Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2022/12

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P5756

At Property:P5756 the scheme appears to have changed and the three examples given, now point to the incorrect people. Any idea how we can fix this? RAN (talk) 01:06, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Uh if the scheme changed and so did the values, then that property needs to be deprecated so that nobody uses it anymore, and a new property needs to be created which will have the updated values. RPI2026F1 (talk) 01:56, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
  • It is odd, they seemed to have switched away from a numerical entry to a name-based entry, yet the numbers still take us to an entry in their database. I have looked at the page-source, but can't figure out how the new numerical scheme is stored. More eyes would be welcome. --RAN (talk) 05:15, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
    It seems like the numerical scheme is now used in the data-history-node-id attribute in the article tags of the page source. There's two different numbers for this id in the source, but one of them seems to point to the burial location, so I guess they consolidated their databases or something. The first property example, Inez Crittenden now has a new numerical id of 480896.DoublePendulumAttractor (talk) 15:08, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
  • I can't see anyway to correlate the new and old numbers, can you? I wrote them to see if they kept a list of the correspondence between the old and new, but judging by how many other website write back, we have 0.001% probability. --RAN (talk) 21:05, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
    The numbers seem to differ by about 34000, but there's some variation on the exact amount. The property seems to be used on only 4 items (though there are probably more items where this property would be useful). So, it'd probably be easier to manually go through and change the values, and maybe adjust the property to reflect the fact that its values can also point to cemeteries now. DoublePendulumAttractor (talk) 00:45, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Mass category item creation by User:CMQW without any statements

User:CMQW is mass-creating items on categories in Wiktionary but these items have no statements. There are about 500 items created within the last 4-5 days according to Special:Contributions/CMQW, and so far none of them have any statements. Maybe a bot should pick this up and mass-add the statements? RPI2026F1 (talk) 02:35, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

I was thinking of adding the statements later, once finished linking all the pages. It would be good if a bot could do it. CMQW (talk) 03:10, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
Category pages is one thing (as they share the same P31), but for pages in the main namespace please do not blindly mass-add items that have no statements, doing so will dump a pile of maintenance work in someone else's lap, not cool. This leads to duplicated items and items that are invisible to queries because they lack categorization. Unfortunately you are not the only one doing this. Infrastruktur (talk) 13:44, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
Interesting, probably WD:N should be modified to say If a link is a category, the item must contain at least two such sitelinks? Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 04:56, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Wikilinks are enough to warrent new items even if those don't have statements.
I don't see any reason why we should modify WD:N here. Having items with one sitelink makes it easier to find out that a category has two existing sitelinks. Given that the items created by CMQW seem to be created by the tool that links two Wikimedia pages together it doesn't apply here anyway.
Part of what Wikidata was designed for was to give other Wikiprojects the ability to create Wikilinks. It's completely fine for someone who's at Wikidictionary to go to a Wikidictionary page, click the button to link it together with another Wikidictionary page and not engage with Wikidata directly. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 12:56, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Fandom wiki ID (P4073) for Fandom interwikis

I'm wondering if the Fandom wiki ID (P4073) is to be used to show only the 'main' wiki id (like "minecraft") or if all the interwikis that exist for that wiki as well can be put in it (like "minecraft, de.minecraft, es.minecraft, pt.minecraft, ...") just like wikimedia projects? Cavernosa Spider (talk) 02:23, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

I think it's ok to use it for wikis in other languages. BrokenSegue (talk) 03:14, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Railway line vs pass

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q369093 claims to describe railway line, is classified also a pass, associated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%BCnig_Pass that is about pass - not about railway line

how this should be fixed? I plan on editing labels and removing railway line claim Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 09:20, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

There is probably a railway line there, but at the moment I see no evidence that an item for the railway line is needed. So yes, removing the railway-line-specific claims should be sufficient (when an item about the railway line is needed, it can be created). --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:70B4:38AE:C9E6:606C 09:59, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
I've amended the P31 values, and added a carries (P2505) statement with values for the road and railway. Ideally we'll improve items as a result of discussions on this desk, not degrade them based on lazy suppositions. --Tagishsimon (talk) 12:28, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Well, this doesn’t solve the issue that this is an item about a pass and a railway line at the moment, instead of having one item for the pass and another one for the railway line (which is the problem Mateusz Konieczny wanted to solve, I presume). All statements about the railway line have to be removed from the pass item; whether they are added to a (not yet created) item for the railway line, is another question. --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:70B4:38AE:C9E6:606C 13:27, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
"All statements about the railway line have to be removed from the pass item" is plain wrong. There are appropriate predicates to link the railway line to the pass item. Again, had you troubled to do the bare minimum of research, you'd have noted that the item was not "about a pass and a railway line" at 13:27, 29 November 2022, but about a pass, a pass having a railway, and a pass having a road. Oh, and the railway line item has long existed. Serially, every substantial assertion you've made in this thread is incorrect. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:57, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Dear Tagishsimon, could it be that we’re talking at cross-purposes? I admit that I misread your reply (though I’m positive I did have a look at the item afterwards, apparently failing to recognize what you’d done), but I’d thought that you’d agree that an item should be about one concept (either a pass or a railway line or a road or a conflation), not about two, nor three, nor four at the same time (Q369093 was at 12:55, 31 March 2022). So statements about every single of those concepts should be moved to the item of that concept. In this case, it appeared to me (after a look at WhatLinksHere) that the item was being used solely as an item about the pass, so the natural way from my point of view was to keep it as the concept referring to the pass, and have a different item for the railway (and another one for the road, and frankly I don’t understand the “is-a conflation” statement), if needed. Now, since there weren’t any uses of the item as a railway line, only as a pass, I figured that creating an item for the railway line was not strictly necessary (but not wrong either – if there already is one, all the better; yes, I didn’t check that, given my assessment that such an item was structurally unneeded). When talking about “statements about the railway line” I was referring to statements about the railway line (such as instance of (P31)railway line (Q728937)) and I didn’t care where they go (to the railway item or to nowhere) as long as they disappear from the non-railway item. I did not refer to carries (P2505) (again, I misread your reply, I didn’t even see the mention of P2505 until now). So I believe this was some kind of awkward misunderstanding. I think the item is good now. --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:254A:DF6C:D37E:B93F 17:18, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Property proposals/Authority control has reached "Pages where template include size is exceeded"

Doesn't seem good to me. There's about 23 untranscluded proposals due to this limit, and they are: 

{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Trismegistos author ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Africultures Structure-ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/African American Visual Artists Database ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/IdnaMapping}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Google Product Taxonomy ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/ISFDB award ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Datastory Glossary ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Kanjipedia ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Jiten Online kanji ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Cinemaazi people ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Listal.com ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Cinemaazi ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/IDG IT-ord ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Sogou Baike ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/PIM publication ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Twitter community ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Pennsylvania State Park Hiking Trails ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/OKRB 011-2022 code}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Android application ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Mac OS creator code}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/ECLI court code}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/Indiana State Historical Marker Program numeric ID}}
{{Wikidata:Property proposal/MyAnimeList magazine ID}}

Something needs to be done about the backlog. RPI2026F1 (talk) 20:48, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

One current plan about doing something is https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Create_items_for_property_proposals ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 22:54, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
This only addresses the ones that are ready for creation. It says nothing about the ones which are still being discussed. And right now there are way too many in the Authority Control section that are being discussed. I think we need to split up the authority control section into more specific topics. RPI2026F1 (talk) 01:55, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
If you have items and autogenerated lists that are created based on those items, it's easy to have additional lists that split up the authority control properties into multiple different parts. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 23:26, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

To deal with this I just deleted enough "Ready" and "Done" proposals from the page list until the error was gone. RPI2026F1 (talk) 22:24, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Deleting proposals before they are supposed to be deleted is bad. When it comes to proposals that are marked as ready, it's important that people can see them and unmark them when they have problems. When it comes to done proposals it's useful for people to see them from time to time to get an idea about how done proposals look like to have a common sense of standards. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 23:29, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
Well I didn't delete them, just removed them from the list of proposals. RPI2026F1 (talk) 23:34, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
There are good reasons for them being in the list of properties and fortunately Emu already restored it. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 12:39, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
I don't know how to get to a solution about the transclusion size limit without pruning the list somewhat. There are just way too many proposals that are never getting made. RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:05, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
There are 12 done proposals at the moment. One of the next runs of DeltaBot should mitigate the problem at least to an extent. --Emu (talk) 15:07, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Mahir256 is also working on it. But the general problem stays. --Emu (talk) 15:12, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
After some movements between subpages, now Wikidata:Property proposal/Creative work has 7 untranscluded properties (certainly better than 23). Mahir256 (talk) 15:44, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
The problem with authority control is that it's scope is too broad. That's why everyone just keeps on putting their proposals there since authority control applies to almost every external identifier type, which is the overwhelming majority of new proposals. RPI2026F1 (talk) 17:10, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Lock EntitySchema namespace for property creators?

I don't see why there is a need to allow anyone to create items in the EntitySchema namespace. I don't think people are rushing to create entity schemas so it can probably have a similar system to creating properties. RPI2026F1 (talk) 19:26, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

As a general philosophy in Wikimedia we don't allow people to take actions because we need to allow them. We only prevent them from taken actions when we believe that allowing them to take the actions will create problems. I'm not aware that any problems are causes by allowing everyone to create items in that namespace. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 21:48, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Incomplete merges leading to empty items?

Wikidata:Database reports/to delete/completely empty items contains a list of completely empty items. Several of them are like Martin vehicles (Q2872658), which had been merged but not redirected. It seems that there is a way to merge items but if there are any conflicting values they will persist in the item. These merges just require the item being cleared and then redirected. Maybe a bot could clean this up? I am using a merge gadget which deals with the issue by clearing the item if not everything is merged and then redirecting. RPI2026F1 (talk) 19:42, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

I think this is basically the https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Bot_requests#Request_to_mass-merge_items_(2022-07-03) discussion. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 21:46, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Blocked user editing via bots

How do we feel about a banned user editing via other people's bots? --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:33, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey Probably report to m:SRG instead? As I think these accounts are compromised. Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 04:52, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
@EncycloPetey: Please take some examples for discussion.--GZWDer (talk) 14:41, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
There is actually a related statement in Wikidata:Blocking policy. —MisterSynergy (talk) 19:55, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
What are banned users: are they blocked on some wiki? are they globally banned by the WMF, or are they simply banned by arbcom from editing only a certain area on enwp to avoid edit wars with certain others? Ottawahitech (talk) 16:36, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Is this about Matlin?--55 to dead (talk) 17:12, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Review-style (?) articles, where to start?

Articles like w:en:Poetry of Mao Zedong, w:en:Sculptures by Ligier Richier, en:Shakespeare's sonnets. Where to start? Instances of what, precisely? is there a how-to model? Retired electrician (talk) 08:51, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Subclasses of poetry, sculpture, sonnet? Ghouston (talk) 09:24, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Labelling could be a problem though. Class labels should be singular (sculpture by Ligier Richier, not sculptures by Ligier Richier), which would clash with the title of the sitelinked article. Is that a problem? --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:254A:DF6C:D37E:B93F 13:23, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
German Wikipedia excludes those articles deliberately: Wikipedia ist kein Ort für Essays. They are simply not useful for an ontology.--55 to dead (talk) 17:32, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps facet of (P1269) rather than instance of (P31)? Or in some cases, P31 --> Wikipedia article covering multiple topics (Q21484471)? Poetry of Mao Zedong (Q7207534) and Sculptures by Ligier Richier (Q16258277) are not individual creative works so probably should not be an instance of anything, unless there are items (or Wikidata metaclass items) for "collective works of a creator": complete works (Q1978454), catalog of works (Q64222248) or Wikimedia artist discography (Q104635718) might point to the right direction. -Animalparty (talk) 18:31, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

What shold go in the description?

I often see people described as say, politicians, when they are a politician, yes, but also a prime minister, or some other designation they are notable for. what should be in the description? Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (talk) 16:30, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

The "politican" descriptions are generic and automated. Feel free to replace them with anything more accurate and personalized for the person the item is about. RPI2026F1 (talk) 16:39, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Description describes the information we currently have. In general our descriptions aren't really standardized and probably won't be until WikiFunctions comes along. Feel free to edit the descriptions to be more detailed. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 16:54, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Another question about the description

Sometime I see a description that says X, but an occupation statement that says Y. What should I do if I don't know which one is correct? Should I simply leave a message on the talk-page in the hope that it will be taken care of sometime in the future? Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (talk) 16:58, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Unless X and Y have no relation to each other (such as X=prime minister,Y=politican does have a relation, where X is a subclass of Y, versus X=painter,Y=sports player, where X and Y are not related to each other at all) , there's no need to change anything. RPI2026F1 (talk) 19:08, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Cannot create new items using CSV format in Quickstatement

I cannot create new items using CSV format in Quickstatement.

https://quickstatements.toolforge.org/#/

For example:

qid,Len,Den,Lzh-hant,Dzh-hant,Aen,Aen,P31,P361,P17,P276,P856,qal407

,A Tale of Laughter and Tears FMP-115693,FMP-115693,啼笑姻緣 FMP-115693,FMP-115693,Hong Kong Baptist University Library Digital Scholarship Services,Hong Kong TV and Film Publication Database,Q732577,Q107791631,Q8646,Q95977692,"""https://digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/film-tv/themes/film/ids/FMP-115693""",Q18130932

,A Tale of Laughter and Tears FMP-115694,FMP-115694,啼笑姻緣 FMP-115694,FMP-115694,Hong Kong Baptist University Library Digital Scholarship Services,Hong Kong TV and Film Publication Database,Q732577,Q107791631,Q8646,Q95977692,"""https://digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/film-tv/themes/film/ids/FMP-115694""",Q18130932 Hkbulibdmss (talk) 03:16, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Do you have any comments on this case? Hkbulibdmss (talk) 07:09, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
There is no existing QID for a non-existent item. You need a CREATE command instead. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:51, 24 November 2022 (UTC)
But I can create a record using this CSV:
qid,Len,Den,Lzh-hant,Dzh-hant,Aen,Aen
,A Tale of Laughter and Tears FMP-115693,FMP-115693,啼笑姻緣 FMP-115693,FMP-115693,Hong Kong Baptist University Library Digital Scholarship Services,Hong Kong TV and Film Publication Database
I can see that if I try to add P31 or something like this, the process will be stuck. Hkbulibdmss (talk) 03:03, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
From Help Manual
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:QuickStatements
It is said that
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Item creation
To create a new item, the first element of the row needs to be empty, so the line starts with a ,.
For example
qid,Len,Den,P31
,Regina Phalange,fictional character,Q95074
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
But you cannot do so at this moment.
@@ Hkbulibdmss (talk) 07:25, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Personally I don't have experience with the CSV mode. Maybe try the copy-and-paste mode, that seems to work for me all the time. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 09:26, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for your suggestion. Hkbulibdmss (talk) 00:54, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
Did you get the csv mode working again? I had issues on 13 November, but assumed I had got the formatting wrong. I've not tried it since. Richard Nevell (talk) 19:09, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
The problem has not yet been solved.
@@ Hkbulibdmss (talk) 09:21, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Should different_from point to disambiguation pages, or just item pages?

