a long time now. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:21, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
People from en.wiki have no standing. I am on record for a quality approach that uses "Sources" as being equivalent to "sources" as they focus our attention to where the issues are. We are heavily adding "Source" identifiers and we can use comparison to realise where it makes sense to spend additional effort to curate data.
As long as en.wp people only insist on us doing their bidding and not consider how Wikidata can enables improved quality in en.wp their opinion is exactly that. My guestimate is that some 4 to 6 % of their wikilinks particularly in lists are wrong. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 20:07, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: Right now you are just hand-waving without making a concrete suggestion. I think you're missing the fundamental point here: we have to be careful with any information on living people, no matter where it is on our website, because their lives can be seriously impacted by information on the web. Do you agree with that? And since anyone is welcome to edit, English Wikipedia editors' opinions do have weight, even though they don't control our community in any way.--Jasper Deng (talk) 20:38, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jasper Deng: Really? With the way you put it, I fail to appreciate your point of view, I disagree with your conclusions, I even reject them. There are several approaches to quality that I support. What Glorian is doing is an initial step to something good. Paleim does great work on the death of people. This can be expanded to signal to signal more strongly to Wikipedias that they do not have a date of death for people. I have proposed to use Wikidata for the management of Wiki projects. "Black Lunch Table" is a working example for artists from the "African diaspora". I have proposed to associate Wiki links and red links in Wikipedia with Wikidata items. It will improve quality and completeness in both Wikipedia and Wikidata. I have proposed the notion of quality as the level of linking between items. At this moment I am doing this for librarians and, it works. I have proposed that the comparison between "Sources" (Wikipedia / Viaf / Open library et all) will allow us to focus on differences. When we concentrate on these differences and seek "sources" for these, our time is well spend because we are active where it matters. We should also seek a use for our data. Wikipedia templates is one, filling the {{authority control}} is another and helping people to find free books in Open Library is another.
So when this is all "classified" as hand waving, I fail to see that you actually understand what conversation the waving of hands supports. Now do you agree that all these approaches improve quality and by inference raise the level of what we do? If not what arguments of your own do you have because so far I fail to see you make a coherent point. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 04:49, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: Look, quality assurance is important in general, but the fact is that we cannot allow our site to be used for libel or defamation, and it is our obligation to prevent it. It's not about dates of death. It's about respecting a foundation principle: living people must have information on them treated with care. You're completely sidestepping this point. And you're not getting anywhere by doing so, because again, this is a foundation principle. Quoted from the resolution, we are urged to commit to "Ensuring that projects in all languages that describe living people have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles of neutrality and verifiability in those articles". A general notion of quality is not compatible with the need for special attention to information on living people. None of your proposals do that.
Perhaps a rhetorical question would help: if you were someone famous, and you found that your Wikidata item was modified to include claims like "instance of criminal", what would you think? What if its description were modified to say your occupation is a prostitute when you yourself were vehemently against prostitution (hypothetically speaking)? What if you found that someone posted a comment accusing you of having committed sexual assault on an item's talk page? Wouldn't you want an easy-to-refer page that clearly and directly states the community's commitment to be especially careful with living people? We're talking about the lives of real people here. These could be perfectly acceptable to include in the items of people who lived long long ago, even if poorly verified, but not in those of living people.--Jasper Deng (talk) 06:58, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
When you say "we cannot allow our site to be used for libel". Obviously. However, what you say is not practical. The quality of our data is substandard and that means that we misrepresent practically everyone on Wikidata. Misunderstanding this information is easy and obvious. When you do not understand how quality measured mitigate problems, fine. When you want to clean up the act of our project you have to focus our attention. We cannot do everything now. We have to fix the issues we know that exist first. When someone has an issue with our data, there are processes for dealing with them. How often were these triggered for Wikidata? Yes, we have had data that was wrong and I added some faulty data myself. That is not the problem, the issue is in how we deal with them in a scalable way. Bullshit rhetorical questions are exactly that. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 11:21, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @GerardM: I'm going to remind you again that we do not have the luxury to not pay attention to this, because Wikidata exists in the real world, and real people are impacted. But you at least agree on the subject of libel. If I revert something libellous or potentially libellous, I need to have a policy I can point to. It is true that we cannot do everything, but the least we can do is formulate a policy. This is not the same as implementing it (i.e. auditing items for such information). You may claim this is impractical, but the fact is, it's not. Enforcing protection of living people is this straightforward.--Jasper Deng (talk) 19:25, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