I'm puzzled why Yarmouth Castle (Q8049393) is marked as different from (P1889) a disambiguation page, Yarmouth Castle (Q15884143) that comes from a Dutch wikipedia concerned about the ship SS Yarmouth Castle (Q935187). Shouldn't this property just link the items directly, and never go through the disambiguation pages? Even if there were lots of disambiguations, having many direct different from (P1889) seems easier to use than going through an intermediate page. Vicarage (talk) 19:09, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Where there's any possibility of a confusion given identical or similar item labels, different from (P1889) will forestall an errant merge. And we see many of them. There's no good reason why the would-be errant merger would do the analysis that you've gone through. There's no good reason why P1889 should not be used to link a regular and a disambiguation item. Rather like aliases, a P1889 statement should probably be tolerated without too much enquiry; someone probably had a good reason for adding the statement, and the statement does no harm. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:50, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
My use case is someone reading a page on my site about Yarmouth Castle, and being advised they might want a different Yarmouth Castle (Fort George is the classic example here, there are dozens). In that case the disamiguation page is a distraction, especially as in this case it does not list the WD items it disambiguates, not mentioning the ship of the same name, so I could not even write a query to find the connection. In this case the statement was added by a QS bot, so I doubt much thought went into it, as saying a page is different to its disambigation page is obvious.
And if my application criteria for avoiding confusion was comparing the classes of 2 linked items, I could judge castle <> ship and not bother the user, but instead am presented with castle <> disambiugation page. Vicarage (talk) 20:07, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Your use case is not supported by the statement as it currently stands. Perhaps, if you wish to see P1889 used in this way - to find castles 2-n which have the same name as castle 1 - you might want to qualify the statement with, perhaps, has characteristic (P1552) taking values of 'castle', 'disambiguation page', &c.
Your use case does not dispose of the more general 'do not merge these two' use case; that case is still valid, whether or not you appreciate it.
Can I say a huge great ... well, I shouldn't swear - to "In this case the statement was added by a QS bot, so I doubt much thought went into it". That's a really stupid & insulting thing to say, as if QS users don't think about what they're doing. --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:14, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
There are people who spent their time at Wikipedia and who want to get interlanguage links to work. Those users don't know much about Wikidata and might want to merge items. The user might not even know that Wikidata exists because it's unfortunately possible to merge items without being aware that Wikidata exists. Applying different from (P1889) is a convenient way to throw an error in those cases. Concretely, imagine that the 'SS Yarmouth Castle' article on nlwiki gets deleted and the information is instead moved to the disambiguation page. A nlwiki user might see that the disambiguation page has no interwiki links, click "add interwiki link" and want to interlink it with the articles for 'SS Yarmouth Castle'. This would trigger a merge and that merge gets prevented by the different from (P1889) statement.
It's also worth noting here that the merge game, using different from (P1889) to mark when a user decided that two pages shouldn't be merged. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 22:21, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Isn't a wikipedia disambiguation page just a statement of "this set of possibly very different things happen to have the same name, and with the limitations of single value mediawiki, come here to see the caveats we added to distinguish them", say Victoria (Q537094). But different from (P1889) aims to be "This item is different from that one, and they are often confused", and no-one is going to confuse a Australian state with a plum. So is there a danger we are using this property for 2 very different use cases, one for things that are similar and should stop being merged, and one to handle a mediawiki naming limitation? I can see the problem if some wikipedian converts an article page to a disambiguation page, so invalidating the link, but I guess you have monitoring bots for that, and the reverse scenario, when a disambiguation page shrinks to an item page should have someone look for a suitable merge. But the patchy different from (P1889) coverage we have (9 links for Victoria out of the required 200+) means no-one could rely on an automated tool, and who manually would merge an item with a disambiguation page without worrying about the consequences? I'd want to know that Victoria is a common place name, not that Victoria is a common name for many things. Vicarage (talk) 22:59, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
You need to give up on the idea that P1889 should only be used in situations in which you can envisage confusion between two distinct concepts. Users merge human items with with DAB page items all the time; they turn up with annoying regularity in petscan reports I run for EN wiki Women in Red (the bottom three or four in this section. Neither are there "monitoring bots" sorting out the problem if some wikipedian converts an article page to a disambiguation page. You seem to be engaged in inventing magic wands and/or excluding from possibility the commonplace, in order to make your case. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:20, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
To cite the proposal description that explains the motivation for the property "Automated jobs (and less often people) make mistakes and identify two things that are in fact different. It's useful to document the difference, so others won't repeat the same mistake. It can also be used to improve authority identifier management (see the first "robot job" above)".
Often time, I think the primary usecase of this property has evolved to prevent merges because it's a good tool for the job and it falls into this motivation of mistake prevention. Your usecase sounds to me like you want to use the property for something besides it's primary function.
As Tagishimon demonstrated, mistaken merges between disambiguation page and other items actually happen. People actually confuse them in a way that produces problems. P1889 is a way to prevent that. Wikidata properties often have a purpose that you don't fully understand just by reading the label and description. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 00:07, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks to you both for the clarification. If the property is actually used in a different way to its description, its of much less use to me. I will write a set of domain specific clarification pages for my application, and keep any cross-links I find out of WD, to avoid rocking the boat. Vicarage (talk) 09:03, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
> The user might not even know that Wikidata exists because it's unfortunately possible to merge items without being aware that Wikidata exists.
@ChristianKl, How could one merge WD items without even being aware of WD? Michgrig (talk) 14:00, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
@Michgrig That would be phab:T270717 Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 14:10, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
In most cases, it appears superfluous, and a great deal of common sense would preclude it: Would we expect every single name on en:John Smith (plus the hundreds of other John Smiths on Wikidata) to explicitly denote that the person is not in fact, the disambiguation page known as John Smith (Q245903)? I don't think practice should be based on what the most clueless person or poorly operated bot might do. In many cases the statements seem to be autoimported from Wikipedia on questionable grounds: the fact that a given language Wikipedia may have a primary topic that defers to the disambiguation page in a hatnote does not necessitate that Wikidata must follow suit. -Animalparty (talk) 23:36, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Merge of "his death" and "her death"

  • I moved this conversation from my talk page to here for more eyes, I am against the merge for reasons stated below. The changing of the parameters is already ongoing based on the decision of a single person:

I believe Q105080687 and Q105080700 should be merged back in to death of subject's spouse (Q24037741) because 1. the sex of the spouse can and should be included as P21 of the spouse, making this unnecessary, 2. "his" and "her" are gendered pronouns of English specifically, and 3. the terms are ambiguous for same-sex couples. I will wait until at least Monday to do this, in case you have any input. Phillipedison1891 (talk) 03:00, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

People were also confused, this time including myself, as to who was the subject and who was the object. Again, when two people are involved, it is ambiguous as to which of the two you are referring to. Apparently the subject is the person named at the top of the Wikidata entry, and the object is anyone named in a Property. See for instance "Subject has role and "Object has role". --RAN (talk) 20:34, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Your definition of what "subject" means is correct. If you have an idea for different labels for death of subject (Q99521170) and death of subject's spouse (Q24037741) to make them more clear, that's great. But the underlying data structure seems to be valid and conforming to long-standing consensus. I understand that "his/her death" looks nicer in English prose and English infoboxes, but it's much worse for machine-readability and query-ability, which is what Wikidata is all about. Phillipedison1891 (talk) 21:41, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
  • You are assuming that Wikidata is only to be used by AIs, and not to be read by a human, so our instructions can be confusing for humans, so long as an AI can comprehend who in the relationship has died first. I think this concept is wrong. Less than 90% of all relationships recorded in Wikidata do not contain an end_cause, and even fewer married people even have a spouse recorded, so I don't see a query having a problem.
Note: the merge can't happen right now because I have to go though everything and determine whether the death is of the subject or the subject's spouse for each item (around 1,000). Phillipedison1891 (talk) 21:54, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

RAN (talk) 02:16, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

I have created a deletion discussion here, so any interested parties may want to comment there. @Richard_Arthur_Norton_(1958-_), CamelCaseNick, Piecesofuk, Bovlb: Phillipedison1891 (talk) 03:03, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Creating a new Mix'n'match project

Hi all. There's an open licence on the Akademi Kernewek (Q42417888)'s standardised Cornish Place Names database, which is now on Commons. My aim is to Mix N Match their database to existing place names on WD. I've added Q115350056 and Akademi Kernewek's Place Names (Q115349858) but I'm not sure if I now need to create a new property id? Cornish language is one of the smallest languages as far as population numbers are concerned, but they have hard working editors, and are batting at a high level, but do need help! Can anyone please create a catalog? Many thanks and best regards. Robin aka. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 15:07, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

The first question would be what you want to do with this list. I tried some modeling at Q6407343#P2561 and Q6407343#P1343. Would that suit you?
The second question would be if Mix’n’match is the best idea. It’s just a hunch but it might be better to find alternatives such as OpenRefine.
My third question would be the scope of your projects. Are you planning on creating items for every place on the list? This might indeed be a good idea but it opens the door to a lot of follow-up questions. --Emu (talk) 17:47, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
Your 1st line: I'd like to match like to like, the existing WD terms matched to the Academi Kernowek's place-name. Your two examples are spot on, but the kw place-name / label also needs to be there.
2nd line: matching like to like - yes, OpenRefine could be used, whichever you think best. I thought, maybe, the geotags of Mix.N Match would help matching the correct name, when two exact names exist for two different places.
3rd: yes, new items for place-names we can not match. If the name has been verified by IK, then it should be recorded on WD. At the end of the day, we can list all villages and towns with a Cornish name on something like 'Wikidata lists'.
Also - as these place-names have now been standardised by IK, any older Cornish names should be changed to these IK standardised names, as they are the authority on this subject. It gives consistence between both projects.
Thanks for your help on this. Small is beautiful! Best regards, Robin... aka... Llywelyn2000 (talk) 06:23, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
@Llywelyn2000
  1. I’m not really sure what you mean by “kw place-name / label” – could you please explain?
  2. Yes indeed, that might be a good idea, too. You can also use both, OpenRefine and Mix’n’match.
I’m not sure if it’s good policy to just change the obsolete Cornish names as they might still be in use somewhere. Maybe list them as alternatives or use ranking?
It might also be a good idea to come up with a numbering scheme for the places. It’s quite hard to directly point to something on your PDFs. --Emu (talk) 20:12, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
Hi @Emu!
Example of kw label, here
I note that no 'obsolete English names' exist. For example the old spelling Beormingahām for Birmingham has long dissapeared, replaced by a national, standardised name. It's not even an alias. We could create a new propetry for example '1st recorded instance of locality' or '1st record of this place-name' or 'former spelling' etc.
'numbering scheme' - indeed; apart from the WD IQ, any ideas? Llywelyn2000 (talk) 11:24, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
@Llywelyn2000 Okay, I see. It’s probably best if people who know the language decide about the kw label. Just my input as an outsider: As somebody who has to deal with obsolete place names (although in Central Europe), I always find it most helpful if all names in all languages are recorded in Wikidata. --Emu (talk) 10:52, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

"Element with Wikipedia article"?

Is there a way to express that https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q26715632 has description at Wikipedia in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Districts%20of%20the%20British%20Virgin%20Islands rather than having dedicated article? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 12:19, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

If there would be no existing article about Tortula, you create a redirect on enwiki with the name Tortola that points to Districts of the British Virgin Islands and then link the redirect from Tortola (Q26715632). Given that there happens to be an existing article for Tortula, you could name the redirect "Tortola (administrative territorial entity)" or something like that. I'm not sure on whether or not the current enwiki stance on redirects that are named like this happens to be. On dewiki it seems like we need a change in policy to allow some of those redirects to exist.
The ability to add these sitelink to redirects is very recent and I hope that over the next 1-2 years all the Wikipedia's will accept that having these redirects is great. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 12:36, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: - that gave me "Site link enwiki:Districts of the British Virgin Islands is already used by item Q2900993. Perhaps the items should be merged. Ask at d:Wikidata:Interwiki conflicts if you believe that they should not be merged." I needed to blank redirect, add link in wikidata and restore redirect Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 19:17, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
I linked you to the article for a reason, it explains how to do it. You need to add the intentional sitelink to redirect (Q70894304) badge. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:06, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Taxonomy templates

I looked at enwiki and there are over 100k taxonomy templates. I'm going to do some work to better deal with all of these, and that includes setting instance of (P31)taxonomy template (Q115595777) on these. First I'll only modify items without any claims. RPI2026F1 (talk) 16:16, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

@RPI2026F1: WD:N says "If a link is a template, the item must contain at least two such sitelinks, and any of them must not be one of /doc, /XML, /meta, /sandbox, /testcases or /TemplateData subpages. Items for non-subpages can be created with only one sitelink, but shouldn't be created in great numbers." BrokenSegue (talk) 16:23, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
I have already come across some of these with two sitelinks, Template:Taxonomy/Fortignathus (Q115568351) as an example. Well now that I know that I'll only operate on existing items. RPI2026F1 (talk) 16:26, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
sure thing. just making sure you are aware. BrokenSegue (talk) 16:32, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Quickstatements being very buggy?

I tried making quickstatements to delete a value of P31 and insert another value. However, for some reason Quickstatements would often add the values 2-3 times even though I only have one insert statements? An example is the edit history at Template:Taxonomy/Autarchoglossa (Q13217744). RPI2026F1 (talk) 23:00, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

QS is known to create (some) duplicate appended items when run as a batch; it does not exhibit that behaviour when running it locally b/c it works at a slower pace, avoiding the causative condition. I presume the same will be the case with appending duplicate statements. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:06, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
I mean it's not feasible to run ~20k statements locally. But how do I deal with the duplication? RPI2026F1 (talk) 00:58, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
Well, it is feasible, it just takes longer. The alternative is to write some SPARQL to get the statement IDs of (one of the pair of) duplicate statements, and delete them after running the batch. Or switch to e.g. wikibase-cli. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:27, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #549

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour on December 5. We will be working on Structured Data on Commons with a WINTER FUN theme, adding depicts statements to images and playing with some tools. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. This will be our last scheduled Working Hour for 2022. Please join us for a relaxing and enjoyable session to wrap up a year of excellent work together. Event page
      • Bug Triage Hour on December 6 at 17:00 UTC, on the topic of Entity Schemas (other topics also welcome). Come with your favorite Phabricator ticket so we can improve its description together!
      • Save the date! The next WikidataCon will take place on October 28-29, 2023, and will be organized by Wikimedia Taiwan and Wikimedia Germany. The hybrid event will be streamed from Taipei and accessible for everyone online. More information and updates on the WikidataCon 2023 page.
    • Ongoing
      • Weekly Lexemes Challenge #69, Cycles
  • Tool of the week
    • How many edits does Wikidata get per second? listen.hatnote.com/#wikidata is a tool that allows you to listen to the sound of Wikidata's recent changes feed.
  • Development
    • Improved the error message for sitelinks to redirects (phab:T320490)
    • Made the Property namespace a content namespace (phab:T321282)
    • Lexicographical data: Added a better link for a help message (phab:T315161)
    • Mismatch Finder:
      • Linked the header to make it easier to get back to the main page (phab:T323680)
      • Made the layout more compact (phab:T323678)
      • Fixed an issue where the whole header of a mismatch results table was a link instead of just the Item ID (phab:T323823)
      • Improved the text on a button (phab:T323682)
      • Finished better support for dates with calendar model and precision (phab:T288511)
      • Ordered the columns in the results page better so they make more sense (phab:T323819)
    • Fixed a bug where a large horizontal scrollbar appeared on RTL interface languages (phab:T321441)
    • Fixed a bug in the search in the new Vector skin (phab:T324148)
    • Query Service:
    • mul language code: continuing investigation for language fallbacks on mobile that is currently blocking it (phab:T323098)
    • REST API:

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Join the Coolest Tool Award 2022: Friday, Dec 16th, 17:00 UTC

The fourth edition of the Wikimedia Coolest Tool Award will happen online on Friday 16 December 2022 at 17:00 UTC!

This award is highlighting software tools that have been nominated by contributors to the Wikimedia projects. The ceremony will be a nice moment to show appreciation to our tool developers and maybe discover new tools!

Read more about the livestream and the discussion channels.

Thanks for joining! -Komla


MediaWiki message delivery 18:53, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Semantic Web Journal Special Issue on Wikidata

Wikidata: Construction, Evaluation and Applications

In recent years, we have seen an increase in the number of publications around Wikidata. While there are several dedicated venues for the broader Wikidata community to meet, none of them focuses on publishing comprehensive, peer-reviewed research. This special issue fills this gap - we hope to provide a forum to build this fledgling scientific community and promote novel work and resources that support it.

The special issue seeks original contributions and extended conference papers that address the opportunities and challenges of creating, contributing to, and using the global, collaborative, open-domain, multilingual knowledge graph Wikidata.

Topics

Topics of submissions include, but are not limited to:

  • Data quality and vandalism detection in Wikidata
  • Referencing in Wikidata
  • Anomaly, bias, or novelty detection in Wikidata
  • Algorithms for aligning Wikidata with other structured or semi-structured resources
  • Representation, Semantic Annotation, Enhancement and Enrichments using Wikidata
  • Semantic Parsing and Question Answering using Wikidata
  • The Semantic Web and Wikidata
  • Community interaction in Wikidata
  • Multilingual data in Wikidata and its reuse
  • Data quality in Wikidata: Approaches for problem detection, evaluation and improvement
  • Tools, bots, and datasets for improving or evaluating Wikidata
  • Participation, diversity, and inclusivity aspects in the Wikidata ecosystem
  • Human-bot interaction
  • Managing knowledge evolution in Wikidata
  • Abstract Wikipedia
  • Wikidata in NLP applications

Submissions shall be made through the Semantic Web journal website at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net. Prospective authors must take notice of the submission guidelines posted at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors.

Deadline

Submission deadline: 31 January 2023. Papers submitted before the deadline will be reviewed upon receipt.

Guest editors

The guest editors can be reached at wikidata-swj@googlegroups.com

  • Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, University of Southampton, lucie.kaffee@gmail.com
  • Simon Razniewski, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, srazniew@mpi-inf.mpg.de
  • Pavlos Vougiouklis, Huawei Technologies, pavlos.vougiouklis@huawei.com

Ls1g (talk) 09:35, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

@Ls1g: I wrote an email to wikidata-swj@googlegroups.com and I got a bounce back saying "the group you tried to contact (wikidata-swj) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group" BrokenSegue (talk) 06:10, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
@BrokenSegue: Apologies and thanks for pointing out! I've now changed the permission settings, please retry. Ls1g (talk) 08:40, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Charles Murray short description

A comment was posted at w:simple:Talk:Charles Murray about the description for Charles Murray (Q1065595). English Wikipedia uses the short description "American political scientist (born 1943)". Simple English Wikipedia does not use short descriptions, and instead uses the description from Wikidata, which says "American libertarian political scientist, white nationalist, author, and columnist". The comment alleges that it is not neutral to refer to Murray as a white nationalist, because some people do not think he is one. I don't know the validity of each side's claims, or how the en:WP:BLP is involved here, but I think this should be discussed. Maybe the Wikidata description is unnecessary or inappropriate. Lights and freedom (talk) 19:31, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I've removed 'white nationalist', an assertion backed by only a single reference in the EN wiki article. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:34, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
Wikidata is not bound by en:WP:BLP but we have our own Wikidata:Living people. Our policy says "Labels, descriptions and aliases need to be neutral and well-sourced (ideally based on referenced statements on the item) and particular care should be taken in editing these for items about living people. Derogatory names, even when used in reliable public sources, should not be added as aliases. Descriptions should focus on facts, not opinions."
Calling him a white nationalist, especially when there's no referenced statement that supports that claim is not neutral and thus it's in line with our policies not to do so and right to remove it. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 14:10, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Q23928292's P2671

Can't find Pierre de Lesquen (Q23928292)'s Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) on the source code of the related Google search... Could someone please help me? :) Nomen ad hoc (talk) 10:58, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Searching for /g/ (or /m/ for older freebase IDs) in the source usually works, and the values will be in a JSON array flanked by \x22. It looks like the identifier for that person is /g/11cn2__f1s. I've gone ahead and added the P2671 to the item for you. --M2Ys4U (talk) 14:21, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Is there an easier way to find it than just by scanning the source code of the page? Like maybe a bookmarket or code that can be run in the webpage console? RPI2026F1 (talk) 18:15, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
If you get a knowledge card in the search results, it has a 'three small dots' menu from which you can copy a share link. Paste it in the browser and it will be transformed into an URL containing the id. Frlgin (talk) 11:20, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
@Nomen ad hoc: https://angryloki.github.io/mreid-resolver/ is a very nice tool for this purpose! You can enter terms or Google Knowledgegraph ids and it will show much useful information. --Frlgin (talk) 20:32, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Is there a way to convert a list of Wikidata items into a list of Wikipedia articles?

I would like to find out if there's a way to do this. 2602:306:C541:CC60:D83F:9B86:CB34:F7B0 05:52, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

You want to map wikidata items to entries in their respective language's wikipedia? I don't know of an off the shelf tool that does this but it's pretty straightforward in e.g. SPARQL. BrokenSegue (talk) 06:12, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
I suggest the Wikipedia and Wikidata tools for Google Spreadsheets. It works like an Excel function. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 08:00, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Eh, that might actually only work the other way. Sorry. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 08:06, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
See toolforge:pagepile. Though you can only see the unordered result, and you may want toolforge:wikidata-todo/linked_items.php to make a page to item mapping.--GZWDer (talk) 13:47, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
You want something like User:ListeriaBot but to show sitelinks for a wiki? RPI2026F1 (talk) 19:57, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

registration area a historic county or not in Scotland

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AQ7309443#historic_county_or_not_in_Scotland shows how we are getting duplicate historic counties in Scotland because of confusion over registration county (Q7309443). Could someone familiar with administrative areas sort it out please? Vicarage (talk) 15:48, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Item 100,000,000 approaches... again

We hit 100,000,000 items a couple of months ago - by the {{NUMBEROFPAGES}} count, which includes "Q-items", lexemes, entity-schema, and (as of this week - phab:T321282) properties, and currently stands at 105,151,527.

However, the "Q-item" count is now approximately 99,950,000 (quarry), and that means we will hit the hundred-million "Q-item" mark sometime this week, depending how quickly things increase - we've had an average increase of ~16,000 items/day over the last three months. Andrew Gray (talk) 00:16, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

How to create item with all statements using Pywikibot?

Is there a way to make an item with labels, descriptions, aliases, and multiple claims with values in a single edit using Pywikibot? RPI2026F1 (talk) 22:30, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

It should at least be possible using the API, see [1] (with new and data parameters). I don’t know Pywikibot well enough to tell whether it supports this operation, though. --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:B9B9:90A0:E68E:FD99 08:57, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
I recommend Wikidata:WikibaseIntegrator. I use it daily and the maintainer is very responsive and the documentation is quite good IMO. So9q (talk) 12:56, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
…and the last example code lines here imply that the data parameter can be used (haven’t found whether new, too, is supported). --

2A02:8108:50BF:C694:B9B9:90A0:E68E:FD99 09:02, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

I was able to figure it out. Basically, to add claims, you need to do something like this:
import pywikibot
site = pywikibot.Site("wikidata", "wikidata")
data = {"claims": []}
claim = pywikibot.Claim(site, "P31")
claim.setTarget(pywikibot.ItemPage(site, "Q5"))
data.append(claims.toJSON())
new_item = pywikibot.ItemPage(site)
new_item.editEntity(data, summary="Making new item...")
RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:04, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T324332
Hmm, I am not sure why the preview failed so badly. I'll be making a Phabricator ticket to fix this. RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:06, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Source tags work better.
In Pywikibot the choice was made to not stack edits like this and make one large edit out of it. Makes it easier for users to follow what a bot is doing, but on the other hand it produces a lot more edits per item. Stacking edits and editing structured data on Commons (phab:T223820) should probably be implemented in Pywikibot, but so far nobody has picked it up.
You can still do it yourself, but that means you have to do everything yourself. See this Commons example. Note that on Wikidata you shouldn't be hitting the API directly, but use new_item.editEntity. Multichill (talk) 15:37, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
I mean in theory it shouldn't be too hard to implement stacking mode for an item. All that would have to be done is to make an internal dictionary of the editEntity datatype, and a new method save() can just internally call editEntity. Now the struggle is toggling between the "stacking mode" and the normal mode. Because if a switch occurs while there is unwritten data, does that get saved or deleted? RPI2026F1 (talk) 16:17, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
ItemPage is a subclass of BasePage which represents any MediaWiki page. BasePage has save() for saving whatever text changes you had and put() to submit the new text and save it. If you change text here and forget to use save(), nothing happens. Wikibase behavior should be the same. Multichill (talk) 16:38, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
There's one more problem with stacking mode, and that is how is it toggled? Would it make sense to toggle it per item, or on the data repository? Are all instances of the same data repository shared? Like, if I call Site("en", "wikipedia").data_repository() and Site("en", "wikinews").data_repository() will they point to the same instance of Site("wikidata", "wikidata")? Also, could both be done where the data repository has a toggle but then items have a secondary toggle that would detach the item from the shared data repository state? Or would it be something like a global pywikibot.stack_wikibase_statements()? RPI2026F1 (talk) 16:43, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Edits are per entity, not per site see editEntity. So the state is per page and the site is just a thin layer to the api. Multichill (talk) 16:59, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
No, I am aware the edits are per entity. The problem is that unless we rip apart backwards compatibility, there needs to be a way to indicate if we're going to be stacking or not. And my question is, where do we store this boolean? RPI2026F1 (talk) 19:06, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
If it's an optional flag (like async) and a function like save() to flush it out, it should be fully backwards compatible. We would be modifying the local state of the item and flushing it out at the end. I just implemented it for my bot by doing it in the client. Probably needs a bit of input from the other developers how to do this in an elegant way in the Pywikibot framework itself. Are you are aware of a relevant phabricator task RPI2026F1 or shall we start a new one? Multichill (talk) 14:37, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
How does the async flag currently work? I'm not fully sure how it's implemented. I can always make a ticket. RPI2026F1 (talk) 21:00, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Made T324401. RPI2026F1 (talk) 21:47, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T324401
@RPI2026F1, do you want to use Pywikibot and nothing else? QuickStatements does exactly what you want and works OK. Michgrig (talk) 14:00, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
I need to use Pywikibot since the data is not known ahead of time. I am currently making calls to other APIs to fetch data and making values based off of that. RPI2026F1 (talk) 20:24, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
did you apply for permission to operate a bot? it looks like you are already running it. BrokenSegue (talk) 21:04, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
I have a RFB open. I'm not really running a "bot" since it's a one-off script that only runs when I input an initial item to scan. RPI2026F1 (talk) 21:40, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
ok cool just checking. i'll take a look at your RFBOT BrokenSegue (talk) 22:08, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

ChatGTP is great for helping write Wikidata description

I just asked ChatGTP "Describe the Biceps Brachii in 250 character or less in a way that would work for an item description on Wikidata" and it answered "The biceps brachii is a large muscle in the upper arm that is responsible for flexing the elbow and supinating the forearm. It is a two-headed muscle, with one head originating on the scapula and the other on the humerus". It missed the fact that there's also a flexion in the shoulder so I edited the response to "large muscle in the upper arm that is responsible for flexing the elbow, flexing the shoulder and supinating the forearm. It is a two-headed muscle, with one head originating on the scapula and the other on the humerus" which is a really nice description and took very little work. I can recommend it for helping writing descriptions.