There is a difference between libellous and damaging. When someone is convicted at the international court in the Hague it is damaging, not libellous. Anyway.. my problem is that we have projects dealing with information of living people, I see easy options for more projects what I do not see is involvement. I have added millions of statements and as anyone I make mistakes. What is wrong is in the "Sources" and on top there are my own mistakes. When it comes to living people, we already will remove libellous information. We will send people packing who add wrong information when we notice their pattern. Projects have been formulated that focus on erroneous statements or focus on particular relevant information like date of death and the comparison with "Sources".
What is wrong with policies based on all individual items focusing on living people is when they do not take in consideration the existing items / data / people we already represent in items. I resent it when they do not recognise that a lack of data does misrepresent people and we have loads of those. I resent it when a policy is so stupid to prevent us from improving the quality because of adding individual item based restrictions. I resent it when people that talk do not seek practical measures to increase quality. I have presented several policies that will impact quality both in Wikidata and Wikipedia but that is ignored because it does not fit the preconceptions.
What I hate most is that what is proposed in a LP is based on bad faith and starts with the wrong premises. This does not mean that "sources" do not have their relevancy and it does not mean that having them is a positive quality improvement and it does not mean that they are extremely relevant when there are conflicts. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 04:48, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: It's not even about individual items or about bad-faith edits. I gave the example of a person's own item as a simple one, but LP would apply to any page. For example, if on someone else's item I add a claim saying you are their spouse, even in good faith, you might feel uncomfortable with that. All of my example claims could be perfectly acceptable if any reasonable person would be convinced that they are true (i.e. verifiable). But because the burden of proof lies on whomever adds the data (something I am aware you disagree with, but which is absolutely essential in this case - we cannot wait for a living person to complain to us because that is not their job), they can't be added otherwise. This is not nearly as much of an issue for other items. It's not even limited to items: adding those same claims to this page or any other discussion page can be just as bad.
One does not need to be acting in bad faith to run into issues here. Not everyone who comes here (remember, our content is editable by anyone, including completely new users unfamiliar with how online information can affect real people) knows to avoid adding things they hear about in forums and on social media, because as far as they are concerned, that information is true. They may add that to Wikidata in perfectly good faith. An LP policy would also serve as a page to educate such users.
Finally, you already agree that we remove libellous and incorrect information. But there is no written policy at this time that requires it (WD:UCS does not count). Furthermore, as I hinted above, all users, good-faith or not, should have an easy-to-refer-to page for the purpose of learning about why information that might merely be disputed in some topics should not be added at all to the website, barring easy verifiability. Note that I am leaving "verifiability" as a free word here, since the community hasn't defined it.
This might not have the immediate effect of improving our data quality, but it provides reassurance to living people that we are at least committed to being careful with their information. Again, however, as much as you may dislike it, you can't conflate the issue of general data quality with being careful with living people - living people comprise quite a small minority of our items as far as I can tell. Unlike with most subjects, it is better to have no data than to have dubious data when it comes to them.--Jasper Deng (talk) 05:31, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
It does make a nice plot though tinyurl.com/m6shc5l. I didn't know the bar-chart display mode automatically sorted the data. Jheald (talk) 09:20, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
  • speaking as a Wikimedia movement member who primarily edits en-WP, some observations
The first is that I get it, that a goal of Wikidata is scalability and openness. You want to be able to run bots that add data to loads of articles, and you want people to be free to make individual edits.
At that same time, I see a real consensus above (with the glaring except of GerardM) to take the WMF resolution about living people seriously.
So this project should think through how to accomplish the two goals above.
I would think that this would be the way to go:
a) decide what this project will consider to be "reliable sources" for data about living people and through that discussion establish a Wikidata:Verifiability policy for data about living people. (the focus on living people should make that discussion tractable)
b) in practice, put any bot runs that will add data to items about living people through severe scrutiny with regard to the source from which the data is taken, per a).
c) change the WD software so that no one-off entry can be made to entries about living people without citing a source. (!) And perhaps flag them for review with some kind of "pending changes" function.
It is likely that some people will be interested in and committed to the work of reviewing and cleaning existing entries on living people, and through that work you all will encounter a bunch of disputes that will eventually result in standard ways to resolve them, and those ways to resolve them will result in a WD:LP policy that grows from community practice and has consensus here.
fwiw. Those are all very actionable things, and would be a better use of everyone's time than arguing with GerardM. Jytdog (talk) 22:44, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
a - ok; b - no; c - no. you will not increase data quality by raising the drawbridge, preventing unsourced data input, or increasing the scrap rate of unsourced data. you will not increase data quality by instituting a block policy under the BLP rubric. and you will not increase quality by drive by tagging.
rather you must have a quality circle. "It is likely that some people will be interested" - show me the project. i see a lot of normative statements and exhortation. i do not see many work horses here.
this would be a good grant proposal. let's start by working with the ORES team to use their metrics. Wikidata:Project_chat#Item_Quality_Pilot_Campaign, Wikidata:Item quality campaign; then make a query of unsourced statements about LP. Slowking4 (talk) 01:58, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
@Slowking4: While I mostly agree with you in principle, I very strongly disagree that I should not be able to make blocks for violations of LP. I like that many project members are thinking along the lines of "positive" (i.e. "we should do this and focus on that") rather than "negative" ("we cannot do this because of that") statements, but the subject of living people is sensitive enough to warrant it. I don't want to be the devil's advocate, but we should not have potentially libelous or otherwise damaging (to a given subject) information in the knowledgebase unless we can be assured that it is correct. Users who insist on inserting claims like "person x is an instance of sexual offender" indiscriminately should be blocked from doing so, because that goes contrary to the foundation principle and can harm real people.--Jasper Deng (talk) 02:18, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
i would suggest that your desire to block people is a wikipedia cultural norm, for which you will not find a consensus here. and no amount of drama-mongering or scare quotes about "libelous" either on wikipedia or here will get you that consensus. i increasingly see the argument that "this issue is so important that we are justified to suspend AGF." i would suggest that a pillar is more important than a policy. we have seen the consequences of this toxic practice with editor decline at the wikipedias where the blocking culture is the worst. Slowking4 (talk) 16:19, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
@Slowking4: Please capitalize your "i" and the first letter of each sentence, it's harder to read your comments when they are all lower-case No, read my reply to Gerard above. Blocking does not imply assumption of bad faith and I don't see where you got the notion of the opposite; good-faith edits can be disruptive. To be quite frank, a policy without provisions for enforcement is not a policy at all.
With that said, it's not like this would all-of-a-sudden result in a million users blocked at once. Blocks by their nature are to be used only if needed. A user, good-faith or not, who receives repeated messages about their editing and keeps doing what they're doing is a candidate to be blocked - and, other than extreme cases, not otherwise.
If you think this is not a problem, just take a look at my linked examples above.--Jasper Deng (talk) 17:13, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
It is exactly your point of enforcement why I oppose your need for a justification to delete. When a fact (like a spouse, a date of death) is supported by a Wikipedia, you are not justified in deleting a statement or banning a user. It is a too narrow view on what we do and where we are in our development. Without a justification for deletion or blocking, I agree that "sources" are to be preferred and when there is no secondary support, sources may be asked. When there is suspicion of bad faith, we already do go further and that does not need a policy change. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:28, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: What if said statement happened to have been added by a vandal on that Wikipedia at the time you added it? What if it were directly inserted out of nowhere? If a living person is upset by that statement, do you think they care where it came from if it's dubious and not verifiable? You're still missing the point (if you are having trouble understanding my comments due to a language barrier, please do not hesitate to get translation from others). And like I said, bad faith is definitely not a necessary condition for LP-violating information to be inserted. And no, even in the case of bad faith, we do not have a policy for that (not all bad-faith edits are mere vandalism).--Jasper Deng (talk) 07:21, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
How often have their been complaints by external people about Wikidata. Get real. You insist on your point of view and do not consider anything else. No, I do not want you to delete on such flimsy arguments. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 16:40, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: There are none that I know of. However, that absolutely does not mean it's not a potential problem that we should work towards addressing. Your logic is like saying in a new town, we should only have a fire department once a home in that new town burns down, or saying that there shouldn't be an evacuation plan in place for a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States despite the glaring threat of a tsunami from the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The bottom line is, we have to be prepared. You clearly are the one who isn't being real here. Have you not read the foundation's resolution? After all, the English Wikipedia removed Wikidata's descriptions from mobile search precisely for this reason.--Jasper Deng (talk) 19:28, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
You are conflating two issues and ignoring some main issues. The problem with descriptions has been ignored for many years and there is a solution that is wilfully ignored. You rate it a BLT issue and that makes your POV about your wish to enforce as an admin. You ignore that for many BLP there is a BLP issue because of a lack of data. Your pov prevents your use of my argument that we are immature in where we are with Wikidata. There is a tool by Pasleim and when we truly cared about BLP there would be not so many items that need an BLP intervention. Your example of a new town you could consider Almere but at its very start there was no fire department. That came later. As to resolutions, they are written for a different platform. It does not consider the corner cases in Wikidata and it certainly does not consider the issues that we face. I am adding a profession for 5383 people at this very moment. It is backed by information in a Wikipedia that suffices for sources as far as I am concerned. That Wikipedia has an error rate and there are errors in there. I did check glaringly interesting cases by hand and that is all you can expect. When you state "we have to be prepared" my question is for what and why? We are not prepared to tackle our known existing BLP issues, we have a problem because of a lack of data and not too much data, there have been no complaints and we can tackle them using our vandalism approach anyway. Vandalism with BLP issues may need a firmer approach. My position is I am totally on board to improve our BLP, I am not on board when we are to implement something that works on a big Wikipedia, that has no provisions for what we do and that does not really function on small Wikipedias. So get real and think on how we can tackle BLP issues and forget your power grab. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 04:15, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