ChatGTP also can give a decent query when asked "Write a Wikidata SPARQL query that shows all women who are poets and who live in Germany". It's really a great help to working with Wikidata. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 22:04, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Except that the description you got runs counter to the guidelines for length of descriptions. I would say it fails at writing WikiData descriptions based on your recent edits, which have turned concise descriptions into multiple sentences. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:09, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
I did ask it to write a description in 250 character or less. If you want something concise in terms of 12 words or less you can also simply ask ChatGTP for that. "Describe the Biceps Brachii in 15 words or less in a way that would work for an item description on Wikidata" gives answer as well. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 22:23, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
I'd have thought the art of a good description is understanding the subject matter to bring out the salient points in a pithy manner, to aid in choosing the right one from a selection of similar things. It shouldn't attempt to describe the thing, that's a job for wikipedia, just provide enough detail to be unambiguous. You want a classification AI generating keywords rather than a natural language AI for that, and it could be much better than a human, but it would work best when applied uniformly across a class rather than piecemeal. Vicarage (talk) 23:05, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Without any knowledge about ChatGTP: I’m very sceptical about a chatbot(-ish NLG system) producing syntactically correct SPARQL (but maybe they did some extra effort to ensure this, I don’t know). Writing something that looks like a description (and has a hopefully matching content) sounds much more like something that can be expected from a chatbot/NLG. But I’m decidedly AI-sceptical in general, so this comment is possibly too negative. --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:B9B9:90A0:E68E:FD99 22:28, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
And yet ... https://twitter.com/timFinin/status/1598749799938809856 and https://twitter.com/timFinin/status/1598786295601324032 - examples of ChatGTP producing syntactically correct SPARQL for simple queries. If that's not enough, then a) A rap battle between @Wikipedia and @wikidata, as envisaged by ChatGPT and b) ditto, opera love duet. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:52, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
Related: [2] --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:71E8:71CE:ABAB:E96B 10:42, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
It's not hard to write descriptions, they should be summaries. Like for people, it can almost be <Country> <Occupation>. RPI2026F1 (talk) 04:18, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
What an dystopian vision, I really can't understand ChristianKl's enjoyment. Let us keep the descriptions human, short & sharp.--Kris Kringle Klan (talk) 11:45, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Do you see most of the descriptions that are currently created by bots as human descriptions? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 11:56, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Bots usually automate the editing process, but the descriptions they write are in most cases defined entirely by humans (bot operator, or source where it can be taken from). —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:14, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
I cannot speak for Kris Kringle Klan, but I’d not so much be concerned about descriptions being written automatically (even involving sophisticated AI/NLG tools) as about using a tool for that designed for something else (or more general), which feels like cracking a peanut with an all-in-one jack-of-all-trades sledgehammer. There’s nothing wrong with making use of any tool that can help you make your editing easier, as long as you know how to use it correctly; there’s nothing wrong with getting inspired by an AI as long as you can tell whether it does what you want it to do (so please don’t adopt any AI-suggested description for some item you don’t know well enough to tell whether it is likely to fit). Bot operators, on the other hand, want to be as sure as possible their bots don’t become disruptive, so they want to retain control over how their bots write descriptions. Then, it’s at least their fault if something goes wrong, and they can (try to) fix/avoid it. With an AI solution, this becomes tricky… --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:D0BE:E480:6135:778B 13:13, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
I don't think the descriptions that are created by bots for items are similar to a human writting a description for an item because a human can make a decision based on the item in question whether or not his change in description is an improvement. When a bot updates what another bot did in the past, there's often no case by case human decision. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 12:51, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
man if people hate this idea they are gonna really hate my idea of using Dall-e to generate images for items lacking images. BrokenSegue (talk) 19:29, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
Not sure if that was meant to be a joke, but making up images (using AI or not) just to have an item image sounds a very bad idea to me… (sorry) --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:C822:B499:A8C0:D69F 20:54, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
it's only partially in jest BrokenSegue (talk) 21:07, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
It could actually make sense to create images for items representing e.g. abstract concepts, but I don’t think making up images for the several million so far imageless instances of human (Q5) can lead to reasonable results. Especially given that for many of them we might have no idea what they look like, nor would an AI. --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:56D:8D42:AFA9:3BD0 10:25, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
ChatGTP will tell you lies about things it has not learned. Afaz (talk) 01:29, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
Fun fact: Humans who do so will be blocked on almost any Wikimedia project. --2A02:8108:50BF:C694:71E8:71CE:ABAB:E96B 08:40, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata items for videos at online video platforms? Do you agree?

Let's suppose XYZ is a location of public interest (e.g. museum, temple, archeological site, or protected area) and it is is recorded in a Youtube video. To add this knowledge to Wikidata, I'd create a Wikidata item for the Youtube video and add the statement depicts (P180)XYZ. I would also add statements such as the language of work or name (P407), duration (P2047), publication date (P577), number of likes (P10649), number of comments (P10651), etc. However, I feel that if I created such item, my item would be requested for deletion, because the video by itself is not notable, since it hasn't been described in a public reference such as a newspaper or an scholarly article. However, things that are shown in the video are notable.

The main reason why I feel motivated to create items for these videos is that there are videos in Youtube from different channels that show different places that are relevant for human knowledge: museums, temples, archeological sites, protected areas, etc and by creating such items, we could use SPARQL to find such videos. For example, someone could write a query for listing Youtube videos in Spanish that depicts statues located in Japan with more than 10 comments as of this date. Such query would include this video. Just if this matter, this is the first time I watch a video from this Youtube channel, and I don't like watching these type of videos where people record their faces while walking on the street, but I think that the simple fact that it depicts Statue of Hachikō (Q62124995) makes the video relevant for human knowledge.

For the record, I don't have a Youtube channel and my main goal isn't advertising. I just feel there's knowledge in Youtube videos that could be beneficial for the community.

My question for you is: Do you agree with the idea of creating Wikidata items for Youtube videos that depicts things that conform with Wikidata:Notability? If not, what alternative would you propose for storing the fact that a location is depicted in a Youtube video and storing the language used in that video and the number of comments/views at different point in times?

-- Rdrg109 (talk) 22:30, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

I connect quality YouTube documentary videos with items by adding a WD item for the channel, and then adding a described by source (P1343) for the channel with a URL (P2699) with the URL. Eg R-class submarine (Q732680). I can't see any merit in creating standalone WD items for YouTube videos unless they are much more substantial. I sometimes add title etc as other qualifiers. Vicarage (talk) 22:41, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
There is also YouTube video ID (P1651) to link to a specific videos, in case this has not been considered yet. I think that items dedicated to individual videos should remain an exception, not become the rule here. Youtube has an API to request data related to videos, so technically it should not be too difficult for a user to gather all this information as described above. —MisterSynergy (talk) 22:51, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
One reason I didn't use that is so lists of videos for a particular channel could be easily generated, it would be too easy to skip a channel qualifier for YouTube video ID (P1651). In the same way described at URL (P973) always seemed feeble. Vicarage (talk) 23:05, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
It might, rarely, be worth linking a video to an item using e.g. described at URL (P973). I do not agree, @Rdrg109:, that you should create items for videos. The video is not notable. It does not inherit notability from from its subject matter. It falls outside the criteria set out in WD:N. Beyond exceptional cases, I do not offer "an alternative ... for storing the fact that a location is depicted in a Youtube video" ... cataloging the contents of YouTube videos falls outside the scope of Wikidata. I accept there are all sorts of interesting videos on YouTube; but it is not part of the scope of wikidata to point its items at these videos any more than it is to point items at the plethora of books on, films on, tv programmes on, walking tours of, &c &c &c.
In my understanding, YouTube video ID (P1651) is an identifier used on items on, mainly, songs - so, Q57#P1651, for instance. It points to the video analogue of the song. A youtube video on, say, York, is not the video analogue of the City of York, and so I cannot see a means by which P1651 can be used to satisfy Rdrg109's aim. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:04, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
We do link to encyclopedias and scholarly articles though, and a good YouTube video can have a similar level of research and be a good visual introduction to a subject to counterpoint the Wikipedia style of text and static images. I value a well shot walkthough of a mine or animation of a battle. Vicarage (talk) 23:13, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Such items - if created - probably shouldn't be only about the Youtube video specifically, but rather about the work, i.e. the video/film/short film, in general. Doesn't really matter where an audiovisual work was published - whether it was on Youtube, Vimeo, Pornhub, Netflix, DVD or aired on TV - the item should describe the work itself, not a single platform-specfic copy of it. Even if it isn't currently available elsewhere. --2A02:810B:580:11D4:8CF2:F89:AF3F:BF36 19:35, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Suspicious string of items created by multiple accounts simultaneously

These items are all suspicious:

They all seem to be made by the same person at the same time, but each coming from different accounts. I'm not sure what to think of them. RPI2026F1 (talk) 14:26, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Possibly an editathon type thing at an academic institution? Typically involves a set of new account registrations and the creation of more or less good items. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:14, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
That's possible, beause it seems that the items have been expanded upon after some time. RPI2026F1 (talk) 16:56, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Can we link to Wikivoyage listings?

Exampleː Q15931145 . It links to Wikipedia articles, but it does not link to https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Jiaxing where that entity (abbey) has a listing in the city article. The listing is connected to Wikidata (it links to our Q article) but there is no link back. Now, I understand that the interwiki link section is for articles, but can we add "wikivoyage listing" subsection somewhere, either to the interwiki links as a sub-article level or as a new property or something? To elaborate, Wikivoyage has many listings for topics that are considered too minor to have their own Wikivoyage article, but should be mentioned in the Wikivoyage articles. Many such listings have Wikipedia entries, or even if they do not, they meet Wikidata notability criteria. So Wikivoyage can link to Wikidata entry on such an entity, but we cannot link back (since we link to articles, not sections/listings), even if the listing existence on Wikivoyage is the main "wikipresence" of a given topic in Wikimedia system. That doesn't seem right. Piotrus (talk) 06:47, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

I agree. It would be ideal if there was some way to link listings and/or sections. SHB2000 (talk) 07:30, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
I think we should better create redirects in Wikivoyage and link them with Wikidata, something an IP user did with Ballygunge, Jadavpur and Tollygunge (although the redirects were created by me). Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs) 09:01, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
@Sbb1413 That's a nice simple solution, which wouldn't require any coding. Only hurdle is to make sure such redirects are not deleted by an overzalous admin at WV? Piotrus (talk) 11:07, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
My external sites using WD are often of tourist attractions, so I would find this useful. The obvious approach, using urls with #section would require individual attractions to be their own sections, which is currently not the case in WikiVoyage.
Links to sections of wikipedia articles would also be useful to me if a minor attraction is described as a section of an article for a place rather than having its own short page. Vicarage (talk) 09:23, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
Sitelinks to redirects are the way to solve this problem. I don't know the current redirect policy of Wikivoyage but if Wikivoyage wants those links it can have a redirect policy that allows the creation of those redirects which are then linked on Wikidata. The same goes for the individual Wikipedia's.
When it comes to Vincent Abbey in Jiaxing (Q15931145) having a redirect from "Vincent Abbey in Jiaxing" to the section on "Jiaxing" would also be good for Wikivoyage users regardles of Wikidata.
If you create such redirects and someone deletes them for violating a policy of an individual Wikiproject, raise the issue on the talk page of the policy for that Wikiproject and hopefully sooner or later the policy changes once enough people want the links from Wikidata and the interwiki links that comes with it. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:03, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
We can only create redirects to sections, not to individual listings. Ymblanter (talk) 19:53, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
There are redirects like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=(7185)_1991_VN1&redirect=no that are more precise than sections. It might be desireable to have even more powerful way to link to specific parts of a page, but that's no Wikidata issue. Part of the advantage of having the sitelinks to redirects is that there's a clear separation of concerns. Wikidata only needs to link to the redirect and in further Wikipedia can develop it's way how it's redirects work on it's own. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 23:35, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
It is possible to create redirects with individual listings. For instance, New Jalpaiguri redirects to the New Jalpaiguri Junction railway station listing in Siliguri. Sbb1413 (he) (talk • contribs) 11:17, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

The Guns of Navarone (Q756882)

Hello,

it looks like at good number of links have been lost on this article due to a merger Previous Version with 35 language entries vs. 19 now. Poppy (talk) 22:00, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

I have restored the previous version. @Twodrifters, what were you trying to do? It is possible that some of the sitelinks were about the book rather than the film ... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:33, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
Common error, I've recently had do undo some of mine/my students edits as we got confused about a badly written item which was a review of a notable book (the book didn't have an item yet, and the review was named just like a book and didn't clarify it was a review...). Disambiguation at Wikidata needs more work. Piotrus (talk) 11:16, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Admin Bot Proposal: Deleting Empty Items

After a short discussion on WD:AN I'm moving the discussion here. Normally bot proposals go to Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot but this is more controversial so I'm bringing the discussion here (RFP/BOT gets very little traffic). Proposal is to make an admin bot that deletes items if the following conditions are met:

  • Item has no sitelinks / inbound links / statements
  • Item has only 1 non-bot editor
  • Item has been left unedited for 72 hours (or more?)

The rationale is that I've been looking at SPARQL of empty items and there are >10 thousands items and most of them meet the above criteria. Some are created accidentally. Some are created by new users who don't understand wikidata. Having a human go through all of these is a waste of time and more are created all the time.