"conflating two issues" @GerardM: To be quite frank, to say this and to accuse me of not listening is to call the kettle black, and it's getting tiring. You're not making a coherent argument by copying, misusing and misunderstanding my terminology.
You are assuming a priori that we are already even committed to addressing living people. That's not what we have, and why we need to have a policy. And no, you again misunderstood my analogy. We're not a brand new project, so that invalidates the counterargument that it's too early. We're quite an old one (we will be celebrating our 5th birthday this October), with tens of millions of items - which makes it even more important for us to have a policy. Also, you should know very well that your view that you are not responsible for the reliability of information you import is not accepted (just check your own talk page), and that therefore, "imported from Wikipedia" usually does not suffice. The problem is, what if the information you imported was not compliant with BLP on the home wiki? You're only exacerbating the problem by importing it. Your mass imports have been controversial in the past so you are in no position to use it as an example; if I knew you would be doing this I would have refused to unblock your RobotGMwikt alternate account when you approached me in person at Wikimania 2014 about that.
And you're also blatantly wrong that we're not prepared to handle BLP issues, unless you are referring to the fact that we have no policy to that effect. That's a very defeatist attitude and not helpful. Admins have the tools to handle BLP, and I know that because I myself have used revision deletion to that effect. And no, you cannot ignore the resolution because it predates this project. Foundation resolutions apply everywhere unless they state otherwise. We are a content project so we definitely fall under that.
Overall, I really dislike your negative attitude. You do not have the perspective of an administrator who has handled this sort of thing, so your comments are almost condescending.--Jasper Deng (talk) 23:13, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
If just a) and b) agreed that would be an amazing place to start. Jytdog (talk) 03:00, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
i would agree to b) if it were not "severe scrutiny" but rather "severe coaching and counseling of uploaders to do the necessary pre-processing of data sets". i prefer the coach model to the gatekeeper model, in a consensus project. Slowking4 (talk) 16:26, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jytdog: It also remains that any notion of (B)LP is contingent upon a notion of verifiability, so we must also discuss that.--Jasper Deng (talk) 07:21, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jytdog:c would mean having stricter standards than en-wiki. On en-wiki you can make edits on living person that cite no sources without violating the en-wiki BLP policy as long as the statements aren't likely to be challenged. I don't think the wish to be "stricter than en-wiki" will win any RfC.
As far as b goes, how does en-wiki handle the issue? ChristianKl (talk) 12:17, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
User:ChristianKl -- i suggested b) and c) together, ~trying~ (probably unsuccessfully) to think about Wikidata as Wikidata, and not as a Wikipedian. The emphasis here as far as I can tell is all about data, and all about scale. b is really the most important. We don't have bots that add tons of content in en-Wikipedia; there is no analogy that I am aware of. Bots in en-Wikipedia tweak stuff. Cluebot changes content, but all it does is delete vandalism. I don't know how it works. With regard to c, yes for these fields this would be more restrictive than WP. But WP has a BLP and V policies not to mention "discretionary sanction" imposed by "Arbcom" (our supreme court, as it were) and we have well established policies and procedures to handle disagreements (questionable stuff is removed right away and not restored until it is settled) and people who do bad things to content about living people get the banhammer. Swiftly. In the absence of solid policy and procedure, locking down just those fields is a sensible thing that honors what Wikidata is and its level of development as a project, and respects the Foundation resolution. Jytdog (talk) 19:33, 11 April 2017 (UTC) (correct per below Jytdog (talk) 21:19, 11 April 2017 (UTC))
Jytdog, yes, Wikipedia has bots that add tons of content. Here's a bit of trivia for you: Which Wikipedia has the second-largest number of articles, and how did they do that with one-fiftieth as many active editors as the English Wikipedia has? Which Wikipedia has the third-largest number of articles, and how did they do that with less than 100 active editors? Answers: Swedish and Cebuano – and they run article-writing bots.
It's not just those two wikis, either. Bots have been used to create articles at the Vietnamese, Waray-Waray, and Dutch Wikipedias – and the English Wikipedia. User:Rambot was before your time, but it used a single source to create articles like this one at the English Wikipedia. The last time anyone looked, that one bot had created or edited about 98% of the English Wikipedia's articles on US geographic locations. JBradleyBot added multiple paragraphs to thousands of articles at the English Wikipedia a few years ago. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:59, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
Those geographic article-creation bots were incredibly controversial in en-WP as you well know. yes there are bots that generate content in other Wikipedia languages. I corrected above. Jytdog (talk) 21:19, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
No, I don't know that. Those bots weren't incredibly controversial. Look at the bot's talk page. If it were incredibly controversial, then you'd expect to see more than six comments per 26,473 edits, wouldn't you? Look at the BRFA that I linked for you. There was zero opposition. OTOH, I do remember the despair-tinged discussions around 2010, when everyone realized that the US census was under way, and that Rambot was not going to update all of the pages. Nobody wanted to update 25,000 articles manually.
You are correct that there have been controversies about semi-automated article creation, but most of them centered around the guy who assembled thousands upon thousands of sub-stubs in a spreadsheet, and then manually pasted the results into Wikipedia to create tiny articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:31, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: the problem seems to be that you are "assuming bad faith" on the part of Jasper Deng (and enwiki folks, etc. etc.). I don't believe that is true at all, I think this is an honest attempt to help us find a workable policy solution here. Note also that wikidata is hardly "small" any more in itself. However, I do see one potential source of trouble - the statement in Wikidata:Verifiability that "The majority of unsourced statements, and statements not supported by the source provided, will be removed from Wikidata.". The second portion (statements not supported by the source) I agree with, but the first half (majority of unsourced statements ... will be removed) I find clearly objectionable. If there is no cause to remove a statement, why remove it just because no source is given? If it is a statement that might be argued with, the first step should be to find a source that either supports the statement, or find a contradictory source and add that (sourced) statement. We should not be removing statements just because they have no specified source. Except - possibly - in the case of living people for certain types of information as we've been discussing here. Help:Sources lists a lot of exceptions to the general requirement for sources, including "common knowledge" which can cover just about anything. More to the point of this discussion, the proposed policy at Wikidata:Living people supports indirect sourcing: statements, labels and descriptions can "Be supported by information in at least one corresponding Wikipedia article, that (in the article) has a citation to a reliable source". So GerardM or anybody else, if you are importing data from a wikipedia, add the "imported from ..." wikipedia statements, or perhaps better a reference URL directly to the source page, and you should meet all the proposed requirements. But we do need to reword the statement in Wikidata:Verifiability because I don't think that's anywhere near current practice or community consensus. ArthurPSmith (talk) 13:38, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
The problem is that it has nothing to do with bad faith and everything to do with refusing to argue. They do not refute any of the arguments opposing their point of view. There has been no problem so far from external parties but the internal criticism about descriptions is ignored, the use of "Sources" to target our effort where we are weak is ignored. The notion that the lack of data itself is a "BLP" issue, the fracas with the quality states has only an acceptable outcome when we do not accept it as effective but only as an approach to quality. An approach that may improve over time. This "Verifiability" thing is not a policy and it will be a disaster when applied. It is a disgrace that tools we have to fix BLP issues are not used by all and that so many known issues are still there.
The problem is that it is not an honest attempt to help. It is wilful disregard to face observable facts and a refusal to argue and listen. The problem is that it is telling others what to do and not walking the walk themselves. It is all talk and exactly because of this refusal to argue not accepted. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 21:04, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: Do you really think I would be spending time on an issue that did not matter to me? Do you really think I am not spending my precious time for anything but the betterment of the project? As I said above, this comment is quite hypocritical. I will not go as far to say that your comment describes your own (earlier) comments, but that's not far from the truth, and your comment very clearly assumes bad faith on my part. I should remind you that last month, you were put on moderation on the wikimedia-l mailing list because of that, and ArthurPSmith (talk • contribs • logs) has observed it too, so it's not like I am the only one who has observed it. It is very hard for me to lighten my tone when you are so disrespectful.
I'm not going to be responding to your comments anymore because that is clearly not constructive.--Jasper Deng (talk) 23:13, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
@Jasper Deng: I do not say that you do not care, I never did. I say that you are wrong. No bad faith, but with all the arguments I put in front of you, no argument of mine has been refuted. You did get a reaction to the arguments you put forward. When you consider the BLP it did good and it did harm at Wikipedia. If you cannot see this, fine, ask someone who should know.
Calling me hypocritical is a personal attack. You forget that I have a large and consistent body of work in my blog. It is quite consistent on the issues that I raise and I raised them over the years, twelve years. When you study what I wrote you will see that I developed my arguments often in response to critique. So you may care but arguably so do I.
I do not mind to be wrong, but prove it. At that you failed and it is reasonable to expect that the implementation at this time of a destructive BLP policy will hurt Wikidata. I made my arguments, they are there to refute, not to ignore. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 04:03, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
    • not much of a debate, merely "everyone is right talking past each other." the wikipedians imagine they will take their failed methods here, by their usual "parade of horribles" drama. no sale. but we may have some upload standards. no sign of a quality circle to improve existing data quality, either on wikipedia or wikidata. Slowking4 (talk) 02:57, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Executive Order data from Federal Register

Note: this was originally posted on Wikidata:Partnerships and data imports, but in line with Wikidata:Data donation#How to add data to Wikidata, I am reposting it here.

I'm looking to improve the coverage of Federal Register records on Wikidata, and I'm looking to start with Executive Orders. The Federal Register has exportable lists of United States Executive Orders since 1994 at https://www.federalregister.gov/executive-orders in both CSV and JSON formats. There are approximately 1000 documents listed, with a fairly well-populated example extant on Wikidata at Executive Order 13233 (Q5419885). There are also further details about the Federal Register API on their developer resources pages, but I'm looking first at establishing a set of mapped and well-populated records before even considering any sort of API usage. One of the things that this is for is to provide additional support for Wikipedia:Template:Infobox U.S. Presidential Document, to which I've added a number of Wikidata properties in order to automatically populate a number of fields, including various document numbers and links to the Federal Register document.

I'll be honest, I've never dealt with Wikidata uploads before, and my experience with APIs is almost as limited, so I would greatly appreciate any assistance that I can get. I am more than happy to do any groundwork in preparing either a CSV or a JSON file, including mapping properties to the data fields populated in the Federal Register records. Would anyone be able to assist me in the upload? — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 17:19, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

please also check out Wikisource:WikiProject United States Executive Orders - talk to transcribers from scans there or at Wikisource:Scriptorium. we have talked with the federal register folks at NARA, drop a line to user:dominic. Slowking4 (talk) 03:32, 3 April 2017 (UTC)
I'm interested. I'm trying to gather certain Federal Register entries which may belong on Wikidata too. I don't know about uploads yet. econterms (talk) 16:54, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
Slowking4: Thank you, that helps a lot! I'm messaging the EO WikiProject now, and I'll speak to user:dominic afterwards.
Econterms: Is there anything that you're looking into in particular? I've got a number of basic properties already mapped out on the page for Wikipedia:Template:Infobox U.S. Presidential Document (mostly the ones most appropriate to EOs). Please feel free to message me, and I can see if I can help you from what I already know. — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 15:30, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
there is also w:Template:Infobox U.S. legislation. we need an infobox for U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, we have s:United States Statutes at Large and s:Code of Federal Regulations. which federal register updates. some wikidata organization would be helpful. we need some way to update census data for w:Template:Infobox U.S. county -- Slowking4 (talk) 20:42, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Advice needed, tools broken for lists of 1000 articles every Wikipedia should have

In Interlingua Wikipedia there are the pages

Three observations:

  1. The first was linked with meta:List of articles every Wikipedia should have - User:MechQuester killed the connection [11] the connection was restored [12] MechQuester killed it again [13].
  2. MechQuester removed all 1000 article connections, breaking ListeriaBot maintained tracking tools.
  3. User:Eurodyne protected the page [14] /Excessive vandalism ([Edit=Allow only autoconfirmed users] (indefinite)))/

What Eurodyne refers to with "Excessive vandalism"? The IP edits, or those by MechQuester, or anything else? How can the old state be restored, we need it in iawiki to progress with 1) item name translation (setting labels) 2) finding images if missing 3) translating P31, P279 and P361 target item names 4) tracking article creation progress.

The goal was to have stubs ready for all top 1000 articles by end of April. The goal is now in danger. Please advice! Also how it is possible to track the articles automated, an item could be removed and another added, without ListeriaBot, how does iawiki get notified about a newly missing item, in case for the new one there is no article? 85.180.37.42 06:26, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Hey there. I know that every those 1,000 articles are important to every wiki. However, i don't think it is necessarily important to add every single one to them. in fact, the article. MechQuester (talk) 13:10, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
It absolutely does not matter what you think about necessity, does it? This is Wikidata, and Wikidata is made to describe things. The meta-list is a reality, a real list and it has list items. And policy that allowed you to remove facts from Wikidata? 85.180.50.240 19:44, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Suggestion: why not add catalog (P972) = Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have (Q5460604) on each of the thousand items, in the same way that Gerard has done for the items of interest to the Black Lunch Table ?

Then it's an easy matter to query for which of those items don't have articles in any particular wiki. Jheald (talk) 13:06, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I am quite happy to make a catalog and set this up. What page should I use for the source of the thousand ? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:07, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Jheald, GerardM: Thank you for your positive cooperation and offer for help!!! Source: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have/Itemlist . Can you also re-install the link to ia:Appendice:Lista de 1000 articulos que cata Wikipedia debe continer on Q5460604. The Listeria code in the two articles can be adjusted later. 85.180.50.240 19:40, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I have added all 1000 to a catalog. You can change your listeria list now. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:27, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@GerardM: Thanks a lot. Edits look good, but http://tinyurl DOT com/llj2a42 " SELECT ?item { ?item wdt:P972 wd:Q5460604 }" does not work, it finds no results. If I try the equally structured http://tinyurl DOT com/mc3nmja " SELECT ?item { ?item wdt:P92 wd:Q428 } " it finds Q12536 . You or @Jheald:, any idea? Some delay? [spam filter prevents link to tinyurl]85.180.52.199 13:25, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@GerardM, Jheald: - the edits all linked the catalog claim to Q29295845, which is for absent items, correct is Q5460604. 77.179.204.253 14:15, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

No, it is for all the 1000 items. Listeria will show what exists and what not. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 16:00, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@GerardM: - no. Q29295845 according to the links to meta and iawiki and according to the labels (ru, en, it) is for missing items. And Q5460604 as mentioned in the thread intro is for the the meta-1000-list. @Infovarius: thanks for Russian fix! @ValterVB: thanks for Italian fix. GerardM, you changed the en-label [15], but that was turning it to be wrong. What now with all the wrong incoming claims? Only 222 items are correct, and as of now Wikidata:List of 1000 articles every Wikipedia should have only lists 222 items. 78.55.15.204 21:11, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
A list is a list .. it is a "Wikimedia list article" I changed the name and the one that is about single items has 1000 articles. Change the query and it will be fine. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 04:42, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: The anon's right. Please, change the statements to the correct item. – Máté (talk) 05:23, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
I am changing the statements to the right target (Q29295845->Q5460604). Infovarius (talk) 14:40, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

GerardM, you are talking nonsense. It is list. Both are a list. But not every list, is the list of the top 1000. You included 1000 articles in "absent". But the absent lists are Wikipedia-edition-specific. Complete rubbish. 85.180.174.34 16:10, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Some free advice. A list is a collection of items. It is not the item itself. So by having all items in this list being known as a "article that every Wikipedia must have", you have what you need. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 04:42, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
GerardM, you are talking nonsense. You included 1000 articles in "absent". You didn't even check if they would all be absent in at least one Wikipedia. 77.179.57.8 20:22, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Kingdom of Aksum not P31=kingdom?

[16] ? 78.48.218.9 17:04, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

It should have both historical country (Q3024240)  View with Reasonator View with SQID and kingdom (Q28050776)  View with Reasonator View with SQID if you want the latter. Having end time (P582) View with SQID on the latter and/or dissolved, abolished or demolished date (P576) View with SQID on the whole item won't hurt also. --Laboramus (talk) 18:17, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
No it should not be a kingdom. It has multiple names and all too often it is a kingdom at one stage and something else earlier or later. There is no point to "realm". When you want to indicate that it starts or stops, it is in dates. Not by descriptive things that have little objective meaning. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:38, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
It may seem a little strange to define Kingdom of Aksum (Q139377) as historical country (Q3024240). If a statement with inception (P571) is added that would logically say when it started to be a historical country (Q3024240) (and thus when the country was dissolved). And dissolved, abolished or demolished date (P576) would say that isn't a historical country (Q3024240) any longer. So when you define something as being an instance of "former something", you cannot say when it was that something? Best regards, Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 07:51, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
+1 with Dipsacus fullonum. historical country (Q3024240)  View with Reasonator View with SQID should be deleted and only queries using time intervals should be used to determine a list of valid countries. Saying that Kingdom of Aksum is a former country is correct only from current point of view. But if I want to extract the list of all countries in the first century, the statement former country is not correct. Snipre (talk) 09:42, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
Of course it ought to include historical country (Q3024240), otherwise it won't get included in a query for former countries: tinyurl.com/lehjbys Jheald (talk) 10:23, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
You should query for former countries with instance of (P31)country (Q6256) and use of dissolved, abolished or demolished date (P576). It makes no sense to say Kingdom of Aksum (Q139377)instance of (P31)historical country (Q3024240) and Kingdom of Aksum (Q139377)basic form of government (P122)feudal monarchy (Q4482688) as a historical country (Q3024240) doesn't have any basic form of government (P122). What doesn't exist any more, doesn't have a government. It makes no sense to me to change what something is an instance of, because it doesn't exist any more. Best regards, Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 11:17, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
It makes perfect sense. Stop making a drama where there isn't one.
Since a long time ago, this is a former country, so it makes perfect sense to record it as such. As well as being handy to query.
Dates of dissolution, and systems of government, are entirely typical of properties that former countries may be expected to have; as this query confirms: tinyurl.com/menn6wn Jheald (talk) 12:06, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata should not only store the state of the world today but the state for any arbitrary point in time. Using start time (P580) and end time (P582) as qualifier we can well describe the validity period that a statement covers. This is different when a "former ..." statement is used. This tells you only that something doesn't exist today but it doesn't tell you anything how it was yesterday. @Jheald: You can rewrite your query to [17] which does not need historical country (Q3024240). --Pasleim (talk) 12:08, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
I'm not saying that historical country (Q3024240) is the only class the item should necessarily be put in; but it is a valid class, with or without a qualifying start time (P580).
I don't do so much with countries; but I have quite often added a P31 former administrative territorial entity (Q19953632) to underline that the item's former role has now ceased. I find it useful to give that additional emphasis, in addition to a end time (P582) on whatever that former role was, eg for people who may be browsing in a mode without qualifiers (eg perhaps based on a "truthy" dump of the database; or using a simplistic database view); and/or for casual browsers who may simply not notice the P582 qualifier. Adding Q19953632 to highlight that it is now a former administrative entity I believe is useful. Jheald (talk) 13:45, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
Crap alarm! former country has a brother "former administrative territorial entity (Q19953632)". Yippi yeah. What about former president? And is Queen Elizabeth II Q9682 not a former newborn? Is there former county? former future county (for those that became county "a long time ago")? 78.55.215.241 04:23, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Property "has a Wikipedia article"