Optionally I also propose that we auto-notify users that they have made an item with no statements and explain to them why this is bad. Similar to the text in {{uw-empty}}. BrokenSegue (talk) 21:04, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

General support. Ideally the bot would advise the user (after ?72 hours) that they've created an items without sitelink / property / inboun link, set a reasonable deadline for remediation - perhaps 7 days - and on the 7th day, if no change, delete (optionally advising the user that the delete has been done). --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:16, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
@Ladsgroup: is the one who volunteered to implement the bot so I'll let them say if that feature would be hard to implement. Sounds like a reasonable idea to me. BrokenSegue (talk) 00:19, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
@BrokenSegue Yup, it's doable. Just noting that the only concern would be that the bot might flood someone's talk page but meh no big risk. Amir (talk) 10:04, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
I support the procedure that Tagishsimon proposes. It helps engage the users which is valuable. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 00:31, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 Support --Emu (talk) 23:02, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
 Support This is a task where bot help would be really useful --Ameisenigel (talk) 08:59, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 Support: Seems good. RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:08, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
@Lymantria, Vogone: I do not think we would be acting on this request does not matter what happens in this section. My suggestion would be to transfer this request, assuming there is initial support, to Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Administrator, then we can act on that request after a week.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:58, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
I agree that for assigning the admin flag to a specific bot a discussion has to happen elsewhere. Ideally, however, the conditions under which this future admin bot is going to operate are already agreed upon here. --Vogone (talk) 20:27, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
@Ymblanter and @Vogone My bot is already an admin, I assume it would only need a bot task approval. Right? Amir (talk) 21:20, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
Yes, this is right. I would still like to see a request open at Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot. I am fine with having most of a discussion here and a fast approval there, but I think we need a separate page. Ymblanter (talk) 21:25, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
oh sure thing, that's a given. I already made more than fifteen of them :D Amir (talk) 22:23, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
Ok so I'll wait until it seems we have consensus here (maybe another week without serious objection). Are you comfortable making the pro-forma request at Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot after that? BrokenSegue (talk) 23:08, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
That seems to be a good strategy to me. Note that Ladsgroup already runs Dexbot having admin tasks and having a somewhat similar task, see this request. Lymantria (talk) 08:23, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

EditGroups cannot handle user renames

My bot User:AniMangaDBImportBot was renamed to User:RPI2026F1Bot. However, EditGroups did not do the rename and treats these accounts like 2 separate users. RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:27, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

The project chat isn't exactly the best place for bug reports of the software. Phabricator tickets even if they aren't always immediately handled, are a better way to get something under developer attention. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 23:22, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
There is no place for EditGroups on Phabricator. I had originally went there but it doesn't exist. RPI2026F1 (talk) 00:16, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
User:Pintoch is the tool maintainer (and its original author, as much as I am aware). You may contact them directly via their user talk page. —MisterSynergy (talk) 00:19, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
@RPI2026F1: hi! I am not actively working on this tool anymore. My original motivation to build it was to make it possible launch the Wikidata integration in OpenRefine (to be a safeguard against unintended edit batches), and I am not working on that integration either anymore. To me, this tool really feels like stop gap solution which should eventually be replaced by a more natively supported notion of edit group (see the discussion at phab:T203557), where it would likely be easier to transparently handle account renames. Such a re-implementation of the tool as an extension would be a completely new code base, with nothing in common with the current tool. As such, the Wikidata community should consider that the current tool might break any time, and people might need to find other solutions to undo the edit groups it tracks. If someone is interested in maintaining the tool in its current form, I would be very happy to give them the required accesses and advise as needed. − Pintoch (talk) 07:34, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Oh thank you for letting me know. I really appreciate EditGroups for managing Quickstatements batches RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:15, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

After having converted a list of Wikipedia articles to a list of Wikidata items, how can I quickly find articles that were lost in the conversion process?

So, basically, I used Petscan to convert a Pagepile of articles from the English Wikipedia to a list of Wikidata items. But, in the process of doing that, three items were apparently lost, and I was wondering if there's any efficient way to figure out which three items were lost. I used Petscan's feature that shows you the pages in a Pagepile that don't have Wikidata items, but I was unable to find any articles using it. 2602:306:C541:CC60:859B:2A4D:D71F:66E2 07:42, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

If you are using pagepile, you can convert pagepile of items->pagepile of articles->pagepile of items and using the minus operation provided by PagePile to get the difference. If you have a pile of articles, PetScan provide a way to see which ones are not connected to items (and you can create new items for them). GZWDer (talk) 08:07, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
In response to your second suggestion, as I said, I used that tool but it showed me that there were no articles in the Pagepile that didn't also have items. But I know that some are missing because the list of items has three missing articles according to the data that I have. Your first suggestion doesn't work in my case because the list of items that I have is too large to be converted to a PagePile format. 2602:306:C541:CC60:E407:A4DB:92A3:6EC5 15:09, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Contributor assignments

Can someone please tell me why I am marked as a contributor for some pages here when I have only created an article in the German-language Wikipedia, e.g. here: [3]? Without any indication in the version history that this happens automatically. -- Aholtman (talk) 17:11, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

You likely clicked within Wikipedia on "Add sitelinks to this article". That action is about contributing to Wikidata even if it's not obvious from the dialog. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:32, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Well , actually, I did only this in this case: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nikolai_Nikolajewitsch_Andrejew_(Mathematiker)&oldid=228734202 (I just started a new article, actually with a translation by the translation tool), but did not click on "Links bearbeiten". The edit on wikidata was done - as far as I could retrace it - completely automatically. So this means that somebody (whoever - no name) is doing something and letting it look as if a different person has done it without documenting it? Best regards, --Aholtman (talk) 18:45, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
I would expect that's what the translation tool does. The translation tool considers it important that the translated article is interlinked with the original and therefore adds the sitelink to the newly created article to Wikidata. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:58, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

String literal in query?

My (very limited) understanding of SPARQL includes the possibility of using string literals for the 3rd term in a triple. I have seen an example where people with the given name "Antoine" can be found but this uses some (magically found?) Q12345. If I modify the query using "Antoine", nothing is returned. In short, how can I build queries using string literals to be matched? AxelCorti (talk) 09:04, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

@AxelCorti: You need to check the datatype of a property. If the property in question has an "item" datatype, as does given name (P735), then it will only have items as values in Wikidata, which in the SPARQL UI would be represented as wd:Q12345 or whatever the id is. Properties with string (including monolingual string, URL, etc.) datatypes can be queried with string values in SPARQL. The wikidata query service (link in the nav bar) has autocomplete to "magically find" values, so if you type wd: then the first letters of the name you want and hit ctrl-spacebar you will be given a dropdown selection of id's. ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:48, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for confirming what I have found out by poking around. My task is to find data for persons where the number (at least for "catching up") is big enough to require an automated process so "typing" is out of the question. - I have thought of downloading everything and battling with the lot, but I fear that this would exceed my resources. Perhaps the organization for which I would be doing this has the necessary computing power, but I shy away from >6 hours of downloading time and the fantastic number of records. A subset of persons might be manageable. (I can work quite well with a full set of persons from DNB's GND.) AxelCorti (talk) 15:42, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Creating a Policy: namespace?

I think it would make sense to introduce a "Policy" namespace to make it clear what is official policy and what isn't.

See Wikidata:List of policies and guidelines some official policies are in the Wikidata: namespace while others are in the Help: namespace but both namespaces also contain pages that aren't policies.

This would also come with the advantage that you could easily filter Special:RecentChanges to only show changes to policies.

--Push-f (talk) 10:26, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

No, please no rule/policy/law namespace, putting it in project namespace (Wikidata) works just fine. I do see a mix up between Wikidata and Help namespace. Wikidata namespace should describe what you should and shouldn't be doing. Help should be how to do that and more extended information. You can already filter for it. Multichill (talk) 11:51, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
No the page also links proposed policies ... these aren't policies yet. --Push-f (talk) 13:41, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Why not just make a "Official policy" template and put it on every official policy page? RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:15, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Template:Policy —MisterSynergy (talk) 13:22, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
banner blindness (Q1067778). --Push-f (talk) 13:42, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

What's the difference between a Wikidata policy and a Wikidata guideline?

Please join the discussion at Wikidata_talk:List_of_policies_and_guidelines#What_is_the_difference_between_a_policy_and_a_guideline?.

--Push-f (talk) 05:22, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Potential issues in Dorsten

Good evening, there are several potential issues in this object of my hometown Q3886#P150. Could someone please have a look? Maybe the boroughs have to be deleted in this object? At least at some other town around, boroughs are not listed. I think i didn't get the error free concept at this point yet..

Thanks! Olli Ziltoidium (talk) 20:10, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Your home time has one administration. It's boroughs likely don't have their own administration and thus contains the administrative territorial entity (P150) doesn't apply here. When looking at Spandau (Q158083) I found that has part(s) (P527) is used there for a similar purpose. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:28, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
So what should i do now to solve this?
a) Remove the boroughs from Q3886#P150 ?
b) Or replace Property:P150 with Property:P527 ?
I guess this "has parts" is a nice solution, but is this common use? Sorry, i am quite a newbie.. Thanks! Ziltoidium (talk) 11:33, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
Replacing P150 with P527 would be a solution that works and follows the modelling used in Spandau (Q158083). ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:34, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Two connected themes

Items Q111146040 and Q6495391 look to be the same theme, maybe it will be useful to merge them. -- PereslavlFoto (talk) 21:18, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

One seems to be 1800 onwards, the other ~1917 onwards, which is to say, entirely different things that should not be merged. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:25, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Please restore an example to SPARQL examples or update the tutorial

See Wikidata talk:SPARQL query service/A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service. My students were doing this tutorial recently and we noticed this example has been removed from the, well, list of examples, so this part of the tutorial is broken. I have the feeling someone thought this example was silly (“Even more cats, with pictures”) and didn't realize it was used in this tutorial. Can someone fix it, by either restoring the example or changing the example in the tutorial? (I'd restore it myself but I have no idea where the relevant code is...). Piotrus (talk) 11:14, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

I restored the query from the screenshot. Although it seems that query had been deleted for years now, I went as far back as 2018 but it wasn't in the examples wiki page.
#title:Even more cats, with pictures
#defaultView:ImageGrid
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?pic WHERE {
  ?item ?xl wd:Q146.
  OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P18 ?pic. }
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}
Even more cats, with pictures

RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:22, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

@RPI2026F1 Thanks. I also found it or a very similar one used (and working) at Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/Wikidata_Query_Help/Result_Views#Image_Grid. Hanyangprofessor2 (talk) 05:58, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

How to add Wikidata identification section

I want to add Bollywood Actor Abhinay Raj Singh wikidata identifers section how i add identifers section pls help me Rajakraj (talk) 04:37, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

You can add identifers the same way you add other properties. When you add them and no identifiers section existed previously, it gets created. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:36, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
All of the "Add ..." links work the same, the sections are visual only. RPI2026F1 (talk) 14:12, 12 December 2022 (UTC)



Help with merging items

Hi, I'm having some trouble merging two duplicate items: Q31671338 to Q31688467.

I get the error:

Failed to merge Items, please resolve any conflicts first.

Error: Conflicting descriptions for language en-gb.

When I try and make the descriptions the same the publish button is disabled. How do I fix this so that the item can be merged? CoderThomasB (talk) 08:53, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

@CoderThomasB, you cannot merge these items because each has an article in Cebuano. Michgrig (talk) 11:24, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
How would I fix that so that the items can be merged? CoderThomasB (talk) 20:08, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
you need to merge the two cebuano articles. are you sure they are the same place? they have different identifier values. BrokenSegue (talk) 20:24, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
Regardless of duplicate articles, you can always delete the description of one item, which is allowed. RPI2026F1 (talk) 14:12, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Creating a Bubble Chart

I want to make a bubble chart. https://w.wiki/66f$ is working, but https://w.wiki/66g2 is not working. Only 'wdt:P2048' has changed between the two. But I don't know why the second link doesn't work. Ivisy6952 (talk) 06:46, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

This query should work. You requested a height (height (P2048)) which is of data type quantity, but the BubbleChart seems to expect a string. I used xsd:string(?cid) to cast the height to string. I also removed the OPTIONAL clause. This clause would return the label of ?cid (as "?cause"), if ?cid is a wikidata item. As height (P2048) does not have Wikidata items as values, but quantities, ?cause is always null. It does not hurt to have it, but it is kind of needless. - Valentina.Anitnelav (talk) 07:56, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

How can I distinguish specific object from class of objects?

I want to have some reliable way to detect that wikidata entry is about class of objects, not a specific object.

I would be fine also with answer "not enough tagged to answer that" but not with a serious chance for false positives.

For example Świnoujście Lighthouse (Q2617672) is a specific object while tower (Q12518) and lighthouse (Q39715) are class of objects, rather than a specific one. How can I distinguish between such things automatically? I tried to assume that specific objects will never have valid subclass of (P279) but this seems to be an incorrect assumption

Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 07:30, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Can you give an example of when the assumption in the last paragraph doesn't hold up? With the exception of punning, I believe that it should hold up. Popperipopp (talk) 08:36, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
@Popperipopp: - is for example Towers of Bologna (Q1784259) and Belém (Q12829733) handled incorrectly now? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 09:06, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
@Mateusz Konieczny: - It looks like the subclass statement has already been removed from Belém (Q12829733). In my opinion, it should be removed from Towers of Bologna (Q1784259) as well. They're both individuals. Popperipopp (talk) 10:34, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
I think the opposite assumption is safer, that is, that something with subclass of (P279) is always a subclass (regardless if it also has instance of (P31). Ainali (talk) 08:45, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
I have similar question. Is type 2 diabetes (Q3025883) instance of (P31) or subclass of (P279) diabetes (Q12206)? As I think it should be instance of (P31). How to distinguish such things? D6194c-1cc (talk) 09:58, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
@D6194c-1cc: abstract concepts like diseases are not "specific objects". If we had Wikidata items for a specific person's experience of type-2 diabetes, then that might be a case where instance of (P31) should be used, but in general the default for abstract things should be subclass of (P279). The exception there is if you have a higher-order class, but those should be relatively rare. ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:42, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
Well, type 2 diabetes (Q3025883) is a specific form of diabetes (Q12206). diabetes (Q12206) is a group of diseases. And type 2 diabetes (Q3025883) is a concrete disease from the group.
My question is about automation, too. I want to show type of disease (inflammatory, infection, etc). So I use instance of (P31) property to get type of disease in my infobox module. But some diseases are subclasses from other, and I can't rely on the subclass of (P279) property because is too abstract. D6194c-1cc (talk) 16:56, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
unfortunately the rules of wikidata are not consistently enforced (or even consistently understood). Any query written against wikidata needs to account for this. BrokenSegue (talk) 17:00, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
We currently don't have a clear agreement over the top level ontology. We would need such an agreement to really move forward, and relevant discussions being archived on https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Ontology before they really are concluded doesn't really help here.
As far as diabetes (Q12206) and type 2 diabetes (Q3025883) go I think that subclass of (P279) is the right link. We currently don't use any "group of diseases" item in our disease ontology and I don't think we should either.
It would be worth to have a better model for diseases. It might be good to have inflammatory disease (Q3508753), infectious disease (Q18123741) and similar items be instance of (P31) of a "type of disease" item. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 15:20, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Failure to add Sami data

As more and more Norwegian municipalities are getting official Sami (a set of indigenous languages of Northern Europe) names. There seems to be a desire to display this in the nowiki infoboxes. The first step would be to add this data to the respective wikidata element, and then add this to the templates. For Q5245991 language:title:description should be Southern Sami:Osloven tjïelte:nöörjen tjïelte . I cannot figure out how to add this. The element seems to be semi-protected, but I believe I have enough edits to be able to contribute, but not certain why I can't add this. BFG (talk) 11:40, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