Hello, I had a look on the properities list and didn't find a property of an item to "have a wikipedia article". I also had a look on parts of the project chat archive without addressing that issue. My question is: does such a properity exist and if not would it be possible to create it (since each item either has or has not a wikipedia article of a certain language) or it must remain by the schema as a solution for some reason, where sometimes combining items and their wikipedia information in the same code is quite difficult (for me yet)? Regards --Sky xe (talk) 02:38, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Could you please elaborate more where sitelinks do not work? Matěj Suchánek (talk) 07:16, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
In a SPARQL query, use the lines:
?article schema:about ?item .
?article schema:isPartOf <https://en.wikipedia.org/>.
-- so the property does already exist, but an item is the object of it, rather than the subject. Jheald (talk) 10:20, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, it works now. I noticed my mistake. --Sky xe (talk) 03:28, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi I created Category:Rock salt crystal structure (Q29386778) in an attempt to link two categories, one on wikimedia commons and one on afwiki. I looked for other sites to see if something similar already exists elsewhere, but that does not seem the case. I have never created a new item before and must have done something wrong, because it does not seem to work. Please help Jcwf (talk) 14:45, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

What's mean "not seem work". In af.wiki I can see the link to Commons --ValterVB (talk) 15:34, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Abbasid Caliphate not a P31=caliphate?

User:Infovarius - overwriting all P31 having normal rank with P31="former country" as preferred rank. https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q12536&diff=474987623&oldid=474964853 78.55.12.38 20:38, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Mix'n'match proposing inclusions that do not meet notability

I am wondering why toollabs's mix'n'match is offering creation opportunities for items that are not within the notability criteria [Abraham Janeway. While I can understand that the tool can generate potential matches of external data, I am not convinced that it is the bot's role to offer these for creation of an item here when there is no internal article, nor a wikimedia page, hence not within the inclusion threshold. I can understand that I can kick past its offerings, as it doesn't reference notability, nor even link to notability, one can see that people will create and match, "just because". Am I missing something?  — billinghurst sDrewth 06:31, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

To clarify, I am seeing things match like ACAD (Cambridge Uni alumni) and CCEd (clergy database) which are people of their time, but when dying at 25 years of age, + other DB, which are hardly notable by our criteria. There must be some databases that we should treat as secondary and supportive of data, not notable in their contents.  — billinghurst sDrewth 06:46, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: It's just a tool. Often, eg for painters, it is useful to be able to directly create an item. Jheald (talk) 08:34, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
(ec) @Jheald: I understand that it is a tool, however, it is a tool that is advertised, and advertised without reflection or connection with the requirements for inclusion; and iclusion requirements are not further identified on the tool. I am not saying ditch the tool, I suggesting that there needs to be fine-tuning in what/when it presents. Certain sources, eg. ODNB, contain notable subjects; other sources, ACAD/CCEd contains some notable people, but it is not a database of notable people. So maybe not present names where there is notable subject sources, or there is no matching WD items.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:33, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
What makes you think someone with entries in four external databases does not met our current notability criteria? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:01, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
My inclusion in four databases doesn't make me notable. Inclusion in a database doesn't make anyone notable, unless the data is specifically notable.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:33, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
I think you need to re-read the current notability criteria; in particular: "It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity. The entity must be notable, in the sense that it can be described using serious and publicly available references.". Conversely, your "unless the data is specifically notable" claim is not supported by any text in those criteria. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:45, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
So you are saying that Abraham Janeway is notable as he appears in an employment database (CCEd) and a similar listing (Surnam) and a list of university students? So what about any person who can be found in the 1851 UK census; Someone whose will appears in the PCC probate? Someone who appears in bankruptcy court records? A criminal who has a court record, transportation record, ticket of leave, etc.? Someone who appears in published government records of employees? All those seem to fit your criteria, and generally none of those people will be notable. Or is it that they all have an electronic web-classified number? I feel your acceptability of criteria for notability is too low.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
I'm afraid the word "serious" in the notability criteria is just too vague. Those who are fond of gobbling up data the way a blue whale consumes krill are bound to interpret "serious" as "not compiled by a crackbot or anonymous author".
I note the Mix'n'match tool includes a genealogy database. I don't know if it is consulted when the tool makes suggestions about creating items, but if so, it would make the goal of the tool to include everyone for which records exist. We might as well use the phone book. I think the notability critera require revision. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:03, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
The issue here is not with Mix'n'Match. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:03, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
I'm saying that Janeway meets the criterion I quoted; which is that agreed and used by the Wikidata community. It's not "mine". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:03, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
Yes, the way Andy Mabbett interprets this policy, everybody in a phone book would meet these criteria. Presumably, this policy was drawn up assuming that users would use good sense. Adjusting the policy is a good idea. - Brya (talk) 16:23, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
This has nothing to do with my interpretation of our notability policy. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:48, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
Is an entry in an local phonebook or an social media account sufficient enough to become notable in our sense? --Succu (talk) 19:26, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
In my opinion: NO. Databases are informational, not notable. The criteria for inclusion into a database is what matters. Telephone books, and social media accounts are low-bar information, which is pertinent ONLY when the person or organisation is notable. We need to be able to rate and rank databases for credible notability, not their accuracy and scope. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:53, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
In what way is it "good sense" to not have an item about a person that's already referenced in four databases. The person clearly seems to exist. Storage space is cheap.
When it comes to copying data from the local phonebook there are privacy concerns. It's quite easy to create social media accounts of fictional persons that don't exist, so I don't see a social media account as a serious source. Curated databases like the membership database of a university on the other hand are serious sources. ChristianKl (talk) 09:34, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: My argument is not doubting that a source is serious, nor that a database is notable; my raising the discussion is whether items that appear in a database become notables under our criteria for their presence alone in a database. My argument is that the single criteria of that item's appearance in a database does not make that item notable; and extrapolating that, appearance of the same item in multiple databases does not make a person notable. Our notability criteria should not solely be multiple appearances in datasets, so we need the means to rate a dataset, eg. dataset #A shows notable people by a criteria, so people are automatically notable; dataset falls into rank #1; dataset #B shows all people who have an event type, or includes numerous people who are doing non-notable activities, this is rank #3, it can be used for supportive, references only, not to determine notability or creation of an item.  — billinghurst sDrewth 02:24, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: The policy page speaks of "sources" so I think you can argue that it suggests that a single database might not be enough to fulfill the criteria that's laid out. The policy page however doesn't support the idea that we need to date databases for notability.
Why does this make sense? The Wikimedia mission statement is to provide "every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge". If multiple sources describe an item, then it's part of the sum of all human knowledge. It's also very useful if there's a place that keeps a record if two different sources speak about the same person. It's part of Wikidata's usefulness to provide a layer that links different databases together by authority control.
You haven't provided a reason why you think it would be bad for Wikidata to host content like an item about Abraham Janeway. You just reitered that it shouldn't exist because it shouldn't. ChristianKl (talk) 17:02, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: Notability, and I did say that above, and it has been my argument the whole way through.