The language code for Southern Sami seems to be 'sma'. The easiest way to set the languages for which you can label is to create a Babel box on your userpage.
I'm using {{#babel:de-N|en-5|fr-1|la-0|}} so I can add labels in German, English, French and Latin when none are available. You can add 'sma' for Southern Sami along with the other language you like to be able to add when labels are missing. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:35, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, that was really helpful. I was tipped that I could change my user interface to Sami, but that was incredibly confusing for a non Sami speaker. The info boxes were helpful and now all the other languages I can contribute also shows up. Thanks to you my first Wikidata entry in Latin was performed right now. BFG (talk) 20:16, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
@BFG: Generally, if you want to load official names into nowiki infoboxes, it might be worth to store them in official name (P1448) as well. That way you could also store a source for them. It would also allow the nowiki infoboxes to only show an official Sami name if one actually exists. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 14:44, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: we had a discussion about this on nowiki and this is exactly what we intend to do. For a name to be official in Norway, it has to be sanctioned by the King of Norway. Since this sanctioning is still pending, we will not do this until it has passed. BFG (talk) 20:23, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Artillery Battery - 2 wikidata concepts covered by single wikipedia articles

battery (Q240313) describes a military unit, and has lots of wikipedia links. artillery battery (Q56344492) describes the physical structure, and has a few. I'm prepared to fix the many wrong classifications of buildings round the world as the former, but I'm not sure how to relabel them to avoid the error recurring, as articles like English Wikipedia Artillery Battery swap between the people and the structure, and all the synonyms "battery", "gun battery" could be applied equally to both. I'm warned off having the same Wikipedia page for 2 WD items, and I can check the 3rd party site links, but how do we generally handle this type of ambiguity, other than using different from (P1889) and duplicating links? Vicarage (talk) 15:05, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Had to deal with a similar situation about a month ago. Just my personal opinion, but reading how this is labeled in other languages, I would suggest using 3 different designations. You know the nomenclature better than me, so feel free to improve them. Battery (unit size designation), Battery (fortification), Battery (artillery terminology). The latter can be used for the articles which mixes them. BFG (talk) 16:57, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Where there is undeniable conflation, so that it's not possible to assign the WP article to a plurality of WD items, then the WP article should be connected to a discrete item using P31=Wikipedia article covering multiple topics (Q21484471), and with main subject (P921) for each subject covered in the article. In this case, for me, EN wiki is squarely/mainly about the military organisation. In other news, the WD item for the fortification would probably be better labelled as just 'battery' cf. https://canmore.org.uk/thesaurus/1/287/BATTERY and so different from (P1889) on both items would be good insurance. If EN wiki lacks an article on the fortification-type battery and covers the concept only in the military organisaiton article, it might be permissible to point the fortification-type WD item at the section of the EN article dealing with the fortification concept by adding a redirect in EN wiki and linking to that. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:18, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
See also Help:Modelling/Wikipedia_and_Wikimedia_concepts#Compound_Wikipedia_articles - Jmabel (talk) 02:41, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Label in language reports

Hi. Just finished updating the queries to generate statistics for label languages. But I noticed the reports for missing language labels were expensive. The report for Catalan language labels contains 12 properties and it took close to 50s to generate. In other words these reports are generally too expensive for the query engine, and some will consistently time out. AFAICT it has been like this for years.

Assuming you agree, these pages can be deleted by an admin: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex?prefix=WikiProject+property+constraints%2Freports%2Flabel+language%2Fby+language%2Fmissing%2F&namespace=4

Ideally going forward there should be a per-property count of missing labels by language. This can, and should, be done without resorting to complex constraints. Exactly how to do this is up for debate. Either a bot can do it, I've mentioned this to both Ivan and Pasleim. It's unlikely Ivan's bot will do it, as it is memory constrained I hear. Another idea would be to make it a part of the property documentation. There are many possibilities. What do you think? Infrastruktur (talk) 01:22, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Here's a little prototype script that generates statistics in JSON. Someone could adopt it and have it run daily and upload the results to Wikidata. It shouldn't be too hard to tweak the property documentation to read from this JSON. Infrastruktur (talk) 08:49, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
I agree that the ListeriaBot implementation is not ideal. Since you have already pretty much everything for report pages there, why not run your own bot? We do need more editors with experience in that field and this looks like a good starter project. If you need some help setting your environment up, please let me know. —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:08, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
@Infrastruktur: Thanks for cleaning that out. Search is fast. You can use that. You can even wrap it in mwapi call in SPARQL if you want to use that as a basis for a query. Multichill (talk) 17:08, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
Yes, search is quite fast, unfortunately the mwapi service has a limitation on 10 000 items. The property talk pages for properties that use "label in language constraint", links to both search and SPARQL reports. Both are good options, especially considering indications of infrequent use. But one user said he missed having statistics for missing labels, I was trying to get that last thing done, in order to get rid of the last use-case for complex constraints for label languages, and also get rid of the previous dysfunctional reports I linked to. I don't have an interest in running bots, but it would have been a shame not to provide an alternative in the form of a prototype implementation. The scripts are less than 2x 100 LOC so they are easy to audit. They generate JSON and wikitext reports. Only thing left to do is automate running them and uploading the result. Infrastruktur (talk) 21:10, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
@Multichill: Thanks for the tip on using CirrusSearch. It occurred to me I might use the API directly bypassing the item limit for the mwapi service. It also looks like I don't have to retrieve a full list of matches since I get the count on the first call. This will be a substantial improvement, making it orders of magnitude faster. Infrastruktur (talk) 21:03, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
The scripts are indeed easy to audit, but this is not the issue here. It is also pretty simple to deploy them to a already set up bot environment. The actual liabilities are:
  • Any bot script needs at least some attention continuously, and that can add up if many scripts are running under that bot.
  • A bot operator may cease editing, and this can be quite a problem if there is too much responsibility concentrated at their bot.
From a community perspective, it is really desirable to have many capable bot operators in order to diversify responsibilities and the work load that comes with running bots. —MisterSynergy (talk) 21:55, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #550

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • REST API:
    • Vektor 2022: Finished work on making Vector’s new Search work with Wikidata. The changes roll out for testing on test.wikidata.org next week (phab:T275251)
    • Query Service:
      • Getting a link to the query is now possible in the same place as getting a link to the result of the query (phab:T324218)
      • Removed the gif that showed on hover over the button that advertises the Query Builder to make it less annoying (phab:T296135)
      • Added wikibase:identifiers to the autocomplete feature (phab:T302057)
      • Adjusted the layout of the Query Builder header to be more in line with other application (phab:T288939)
    • Constraint violations: When a language name is mentioned in the constraint it will now show the name of the language in the interface language instead of the language itself to make it easier to understand (phab:T316936)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

"church" and "Church"

That is, a particular building and/or congregation vs. a denomination.

I believe there is a bit of a mess in

⟨ Baptist church (Q115160305)  View with Reasonator View with SQID ⟩ subclass of (P279) View with SQID ⟨ Christian Church (Q34651)  View with Reasonator View with SQID ⟩

, but I'm not sure how it should best be resolved. - Jmabel (talk) 02:38, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

You could do a SPARQL query and remove the known exceptions. In your example there is no instance of (P31) so you can setup your query so that both subclass of (P279)Christian Church (Q34651) and instance of (P31)<any value> have to exist. RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:51, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

No support for displaying incremental archives?

I've noticed that Wikidata has almost next-to-no support for displaying incremental archives (Archive 1, Archive 2, etc.). I think there are many talk pages that could use archiving but not month and year-based archives as they don't generate enough content for that. RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:52, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Good news! You are wrong, see User:Hazard-Bot/Archiver :) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 14:34, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
That makes the archives. However, there's nothing like English Wikipedia's banner that shows all of the incremental archives on the parent page. RPI2026F1 (talk) 14:40, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Template:Archives? See https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Ontology&oldid=1784614519 (current version uses new archiving method) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 14:42, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Oh thanks, this is what I was looking for. I was mostly following the archive box examples I saw in pages like the project chat (where we are now) and all of them used the month/year archiving system. RPI2026F1 (talk) 14:45, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Putting this templates in "See also" in places where you checked may help next person so I would encourage to try doing this :) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 14:51, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Coord for Bronx Community College Library (Q18148660)

Last week I noticed that the coords of this library were over hundred meters off so did a quick rough adjustment with my tablet, somehow. Now I'm at the real computer and Google Earth's photo is showing 40°51'32"N, 73°54'45.5"W as better. But, when I enter the new numbers and click "Publish" nothing happens. Eh? Jim.henderson (talk) 20:48, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

From your description: who knows. I've amended to coord to point at the centre of the North Hall, the 2nd & 3rd floor of which seem to be the library. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:32, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, @Tagishsimon: I should have thought of that trick of adding the new coord before deleting the old. Next time the plain edit doesn't work, I'll give it a try. Jim.henderson (talk) 21:37, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Documenting the limitations of Wikidata

Hey all, I just created Wikidata:Limitations as an attempt to document the limitations of Wikidata. You are more than welcome to leave feedback here or on the talk page :) I am also interested in any other limitations you can think of, that aren't listed on the page yet.

Cheers, --Push-f (talk) 15:26, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

It's an interesting topic for sure. There might be some overlap with Wikidata:WikiProject Limits of Wikidata, but your document seems to approach the subject from a more broad point of view. Infrastruktur (talk) 17:14, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
@Push-f If you just create a new page, why do it in the main namespae instead of as a draft on your own userpage? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:45, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
I think the content of the page is accurate and it's more likely to be found and more likely to be expanded in the Wikidata: namespace. I think it's very important for any project to openly document the limitations and also to encourage discussions about them.
I would be more inclined to open RFCs about the "moving of drafts to the Wikidata namespace" if the RFC process didn't have the stipulation that an RFC "should be done after a long discussion via the other channels" ... I have not found other channels, I really want to participate in. I hear the Telegram channel is active but I don't use Telegram. While the Matrix channel is bridged to the IRC channel it's pretty much dead, I have never gotten any reply when asking about feedback there.
You're an admin, if you don't think the page belongs in the Wikidata: namespace, please just move the page (along with the talk page and subpages) to my user namespace User:push-f/Wikidata:Limitations ... I cannot do so myself without leaving a redirect behind.
--Push-f (talk) 21:14, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
I moved it to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Push-f/Wikidata:Limitations
Another channel is for example the project chat we are having here. Also the various Wikiprojects.
You wrote about Privacy: "Statements about living people should only be made if they can be considered widespread public knowledge or are openly supplied by the individual themselves".
According to our policy that's only true for those properties that are at the highest privacy protection level but not for properties that are at lower levels.
Having seen the confusion more it likely would make sense to rename the two protection levels into "privacy protection level I" and "privacy protection level 2", maybe I will write an RFC sometime about it. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 23:22, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. The wording of the policy should really be improved then because it does not say that clearly ... at all. I don't think it's necessary to change the names of these levels ... just the description has to be improved. --Push-f (talk) 03:32, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
FYI, I created Wikidata:Limitations as a disambiguation page linking Wikidata:List of policies and guidelines, Help:Data type#limitations, Wikidata:WikiProject Limits of Wikidata, as well as my unofficial draft under See also. I hope that's alright. --Push-f (talk) 10:16, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Where did you get the idea that "Statements about living people should only be made if they can be considered widespread public knowledge or are openly supplied by the individual themselves"? I see that pharasing only in that paragraph about the "Statements that may violate privacy" protection class. Which might be renamed into "privacy protection level 2".
The general statement is "As we value the dignity of living people, the information that we store about them deserves special consideration. Instead of striving to provide all possible information about living people we strive to provide only information in whose veracity we have a high confidence and which doesn't violate a person's reasonable expectations of privacy. Statements that can reasonably be expected to be challenged should be supported by a reliable source. When exercising editorial judgment we should always consider the possibility of harm to living people." ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:57, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Let's continue this discussion in Wikidata talk:Living people#Ambiguity of this policy. --Push-f (talk) 07:36, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Entries with multiple dates of birth

I have recently encountered a few human (Q5) records which have multiple birth, or death, date entries with differing accuracies. e.g. Q727753 Q768059 Q229330 Q3180945 Q48231. They each have a sourced full date, but in addition there is a separate entry for just a year, or month/year. First question, this has recently started happening, I am just wondering did I miss a discussion about this new implementation. My second question (if not answered by my first), is there really a need to record a year of birth, when there is already a source for the full date? Periglio (talk) 02:58, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I don't think there's something new here. If the best sources for the date of birth are also the most precise ones and there are good sources for it you can delete the less precise ones. For John Diamond (Q768059) that's not the case as there's only user-generated content sources for the most precise value but better sources for the less precise value. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 11:55, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
WD does not normally delete well-sourced statements, such as a year date, in a situation in which there is a more precise well-sourced month or day date. Instead, statement rank is used to set the more precise well-sourced date to 'preferred' leaving the less precise well-sourced dates as 'normal' rank. Poorly-sourced dates - such as wikipedia imports and unreferenced dates are normally removed if there is a well-sourced date.
I operate a bot that marks more precise dates as the preferred value and I understand that to be the correct thing to do. Leave the less precise but they aren't the preferred value and so don't cause problems when running SPARQL. BrokenSegue (talk) 18:32, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
It might cause problems anyway if you try to retrieve the full form of the statement. author  TomT0m / talk page 10:36, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

How to mass remove invalid subclass?

After https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q61941085&diff=prev&oldid=1789091280 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q61941105&diff=prev&oldid=1789092107 it is clear that this problem is systematic and finding it one by one and then fixing it one by one will be annoying.

How can I delete all instances where such value is used as sublass? Can I do this or is it requiring pasing bot approval (though bot policy on Wikidata seems to be mostly kept as trap for people seriously following rules)

I found Wikidata:Tours, there is an "Automatic addition" in sidebar. I tried Help:Contents and found Wikidata:Tools/Edit items but nothing seems to match. Wikidata:Contribute was not helpful. The same for Help:FAQ#Editing

(if someone else will do this edit I also would be quite happy)

Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:08, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

You can use the QuickStatements tool to remove such claims without bot approval. Please start with small batches, though. —MisterSynergy (talk) 11:26, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
So I need first to generate commands somehow, then execute it with QuickStatements, right? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:43, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Yes, correct. Help:QuickStatements might be helpful at the beginning, but quite quickly this should be a routine. —MisterSynergy (talk) 11:46, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Petscan can also help. It can remove statements on a set of results. author  TomT0m / talk page 10:37, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Have I done anything wrong yet?