By your logic, any person mentioned in multiple databases gains notability, and my thoughts are that is a step too far, especially for a meta database like ours that needs to maintain usability, and our usability for that data mass is a very long way to go in that regard — except maybe for the geeks who dance sparql queries (a very small part of the population). You seem to equate data with knowledge, and that is a misstep, they are different beasts. Through our mission we can provide access to the knowledge without access to the data, without datamapping every step, and importing everyone's data. [If our notability and wish is to remap every organisation's data then start saying that, as that seems more mission creep.] If it is our task to interlink every distinct person if they appeared in a datasource, no matter how (in)significant the person or the datasource then start saying that. Let's be upfront.

Are you truly saying that databases of births, deaths, marriages; databases of baptisms and burials; databases of tax records; databases of shipping; immigration and emigration are now things that we will utilise and data match? Someone born yesterday, dies today will appear in two databases, is that enough for your notability inclusion criteria? I do NOT believe that it is sufficient.  — billinghurst sDrewth 00:55, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

@billinghurst: A notability policy has a purpose. The purpose of the Wikipedia notability policy is to prevent the prevention of spammy pages for many people that are advertisements for them. Wikidata entries like the one for Abraham Janeway on the other hand have little room for personal opinion that might be biased.
I don't think that having an additional item like Abraham Janeway impedes the usability of Wikidata. There's some problems that come from having items for a lot of people with the same name
I do think that our current notability policy is okay with important data from trustworthy data-sources about births and deaths. There are some privacy concerns that suggest that simply important data for everybody who's recently born is a bad idea.
Given the current quality of our search function I also don't think that creating items for everybody in the 1850 census tomorrow would be the right way to go. I think that's better done when we have better search but I would want a future in which Wikidata hosts data like that. Having data like this directly in Wikidata allows queries about the 1850 census that people otherwise couldn't make. It allows knowledge about what the US was like in 1850 to be generated in a way that otherwise wouldn't be possible. ChristianKl (talk) 13:44, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Fake item "global aircraft fleet" (part of docu "crap wiki")

Q24175393 "global aircraft fleet" - created 2016-05-20 by User:Joshbaumgartner. And on the same day, enacted as operator of the class(!sic) aircraft https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q11436&diff=338796708&oldid=338794324 . And no user changed it since then. LOL. Crap Wiki. 77.179.251.171 04:16, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Why do you consider that item to be fake? ChristianKl (talk) 12:56, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Mess in properties referring to the owner/founder of an organization

There is a bit mess in properties referring to the owner/founder of an organization.

parent organization (P749) and its duplicate Q1956113 has maybe a needless overlap with owned by (P127) - if a company is a parent company of an other organization, it usually means that the company is owner of the subsidiary organization. However, parent organization (P749) is inapplicable for cases when the parent organization is not a company, but have some different form. However, many aliases of the property are confusing, outside the name and basic descritpion of the property.

If the owning organization is a company, we need use parent organization (P749), but if the owning organization is not a company, we need use owned by (P127)? Or we need use owned by (P127) also paralelly with parent organization (P749)?

For cases when the parent organization is not the "owner" strictu sense, but the "founder" (typical for non-profit governmental organizations, subsidiaries of associations and clubs, church parishes etc.), we can use founded by (P112), which is too general and ambiguous, covering all from official and formal founder status to informal inspirational role in the world of movements and ideas. --ŠJů (talk) 10:16, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

there is also part of (P361) which can be used instead of parent organization (P749) although that might not cover all cases of interest. ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:00, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

quickstatements

[18]

Can anyone help me with the tool? I want to add numbers. For example,

Q4831311 P2046 5,823

Xaris333 (talk) 16:01, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

For decimals you need to use a . (period) as a separator, not a , (comma). And a separator for thousands isn't used. Mbch331 (talk) 16:34, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
What are the units for this property? You must specify 5,823Uxx as mentioned here [19]. Also check the example entities given in https://tools.wmflabs.org/sqid/#/view?id=P2406&lang=en. Jsamwrites (talk) 16:37, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

@Jsamwrites: The units are square kilometre (Q712226). How I must write it? Xaris333 (talk) 17:11, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

amount[lower,upper]Uxx → 5.823U712226. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:27, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I have tried Q4831311 P2046 5.823U712226 but is not working. Xaris333 (talk) 17:35, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

You don't have to put the period in the number, and don't forget the tabs (which you can't place in the tool, but you have to do it in excel or a texteditor) between the different items: Q4831311 P2046 5823U712226. Q.Zanden questions? 17:57, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
Its not a period. Its the comma for decimal. Still wot working with tabs. Xaris333 (talk) 18:11, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
Same by me... it seems that unit support has only been added to the old version. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:30, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
Indeed, https://tools.wmflabs.org/quickstatements/ isn't supporting units. Looking forward to the day it does :-) 123 (talk) 23:58, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
It works in the NIOSH Fork. I did so. Lymantria (talk) 09:14, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

It doesn't work :( Even if I try Q16269888 P2046 "3,737" is not working. Units are optional for area property. Do you know any other tool that can help me? Xaris333 (talk) 16:37, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

@Xaris333: It should work! Try Q16269888[TAB]P2046[TAB]3.737U712226. Do not use commas! Units may be optional, without unit the statement is without meaning... Lymantria (talk) 16:47, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
@Lymantria: Is working but is adding 3.737±0.001 [20] I don't want ±0.001 .Xaris333 (talk) 16:57, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
@Xaris333: Ah. I don't think in general the ±0.001 is a bad idea. But you might try something like Q16269888[TAB]P2046[TAB]3.737[3.737,3.737]U712226. Lymantria (talk) 18:04, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
@Lymantria: Bad idea [21]. Nevermind. Thanks for your help. Xaris333 (talk) 18:27, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Property for "named by"

Good day, do we have a property for "named by"? For example, who gave the name to an island. If not, should we create it? Thanks, Amqui (talk) 19:22, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

named after (P138) Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:26, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
I don't think that's what Amqui was looking for. E.g. for Rastorguyev Island (Q2581188) we can have the statements named after (P138) Stepan Rastorguyev (Q4390607) and named by Eduard von Toll (Q559426). conferred by (P1027) might work if used as a qualifier to named after (P138) - naming something after someone is conferring an honour so I think it's within constraints but I'm not sure. Thryduulf (talk) 22:39, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
Yes, Thryduulf is right in what I'm looking for. I think it would be useful to have this property on its own and not only as a qualifier of "named after". I say that because something can be "named by" someone without being "named after" something else. Anyway, to use conferred by (P1027) that way, we would need to expand its scope, because right its description is only for awards or prizes. The "named after" is not only an honour, because something could be "named after" something that is not the name of a person. For example, there is an asteroid 274301 Wikipedia (Q3913001) "named after" Wikipedia, but could we say that this name is an honour/prize to Wikipedia in order to use "conferred by"? I guess it can make sense if it's always a qualifier of "named after", but not as a property on its own. Amqui (talk) 03:44, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Property Country of Citizenship

hello, I would like to specify the country of citizenship for items of class human who studied at the university Oxford based on the continent the country is located in. I used the property "part of" and the continent item to get the results. It worked for Europe but not for other continents. E.g. I get no results when the continent Item is changed to North America, although there are many north american items that should be in the output. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Thanks for help! see line 17 here.--Sky xe (talk) 14:10, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Try replacing part of (P361) with continent (P30). Shinnin (talk) 14:53, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Nice, it works. I didn't know that such a property exists. Thanks Shinnin. --Sky xe (talk) 15:27, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

P123 (publisher) -- German/French problem

publisher (P123) has as description: "organization responsible for publishing books, periodicals, games or software". As German translation "Verlag" is used and the description is: "Namen des Medienunternehmens, das die Publikation auf den Markt gebracht hat". (Literally: "Name of the media company that has published the publication to the market".) If one looks at the actual use of the property in references[22] one finds that there hardly figures any organisation which in German would be called a "Verlag". Actually, while the English description of P123 would need only little change to accommodate the actual use, the item publishing company (Q2085381) doesn't fit, as many of the entries are no "media companies". The wikidata module in the German wikipedia uses P123 entries in references and precedes them with "Verlag", which doesn't make any sense in most cases. I'm just wondering whether there is some way to rectify the situation. 123 (talk) 17:06, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