I'm new here, heh, but I've done a few of the tours and tried to make a couple edits / items in an attempt to be helpful - just trying to make sure I'm not going in the complete wrong direction before I continue. Lookin' through my contributions, have I done anything wrong yet? LilWaddleDee (talk) 08:59, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

There is a common confusion between a book, a physical object, say the copy of the Gutenberg Bible in the British Library, and a literary work, the bible writings itself. So your The Zabajaba Jungle (Q115625588) should follow the form of The Wind in the Willows (Q936276) using literary work (Q7725634) and genre (P136) Vicarage (talk) 09:20, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
Aha, gotcha - I'll sort that out now. LilWaddleDee (talk) 09:24, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Mapping between Wikidata Datatypes and RDF Datatypes

Hi, where can I find the mapping between Wikidata Datatypes (like External identifier, String, Monolingual text, etc.) and the RDF(S)/XSD Datatypes (like xsd:dateTime, xsd:integer, xsd:string, etc.)? Specifically, I need this for building some SheX shapes.

Thanks, Valentina Valentina Carriero (talk) 11:33, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

@Valentina Carriero On this page probably : mw:Wikibase/Indexing/RDF_Dump_Format#Value_representation. It is accessible from the sparql query service for example, help menu for quick access. author  TomT0m / talk page 11:41, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Creation of items for all external identifier identifers

I would like to create items representing the identifiers of all the external identifier properties so that we can relate a an external identifier property (YouTube video ID (P1651)) with the thing its value identifies (YouTube video (Q63412991)) and replace Wikidata item of this property (P1629) (which is currently conflated and used for multiple relationships. For example, see Twitter (X) username (P2002)).

Here is an example of this relationship with YouTube video ID (Q110851517) as the external identifier item:

YouTube video ID (Q110851517)identifies (P10476)YouTube video (Q63412991)

YouTube video ID (P1651)class of non-item property value (P10726)YouTube video ID (Q110851517)

If we do this we can also describe other relationships on the external identifier item such as:

YouTube video ID (Q110851517)subclass of (P279)unique identifier (Q6545185)

YouTube video ID (Q110851517)issued by (P2378)YouTube (Q866)

YouTube video ID (Q110851517)regex format/asdf-lskdfj-sldkfj/ (useful for identifiers other than this one)

Does this sound like a good idea? Would the items be notable/structurally needed?

If they are not notable/structurally needed, we'll need to create at least 2 new properties to describe the above relationships and possibly others in the future (so this is the tradeoff):

  1. value of property identifies
  2. property identifier issued by (we'll need to split up issued by (P2378) since that is currently conflated as it is used on both properties and items. For example, YouTube video ID (P1651) is issued by (P2378) the Wikidata community (Q110435017), not YouTube (Q866). Thus, we'd need a "property identifier issued by" property)

@Push-f @ChristianKl @Wd-Ryan Lectrician1 (talk) 17:21, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

 Support Creating items for identifiers also lets us use quantity (P1114) which is more clearly defined than number of records (P4876) since it's clear what the records actually are. Also consider the semantic differences of inception (P571) ... I would understand inception (P571) on a property to refer to the date the property was created while on a data item it's clear that it's about the entity represented by the data item. --Push-f (talk) 17:27, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
I agree that items like this would be a good idea, but I don't think you can create them automatically. Our property follow our own naming schema and that might not always be appropriate for individual items. You would actually need to look at the particular entity in question to look how it's well represented. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 17:45, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
I agree. This would be a manual process. Lectrician1 (talk) 17:51, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 Support I'd love to help out with this. -wd-Ryan (Talk/Edits) 18:10, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 Support This is how it should have been one, from day one. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:41, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
 Support A Wikidata property and the identifier it represents are two different concepts, if we have an item for both, we have an example of Wikidata:Conflation. Let me explain this: Most of the times, Wikidata contributors discuss about Wikidata properties (e.g. the constraints the property might have, the domain of Wikidata items, etc.). That concept is different to a discussion between people that might not know about Wikidata but is familiar with the concept of the identifier. For example, the main subject of the video "Will YouTube Ever Run Out Of Video IDs?" by Tom Scott is YouTube video ID (Q110851517), not YouTube video ID (P1651). - Rdrg109 (talk) 02:04, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Titles in aliases?

I'm cleaning some data for future upload to Wikidata. Some of the "aliases" listed have titles, like "captain" or "president." Help talk:Aliases doesn't mention titles of people specifically. Should I take them out? Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 20:15, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

If the person is known as Captain this or President that, it's fine to add the title as part of an alias entry. Main purpose of aliases is discoverability of the item via search, and so using string forms which are found in 3rd party sources is always appropriate. cf. w:en:Robustness principle. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:36, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Like so much of Wikidata, there is no clear guidance. A good deal of common sense is called for, but not everyone agrees how much sense is common. I do think titles can be helpful and worthy of inclusion, but that doesn't mean all whom hold the title must be treated the same. Q188936 is commonly known as "General Sherman", and David Livingstone (Q48373) is the famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?", but we certainly need not append "General" or "Dr." aliases to every general, physician, or holder of a doctorate. I find that titles are especially useful for differentiating family members with shared names: as genealogies, history books, and other sources may routinely distinguish between a father, son, and grandson as "Captain John Smith", "Major John Smith", and "Dr. John Smith". -Animalparty (talk) 22:57, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
A bunch of these aliases are for people who wrote for or appeared in the Millennial Star, an LDS publication for missionaries. In that publication, they are often mentioned as "Elder" + last name as well as their first name. So I think that since they appear in print under that title, I will include the titles with the aliases in this batch of data, but not add it to every item of every person who was ever an LDS missionary, if that makes sense. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 17:02, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
  • I think they are very important, when you transcribe old news articles, the paper of the day assumes you to already have a working knowledge of local people, so someone is only described as "Mayor Smith" or "Councilman Smith". The Wikidata entries need that so you can find them and link them. As usual, we most likely only need them for obscure people or to distinguish between people of the same or similar name. --RAN (talk) 19:37, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

100,000,000 items

100,000,000

A while back, we passed 100,000,000 content pages. Today, at around 14.38 UTC we passed the same number of items: Quarry query. Since the query took around 30 seconds to complete, I don't know exactly which one was the hundred millionth, but I'm pretty sure it is one of these. (Since I tried to hit the target, I'll excuse myself from further investigations.) Ainali (talk) 21:58, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Emoji_u1f4af Lectrician1 (talk) 16:34, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Usage instructions in descriptions

When are we going to stop putting usage instructions in item descriptions, like the en:description for structure of worship (Q1370598) ("specially designed structure or consecrated space for use in worshipping; for significant location or place where a deity is worshipped see Q111286333 (place of worship)")?

Wikidata usage instructions (P2559) has existed since February 2016‎. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:36, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

It's not going to stop. Descriptions are our only way to communicate the difference between one item and another before an editor adds one to a statement. Lectrician1 (talk) 16:44, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
  • We have so many items that have subtle differences in their definitions, we need long descriptions. See above, where someone is confused about the difference between "book" and "edition" and "literary work". My fave for confusion is "object has role" and "subject has role". --RAN (talk) 19:31, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
The descriptions are easily available when the user searches for the item. The Wikidata usage instructions aren't. We would likely need a way to make the usage instructions to be more visible before they could replace descriptions fully. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:38, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
I would support a wikibase change that made the advice easily available from the GUI, perhaps as an '?' icon next to the label that brought up a box with the instructions, which would be more useful than a truncated line as we get for the description. Or when a constraint violation is flagged. I'd never heard of the property before it was mentioned here. Descriptions are not the place to explain that book<>literary work in a WD context. I'm not convinced that project instructions should be contained in properties though, and there is often useful advice in the proposal and talk pages, but pithy advice at point of use is valuable Vicarage (talk) 21:12, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
Something I try to do is make sure similar concepts never have the same labels. Then people actually pay attention to what they're adding and don't jst add the first result when they're adding an item. Lectrician1 (talk) 22:05, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
  • We also sometimes get overly long descriptions of humans, usually their job titles, but we don't have entries for that position or that company. --RAN (talk) 22:44, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Google + geographic codes

Do we support Google+ geographic codes? See for instance St Peter’s Episcopal Church where the Google+ geographic code is "282M+M8 Port Chester, New York" for St Peter’s Episcopal Church (Q115700167). We appear to support some sort of Google+ code here: Property:P2847. We need a unique identifier for businesses and churches and other geographic items to know when we already have an entry. RAN (talk) 19:14, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

@RAN The codes used on Google Maps are based on the "plus codes" from the Open Location Code (Q23582265) system, and aren't connected to Google+ ID (P2847), an abandoned social network service. There was a proposal for these at Wikidata:Property proposal/Plus codes a few years ago which wasn't successful, for what it's worth.
The Google ones are modified (see en:Open Location Code#Common usage and shortening) so that "282M+M8 Port Chester, New York" is "87H8282M+M8" with the first digits turned into a general location.
Note that this wouldn't be a unique identifier for a geographic item - it's just a coordinate box, so you could identify the church with any of +J7, +J8, +H8, +G8, and so on. Similarly, +VF over the road seems to contain two distinct businesses within that area (about 100 square metres?) Andrew Gray (talk) 19:43, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks! You are correct, it wouldn't be unique, but could help find duplicate entries. The odds of two churches with similar names within the same coordinate box would be vanishingly small. We have dozens of entries called "First Dutch Reformed Church". --RAN (talk) 19:45, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
It would not be "vanishingly small". Scotland has very many pairs of church buildings, one very close to the other, having the same name, and arising out of the fairly simple principle that the congregation, dissatisfied with one building, built another. It's not enough to believe your own wishful thinking, RAN. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:52, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Property for image processor

Hi, I'm trying to populate photo camera items and it looks like we're missing several properties on the theme. For the case of image processor (Q861004), I wonder if I can use GPU (P2560); I asked on their talk page, but none of the people involved in the creation are still active. Does anyone know if use this property is correct, or do I need to create a specific property?. Thanks Amadalvarez (talk) 11:54, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

@Amadalvarez It appears that most of the image processors you find in cameras are a en:System on a chip. Afaict, that may include a GPU, but typically contains several other components as well. en:Milbeaut for example appears to have multiple CPUs. I think it would be better to create a property for that. El Grafo (talk) 10:32, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, @El Grafo. I assumed it, because I red that GPU is used to "output image manage", but "image processor" is just to convert an image to digital, this is, input. Thanks, Amadalvarez (talk) 11:51, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Missing Item

Hello, I cant find the items i created in any log and i didn't get any notification about it

The items are Alessandro Cotrufo (115681761), ServerNet (115682600), ExploreMyPC (115682064), Airconist (Q115682782), Parbhis Rehan (Q115690281)

I need help on it, thanks

QDJ22 (talk) 00:29, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

You can use Special:Log. Eg [4] Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 11:23, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
See also WD:Undeletion. GZWDer (talk) 13:09, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Projection [Math]

What's the difference between projection (Q93504992) and projection (Q519967)? Modula-3 (talk) 13:42, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Looking at the ptarticles and the statements, it seems that the more specific one is required to be linear, while the more generic notion can be used outside linear algebra. author  TomT0m / talk page 14:19, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2023 opens in January

Please help translate to your language

(There is a translatable version of this message on MetaWiki)

Hello

The Community Wishlist Survey (CWS) 2023, which lets contributors propose and vote for tools and improvements, starts next month on Monday, 23 January 2023, at 18:00 UTC and will continue annually.

We are inviting you to share your ideas for technical improvements to our tools and platforms. Long experience in editing or technical skills is not required. If you have ever used our software and thought of an idea to improve it, this is the place to come share those ideas!

The dates for the phases of the Survey will be as follows:

  • Phase 1: Submit, discuss, and revise proposals – Monday, Jan 23, 2023 to Sunday, Feb 6, 2023
  • Phase 2: WMF/Community Tech reviews and organizes proposals – Monday, Jan 30, 2023 to Friday, Feb 10, 2023
  • Phase 3: Vote on proposals – Friday, Feb 10, 2023 to Friday, Feb 24, 2023
  • Phase 4: Results posted – Tuesday, Feb 28, 2023

If you want to start writing out your ideas ahead of the Survey, you can start thinking about your proposals and draft them in the CWS sandbox.

We are grateful to all who participated last year. See you in January 2023!

Thank you! Community Tech, STei (WMF) 16:44, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Items for individual entries in online encyclopedias

Some examples are Q104021277, John Barker, 1901-1970 (Q47478329) and dalton (Q61068243) (see the version before merging).