And if you look at the constraints on P123 you will note the publisher can be an organization or a human. The German translation of the description is clearly too restrictive. But it seems there may also be a problem with the way people are using this property in references. Do you have some specific examples where it looks wrong to you? ArthurPSmith (talk) 13:28, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
Well, in the German wikipedia basically all entries with the property P123 result in something which looks (actually: is) wrong. Only 61 entries from 52155 use an item which is an instance of publishing company (Q2085381) (to be a publisher in the sense of Q2085381 would be a necessary but not sufficient condition to qualify as a "Verlag") and even under these 61 7 actually do not give a "Verlag". For the rest: the United Nations, Rostock District, BBC, Statistics Belgium, Adobe Systems, Aargau, Department of Defense, Microsoft, World Health Organization, Bochum, oronto, International Astronomical Union, Bad Doberan, erbo-Croatian, Facebook, Wikimedia Foundation and so on are all no "Verlag". From a German perspective the problem is not so much that the description is too restrictive (it is adequate as description of a Verlag in the context), but that the translation of publisher with "Verlag" is wrong. The deeper problem is that the English and German ontology seem to differ. As a result there is no interwiki link from de:Verlag (and fr:Maison d'édition, pt:Editora ...) to the English wikipedia! (A link to en:Publishing would be as wrong as is the link from en:Publishing to de:Edition: "Edition" as concept is much narrower than "Publishing".) Most of the entries for P123 would qualify for what in the context of cataloging in German is called Körperschaft as de:Urheber (originator, creator) or initiator/causer of a publication. ("Urheber" again being an important German concept without interwiki link into the English Wikipedia.)
In an ideal world, from a German perspective (and French and some others) there would be at least four properties for the "Urheber" or initiator/creator of a reference: author (P50), editor (P98), publisher (P123) and a new one, called in German "Verlag" (in French "Maison d'édition", in Portuguese "Editora" ... and in English perhaps "Publishing house").
* author (P50) for, well, authors.
* editor (P98) for editors according to the description given: "editor of a compiled work such as a book or academic journal" (at the moment for most of the entries what is given are not editors but the organisations responsible for the publication, and P98 should therefore in these cases be replaced by P123).
* publisher (P123) should in German get a different name (like "Körperschaft" and a corresponding description); the English description could be somewhat wider on the one hand but exclude publishing houses and the like on the other hand.
* P|xxxx in German Verlag, in English perhaps publishing house; would correspond to item publishing company (Q2085381)
The hole point is that the concept "publisher" as used now, lumps together two quite different activities: The actual production of content and/or ultimate responsibility for the publication of some work through some organisation (like the Worlbank producing and publishing data, the UNDP producing and publishing its reports ...) and the copy editing, layouting, printing, selling etc. of published work. Two examples (one from a library record, one from academic writing) which illustrate the difference:
*Title: Human development report ... By: publ. for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Place: Oxford [u.a.] Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press
*U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1975). Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Most of the entries under P123 give organisations like the UNDP or the U.S. Department of Commerce ... A very few give entities like Oxford Univ. Press or the U.S. Government Printing Office. Both categories should be distinguished. 123 (talk) 18:57, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
123 - does "copy editing, layouting, printing, selling" even apply for information published on the world wide web? Certainly the "printing" and "selling" parts do not. At least in English, the verb "publish" means the act of making something public, or available for distribution to the public (whether for sale or not) and doesn't require any of the things you mention. So "publisher" should be the actor that performs that act of publishing for the work in question. I think the German verb "veröffentlichen" might be closest to the English meaning of publish as used here - is there a German noun that captures that meaning similarly for "publisher"? ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:30, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
"copy editing, layouting, printing, selling" served as an illustration not a definition. I just wanted to illustrate the distinction between what according to ISO 690 (1987), 690-2 (1997), 1086 (1991) and 5127 is a publisher: "Person or organization responsible for the production and dissemination of a document." [ISO 5127/3a:1981] and what is an author: "Person or corporate body responsible for the intellectual or artistic content of a document." This distinction is relevant because according to the norms (ISO and otherwise) for bibliographic references the author (or more general: the creator of content) should come first while the publisher only comes after the title, (if relevant: media designation and edition) and place. Lumping together publishers in the sense of the ISO definition with corporate authors or creators of content (and with periodicals, namely newspapers), as it happens now in publisher (P123), makes it impossible to use the data of wikidata to create a correct bibliographic reference. This should IMHO be a serious concern for everybody who hopes for more widespread use of wikidata and for its quality. That's the reason why I thought we need a new property for "publisher" in the sense of the ISO definition (which more or less corresponds to the German "Verlag").
Looking through Wikidata:List_of_properties/Works#Literature, Wikidata:WikiProject_Books, Wikidata:WikiProject_Periodicals and Property_talk:P123 I notice though, that obviously P123 is/was meant in line with the meaning of publisher in the sense of the ISO definition and what really is missing are the properties of "corporate creators of content" and (less frequent, but belonging to a complete set of bibliographic properties) the one of "corporate editor". To move the corporate authors to author (P50) wouldn't be an ideal solution, as there are different rules for how to treat persons and corporate authors/creators of content in bibliographic references. And indeed editor (P98)(cf. Property_talk:P98) as author (P50) (cf. Property_talk:P123) require human persons as values. There is, at the moment, no property under which one could correctly place all those entries of corporate authors/creators of content in references.
As far as I know there is no (actually used) German noun which would capture the wide English meaning of publisher. (There is of course also a narrower meaning of publisher in English, given by the public version of the Oxford dictionary as the only one: "1 A person or company that prepares and issues books, journals, music, or other works for sale. 1.1 North American A newspaper proprietor." which again closely resembles the modern, wider meaning of "Verlag" in German.) But for the reasons given, just changing the German label wouldn't do. 123 (talk) 22:40, 12 April 2017 (UTC)
123 let's talk about specifics here. You listed Wikimedia Foundation as not qualifying as a "Verlag". Yet it is listed as the publisher (P123) for Scholarly article citations in Wikipedia (Q21684024). What do you think the publisher should be instead there? Similarly you said Adobe Systems should not qualify, but it is listed as publisher of PDF Reference, sixth edition (Q26480769) (for which it seems to be also sole listed author and with no editor provided). Who do you think is the publisher instead? ArthurPSmith (talk) 12:42, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Well, you hit the nail on the head of the problem with your first example. Wikimedia Foundation unfortunately is listed as publisher of Scholarly article citations in Wikipedia (Q21684024) - but it in no way is its publisher. The data set is "published" in the wide sense by Figshare, which isn't a publisher either, but a website, belonging to a publisher - Macmillan Publishers. In a correct bibliographic reference you would have to indicate the individual authors and later the place, where to find it (depending on the style you would indicate the direct url or only the website - Figshare - or both) but you could leave out the publisher part. I guess it would be mostly allowed to add Macmillan as publisher. But I might be corrected on this guess.

Your second example is a typical one and the answer is very simple: There shouldn't be a publisher mentioned. It is case where some organisation (corporate body) not being a publisher produces some content and disseminates it itself. If you care you could download the document and you see how Adobe gives references in the bibliography: Most of its own publications it gives without a publisher (indicating before where they might be found). There is one execption: PostScript Language Reference, Third Edition, which was published by Addison-Wesley, a true publisher. Under "Other Resources" you find documents of many corporate bodies beginning with Apple Computer, Inc., which are always indicated as author/creator and no publisher is given (but often a place where to find the document). 123 (talk) 01:03, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

If you disseminate content to the general public, then you are the publisher. For example, Apple, Inc. is both the corporate author of, and the publisher of, www.apple.com.
The point behind identifying a publisher in a citation isn't to show that there's a professional publishing house behind the source. The point behind identifying a publisher was to make it possible for you to obtain the source (back when 'obtaining a source' meant writing a letter, on paper, in an envelope, addressed to "Example Publishing, London, England" (which used to be a functional postal address). In the case of self-published works, including a note that it's self-published does not help you obtain the work, and therefore it's usually omitted (although we might include it if the source (e.g., a book) might otherwise reasonably be expected to be non-self-published, and we think that this information would be helpful for some reason). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:20, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
The way properties for works are structured in wikidata at this moment it would be "wrong" to put Apple, Inc as corporate author of www.apple.com: There is no property for corporate authors (and none for corporate editors) and the property P50 is reserved for human persons. As the author/creator is the main responsible for the content of a work, it is of utmost importance to indicate him/her/it. Repeating the same entity as publisher is normally redundant and the requirements to indicate the publisher in case it is not identical with the author/creator, the url where a document is available in the case of a document disseminated through the web, or the printing company in case the author disseminates a printed document without a publisher intervening etc. take care of indicating ways to obtain the document. The common norms of how to create a reference to works of Apple, Inc (indicating and mostly starting with "Apple, Inc" as author/creator) have their good reasons. It is a pity that the way properties for works are setup in wikidata does not allow to create a reference abiding to those norms. 123 (talk) 22:46, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
Hmm, so would a new "corporate author" or "organizational author" property suffice to address your concern here, or are there other gaps in your view? Please propose a property along these lines, it does sound like you have a case for it! ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:54, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
To address my concern fully one would also need the property "corporate editor". (Like an organisation as editor of a journal). This is less frequent, but I actually had found cases in wikidata where this would be adequate. (Unfortunately I didn't document them.) 123 (talk) 20:30, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
@ArthurPSmith: I proposed the property "corporate author" and would be happy if I could get your support:-) 123 (talk) 22:51, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Add reference

Hello. Let say that some items (more than 100) have a property with one value. This property may have a reference or may not. Is there a way to add automatic a new reference (reference URL (P854), title (P1476), archive URL (P1065), archive date (P2960) etc) to all article. The reference is the same for all the items. I don't want to change the value of the property in any item. Xaris333 (talk) 01:09, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Depends on the value: If it is a quantity there isn't any tool I know of. (And if anybody knows of one, I would be more than happy to get a recipe.) If it isn't a quantity (or what else?) https://tools.wmflabs.org/quickstatements/# seems to work perfectly. 123 (talk) 01:53, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
I don't want to add the values, only the reference. Xaris333 (talk) 01:55, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
QuickStatements won't create new statement if it already exists and will still add the reference if it doesn't have the same one. (Statements are same when they have same property, value and qualifiers.) Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:25, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Yes, but do I still need to have the value? I know that the values are correct, I don't want to add these information to quickstatements again. Just to add the reference. Xaris333 (talk) 12:41, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
If you want to add a source to a value, knowing the value is essential. Doesn't matter whether by hand or in bulk. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:04, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #256

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Wikimania 2017 in Montréal

Wikimania 2017

This year, Wikimania is happening in Montréal, from August 11 to 13, and for the Hackathon and the Sourcethon, from August 9 to 10! In the hackathon, there will be some projects for WikiData. Interested?

You want to give us a hand? We need YOU as a volunteer!

Contact Antoine2711 at abeaubien@wikimedia.ca.

Come make a difference with a great team of passionate Wiki people.

--Antoine2711 (talk) 14:21, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Please, stop this vandal Briya!

Moved to Wikidata:Administrators' noticeboard
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:52, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Please, stop cross wiki vandalism by Sintakzo!

Moved to Wikidata:Administrators' noticeboard
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:52, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata description editing in the Wikipedia Android app

Ciao, I just sent out a new announcement about Wikidata description editing, the experiment being rolled out on the Wikipedia app for Android. While this primarily impacts Wikidata, the changes are also addressing a concern about the mobile versions of Wikipedia, so that mobile users will be able to edit directly the descriptions shown under the title of the page and in the search results.

We began by rolling out this feature several weeks ago to a pilot group of Wikipedias (Russian, Hebrew, and Catalan), and have seen very positive results including numerous quality contributions in the form of new and updated descriptions, and a low rate of vandalism.

We are now ready for the next phase of rolling out this feature, which is to enable it next week for all Wikipedias except the top ten by usage within the app (i.e. except English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, and Chinese). We will enable the feature for those languages instead at some point in the future, as we closely monitor user engagement with our expanded set of pilot communities. As always, if have any concerns, please reach out to us on wiki at the talk page for this project or by email at reading@wikimedia.org. Thanks!

---Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:48, 14 April 2017 (UTC) on behalf of DBrant (WMF).

  • Can you add some Special:Tags to edits where people add/change these disambiguators? (or link the one that is already being used)?
    --- Jura 07:31, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
    I believe mobile app edit is the one but that's just my assumption. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 10:19, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
    Seems to be. It would be good if these could be listed by language. Maybe a more specific tag could be generated? "mobile disambiguator-ca" (for Catalan disambiguators). Those not reading ru and he, currently need to skip through these.
    --- Jura 10:44, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
    Yes, Matěj is correct. (The tag is a general one that catches app edits of all kinds both from the iOS and Android apps, but the description edits on Android are currently the only ones that are possible on Wikidata.)
    Regarding Jura's idea: Without being an expert on edit tags in general, I assume it would be very difficult to provide a separate tag for every possible language. That said (speaking also as a frequent recent changes patroller - as volunteer - myself), it looks like there is a need for such a tool in general, which would let one focus on changes to language-dependent content (such as descriptions) in one's preferred languages. There was already a Phabricator task at phab:T141866; I just made some further edits and suggestions there. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, this is really cool! --Denny (talk) 20:58, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

List of users with the most edits?

I just made my 100,000th edit and was wondering, is there any list of users with the most edits on Wikidata, and if not, could one be created? I know some other wikis have them. --AmaryllisGardener talk 03:28, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

There is such a thing but there is little point to it. PS Great effort :) Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:38, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
You will find it here, updated every month. Mahir256 (talk) 05:50, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Well done for being in the top 200, though stats are so skewed for this wiki due to people's ability to "bot" mega-edit with the use of tools. If you have done them manually even more congratulations.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:55, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Yeah, all of them were either manual or with the Wikidata Game. Thanks you. --AmaryllisGardener talk 19:52, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

P1448: official name

Hi! Regarding official name (P1448), while according to the description it is meant to contain the "official name of the subject in its official language(s)" and my feeling is that this is indeed the original purpose, from time to time I find here and there the property filled with the official name transcribed in non official languages. For example I am sure that russian and georgian are not official languages used in New York City (Q60). Discussing on the use of this property for infoboxes we realized that this would be a problem when we want only the "official name of the subject in its official language(s)". So I am asking if the description and the intended purpose of the property is correct. Additionaly it would be a good idea for maintenance to check for such problems (easy, most countries have only one or two official languages). -Geraki (talk) 19:40, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Can anyone answer that? It's a serious problem. See Germany (Q183). It has 15 values in this property. And only the first one (with preferred rank) is the real official language. If we want to write all possible language and just to have the official as preferred, we must write it down. Xaris333 (talk) 14:30, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Linking a Wikipedia article which covers two items

Land Rover (Q35907) - the former company, and Land Rover (Q26777551) - the brand, are both covered by the same English Wikipedia article (Land Rover). How can I link that single article to the two different items? DeFacto (talk) 17:00, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Pick one. - Brya (talk) 17:05, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
There are tons of Wikipedia ariticles that cover more than one Wikidata item. Until we can link to subsections of an article (if that ever happens), there's no way to resolve this. - PKM (talk) 22:17, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
See Help:Handling sitelinks overlapping multiple items ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:58, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
in the long run you should make a list of problem articles, and build the team to go split them.Slowking4 (talk) 15:02, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Error in setting official websites

Try setting official website (P856) for url shortening webservices like https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~01fc52ce440b7ada3b (Q1196499) or Bitly (Q21079) and it won't work and gives the following error: "The text you wanted to save was blocked by the spam filter. This is probably caused by a link to a blacklisted external site.". I think exception can be made in these particular cases. Jsamwrites (talk) 16:47, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

In principle an expectation can be made but it's not straightforward. There's a global blacklist that's effective for all Wikimedia website and it comes into effect here. It's likely not worth the effort to create a system that allows this for the few exceptions. ChristianKl (talk) 08:25, 16 April 2017 (UTC)