Here is my opinion for keeping such items:

  • The items for articles may provide informations about the articles themselves (such as author, cited works)
  • Also, this prevents duplicated imports (if such items are deleted and Wikipedia refers to such DOIs then they may be imported to Wikidata in the future)

Previous discussions:

--GZWDer (talk) 18:48, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

If feels like the tail wagging the dog. If the external source shows there is a notable item WD is missing, then it seems sensible to add a WD entry with a instance of (P31) and the external source ID, and expect a network to grow round it. But the danger is it could be used as an excuse to pump in all an external source in WD without checking our already comprehensive coverage. I've got lots of Scottish shipwreck sites that came from a heritage register import that are proving very tedious to merge with our existing ship entries. An article about John Barker would be better served as described_by_source for the person than a separate article, and we don't want entries with labels like Chervin, Louis that go against our label conventions and make merges much harder. Properties of the external source can be become qualifiers when attached to existing entries. Vicarage (talk) 19:53, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
The Barker example was very weird - I had no idea Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society ID (P10704) existed. We already have items for (I think) every published paper in the Biographical Memoirs, at least all the ones that have an issued DOI, so we already had the DOI at John Barker, 1901-1970 (Q47478329) and it linked to him with main-subject. Not sure this specific identifier is really useful. Andrew Gray (talk) 00:28, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
Now flagged up at Property talk:P10704. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:09, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
If an encyclopedia entry comes with DOI, OpenAlex ID or other identifier for scholarly resources, it belongs on Wikidata just as much as any other scholarly article, with main subject (P921) linking to the Q-id of what the entry is about. Same for entries which feature individual authorship information or cite references, bibliography or "authorities" - that information can be added to Wikidata's authorship and citation graphs. --Hupaleju (talk) 09:53, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
Any feeling for how many such articles are out there, and would they swamp the ~100m entries WD currently has? We'd need a better editing UI to help people typing in the search boxes being prompted by things in preference to articles about things. Vicarage (talk) 10:51, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
  • As the discussion about IUPAC GoldBook entries has been cited here, I feel obligated to comment. DOI does not mean (1) the object behind the DOI is a scientific article, (2) the object is any article, (3) the object is a valid Wikidata item. In other words, the existence of a DOI number does not imply that the digital object behind this ID is notable. In the case of IUPAC GoldBook we have not an online encyclopedia, but an online database that collects entries about chemical definitions from various sources. These entries are not scientific articles, are not any articles at all, sometimes the entry is one word only. This database is similar to other chemical/medial/biological databases (like MeSH for example) used in Wikidata. The difference is that it can be accessed both by using IDs and by using DOI service (which also utilises these IDs). We already have one way to link to IUPAC Goldbook (by a dedicated ext-ID property). If we started applying the logic outlined above, we could create billions of items describing individual entries in every possible database. I guess that's why we have dedicated extID properties...? Wostr (talk) 19:33, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
The use of such items depends on the field they are about. Please note that the Wikiproject Chemistry, in the discussion linked above, have expressed their opinion already strongly about the chemistry related items. The proponent of this, User:GZWDer has not deemed it necessary to participate in the discussion, as usual. I would hope for a solution that doesn't force a reversal of the decision by the WP:Chemistry. Let the WPs decide if they want this. --SCIdude (talk) 19:17, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
I only have an opinion at the moment about the 63.362 Benezit "encyclopedia articles". These are just junk without any added value just making it harder to find. These should all be deleted starting with the 58.304 unused ones. Throwing all these different topics on one gigantic heap is a good way to ensure that nothing happens. Multichill (talk) 12:05, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Wikidata:Requests_for_deletions#Benezit_Dictionary_of_Artists_bulk_of_58.000_unused_items. Multichill (talk) 13:08, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

New qualifier

Hello, I contribute to Wikidata a little, but my terminology might be wrong, please forgive me.

I'd like to see a way of documenting webpage URLs for individual locations in chains. eg Greggs (Q3403981) would be `^https://www.greggs.co.uk/shop-finder?shop-code=(\d+)$`, Sainsbury's (Q152096) would be `^https://stores\.sainsburys\.co\.uk/(\d+)/([-\w]+)$` and Bupa (Q931628) would be `^https://www\.bupa\.co\.uk/dental/dental-care/practices/([-\w]+)$`.

I think what I'm actually looking for is not a new property, but a qualifier on URL match pattern (Property:P8966). Could anyone point me in the right direction of what to do.

Thanks. CjMalone (talk) 15:41, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

URL match pattern is only meant to be used on properties. So it isn't what you want to be using here. I think traditionally the solution would be to make an item for each location of the chain. Though I could see the argument for making a new property to represent this. BrokenSegue (talk) 04:59, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
We're sitting on ~2 million POIs, depending on the week. You're welcome to them [5], but I think copyright wise (scraped from chain websites) it's questionable, and technically keeping them up to date isn't feasible right now. Longer term though, I'd be interesting to see them in here though.
I'm going to do a proposal then, I'd appreciate any help as I've not done this before. CjMalone (talk) 13:32, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
Wikidata:Property proposal/location URL match pattern CjMalone (talk) 14:22, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

WDQS reports outdated data type

The data type of shortened URL formatter (P11136) has been changed on the 21th November from External identifier to String ... however WDQS still thinks it's external-id:

wd:shortened URL formatter (P11136) wikibase:propertyType ?type

Do we know when/if WDQS will catch up?

--Push-f (talk) 04:28, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Data type change does not propagate to WDQS. We need to wait until WDQS data is reloaded. GZWDer (talk) 08:32, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
Interesting ... is there a Phabricator ticket for that bug? How often is WDQS data reloaded? --Push-f (talk) 08:37, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
Reloading happens rarely/only when necessary as much as I am aware. You could try to contact the WDQS team at Wikidata:Report a technical problem/WDQS and Search and ask whether they can somehow fix this manually. —MisterSynergy (talk) 10:20, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Merge

Can anyone merge Bölük (Q6924739) with Bölük (Q6825844)? Special:MergeItems failed with this one. Semsûrî (talk) 23:52, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Done. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:45, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you. I'm having the same issues merging Bulaklı (Q6990225) with Bulaklı (Q1003467). Hope you can help. Semsûrî (talk) 12:15, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
Maybe try https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Merge#Gadget ... but I've merged the above. --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:08, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

PROBLEM TO CREATE PAGE ABOUT MY FAVORITE ACTOR

Hello to all the respected managers and officials of Wikidata Hope you feel good I want to create a page for my beloved Bazher in Wikidata so that other fans of his can see his information and biography, but I encounter this error when registering on the site. Your action has triggered the Abuse Filter This action has been automatically identified as harmful, and therefore disallowed. If you believe your action was constructive, please inform an administrator of what you were trying to do. A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: Spam

where is the problem from ? The name of my favorite actress is POUYA MORADZAD I would be grateful if you follow up and solve this problem so that the fans of this actor can read and know about his biography. 91.184.65.85 12:37, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Did you type the name in all caps like you did here? That may trigger an abuse filter (and rightly so). Here's your item: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q115757184 --Anvilaquarius (talk) 18:24, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Please help translate to your language

Voting in the Wikimedia sound logo contest has started. From December 6 to 19, 2022, please play a part and help chose the sound that will identify Wikimedia content on audio devices. Learn more on Diff.

The sound logo team is grateful to everyone who participated in this global contest. We received 3,235 submissions from 2,094 participants in 135 countries. We are incredibly grateful to the team of volunteer screeners and the selection committee who, among others, helped bring us to where we are today. It is now up to Wikimedia to choose the Sound Of All Human Knowledge.

Best wishes, Arupako (talk) 15:40, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #551

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming:
      • You can now register for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023, taking place on May 19-21 in Athens, Greece. You can also apply for a scholarship until January 14th. More information: Wikimedia Hackathon 2023/Participate
      • digital@IANLS: online Wikidata workshop for Neo-Latinists in February 2023
      • Call for Papers on Linked Open Data on Journal BiD: Deadline: Sun, 04/09/2023. Some of the ideas and issues to be included in this issue: Creation and exploitation of knowledge graphs, Information services based on linked open data and knowledge graphs, Artificial intelligence and linked open data, Textual corpora and linked open data, Textual corpora and knowledge graphs, Application of bots in linked open data, Application of bots in knowledge graphs, Linked open data and diversity of genres, Graphs of knowledge and diversity of genres, FAIR and linked open data, FAIR and knowledge graphs, Ontologies and linked open data, Ontologies and knowledge graphs, Application of ontologies in information services.
    • Ongoing:
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata Atlas is a system allows the user to search for different types of entities (with geo-coordinates) on Wikidata and visualize them on a world map. (Feedback is very welcome to help evaluate and improve the tool.)
    • Check out a similar tool: wiki-atlas
  • Development
    • REST API: We are getting ready for a release in January and would really love more people to test the current state on beta. You can find details for testing at Wikidata:REST API feedback round.
    • Vector 2022 search: We have worked on making the new search in the Vector 2022 skin work for Wikidata. You can now test it on test.wikidata.org and soon on Wikidata.
    • Query Service:
      • Removed the SVG download options for result views where SVG downloads are not supported, such as Map (phab:T311594)
      • Fixed the indentation of autocompletion suggestions (phab:T291695)
      • Fixed downloading query results in the Query Builder (phab:T323451)
    • Lexicographical data:
      • Working on showing the Lexeme lemmas when you look at a Lexeme’s history (phab:T312660)
      • Fixing a keyboard navigation issue in the lookups on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T324743)
    • mul language code:
      • Continuing to investigate how to implement language fallbacks on mobile termbox (phab:T323098)
      • Investigating how to disallow `mul` descriptions (phab:T313027)
    • Improving and harmonizing the footers in the Query Builder (phab:T324356) and Mismatch Finder (phab:T324366)
    • Preparing for showing constraint violations to visitors who aren’t logged in (phab:T272132)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Bot to fetch OpenStreetMap ID

Is it possible to run a bot for all nodes in Iceland on OpenStreetMap that have a wikidata link (example and Q27006157) and add the OpenStreetMap way ID (P10689) number (when there is none). Steinninn (talk) 06:08, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

There appears to be 236 nodes or ways that link to wikidata, which aren't linked from wikidata. I heard their triplestore lags 10 months behind the live data. Enter the following at https://sophox.org :
select ?s ?wd
where {
  # items that are nodes or ways and link to wikidata
  ?s osmm:type ?type. FILTER(?type IN ('n', 'w'))
  ?s osmt:wikidata ?wd .

  # located in bounding box covering mainland iceland
  ?s osmm:loc ?coord .
  BIND(geof:latitude(?coord) AS ?lat)
  BIND(geof:longitude(?coord) AS ?long)
  FILTER(?lat < 67.13 && ?lat > 63.39402834 && ?long < -13.49596381 && ?long > -24.53338265)

  # minus items already linked from wikidata
  MINUS {
    SERVICE <https://query.wikidata.org/sparql> {
      SELECT ?item WHERE {
        ?item wdt:P17 wd:Q189 .
        ?item wdt:P10689 [] .
      }
    }
    ?s osmt:wikidata ?item .
  }
}
LIMIT 1000
This could be turned into a QuickStatements job with little effort, but I'm not sure the data-quality on OSM is such that statements should be added without any quality control. Could someone enlighten us? Infrastruktur (talk) 08:40, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
Probably not a good idea, as OSM IDs are not permanent (compare e.g. [6]). El Grafo (talk) 10:49, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you @Infrastruktur I used your script and am doing another one for relations. --Steinninn (talk) 00:03, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Wwwyzzerdd: Now with ML-powered suggestions

Building on the thread from last month I have added functionality to Wwwyzzerdd (the wikidata browser extension I maintain) where it now will try to predict good statements to add to Wikidata from Wikipedia articles. It only works for enwiki articles for now but if anyone is interested in trying it out here is a demo video of the new functionality.

BrokenSegue (talk) 05:16, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

@BrokenSegue: Might be good to include a section in your tool describing how privacy is handled. I noticed you are using a third part provider with it's own privacy policy. Multichill (talk) 17:38, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
this is a good point. but honestly i'm not sure how to write a privacy policy. maybe i'll have to look it up. BrokenSegue (talk) 03:49, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
No, don't write one. Just mention the components you use in your tool and add a link to their privacy policy. Something like: "I'm not collecting any data, but my tool relies on ... with privacy policy at ...". Multichill (talk) 18:47, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
Ok I can do that. I updated the listing on the extension stores to mention the HuggingFace dependency and list their privacy policy. BrokenSegue (talk) 22:33, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
@BrokenSegue: Is this yet available in the Chrome version? The title orb doesn't seem to appear. -wd-Ryan (Talk/Edits) 19:27, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
@Wd-Ryan no it should be available in chrome. it's in version 0.0.3.0. Check if you are on that version? Or check the settings drop down to see if it's unchecked (should be checked by default). It's working for me. BrokenSegue (talk) 00:06, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
It says I'm on that version. The dropdown settings are "Show Orbs", "Allow Anon", and "Load Suggestions". Should it appear on every article? -wd-Ryan (Talk/Edits) 01:48, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
Ok, weird, "Load Suggestions" was checked, but I unchecked and rechecked and it fixed it. Maybe a settings error. -wd-Ryan (Talk/Edits) 01:49, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
sounds like a bug. i'll look into it. thanks. BrokenSegue (talk) 02:41, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
this should be fixed in 0.0.3.1. BrokenSegue (talk) 22:33, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Movement Charter: End of the community consultation round 1

More languages • Please help translate to your language

Hi everyone,

On behalf of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC), we would like to thank everyone who has participated in our first community wide consultation period on the Movement Charter.

People from across the Movement shared their feedback and thoughts on the content of the Movement Charter. If you have not had the chance to share your opinion yet, you are welcome to do so still by giving the drafts a read and filling out the anonymous survey, which is accessible in 12+ languages. The survey will close on January 2, 2023. You are invited to continue to share your thoughts with the MCDC via email too: movementcharter@wikimedia.org.

What’s next?

The Movement Strategy and Governance team will publish the final report with the summary of the feedback received in January 2023. It will be shared with the MCDC and the communities via different distribution channels.

After receiving the final report, the MCDC will review the suggestions and communicate the changes by providing an explanation on how and why suggestions were or were not adopted in the next versions of the drafts. There will be additional ways to engage with the Movement Charter content in 2023, including early feedback on a proposed ratification process and new drafts of different chapters in the second quarter of 2023.

We invite you to sign-up to the MCDC monthly newsletter, it will be delivered to the Talk page of your choice. Monthly updates are available on Meta to remain updated on the progress of the MCDC.

Interested people can still sign-up to become a Movement Charter Ambassador (MC Ambassador) to support their community. The MC Ambassadors Program grant program will restart accepting applications from both individuals and groups ahead of the next round of consultations in the second quarter of 2023.

We thank you for your participation, time and effort in helping to build the Charter for our Movement!

On behalf of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee, MNadzikiewicz (WMF) (talk) 12:47, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

I accidentally created a duplicate item Drew Harwell (Q115732207). A Wikidata item about Drew Harwell already existed. My mistake.

Please delete/re-use Drew Harwell (Q115732207).

Thank you! Mastodeas (talk) 02:06, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

@ Mastodeas: if you find a duplicate you can just merge it yourself following the instructions at Help:Merge. BrokenSegue (talk) 02:11, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Property for "sequential number" in a sequence of documents (within, e.g., a folder)?

Is there there such a property? page(s) (P304) does not work when a multi-page documents are part of the sequence. Other related properties seem also unsuitable to me.

Use case: Within the folders of the 20th Century Press Archives (Q36948990), documents are identified by a sequential number (numerus currens) within the folder. As it [turned out], there are folders with documents related to different items, and it would be useful to qualify the according PM20 folder ID (P4293) with the information which actual documents apply to the current item. Jneubert (talk) 15:56, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the hint! Perhaps I hadn't expressed myself clearly: The documents are not represented as items in Wikidata, so they cannot be connected with part of (P361) to the folder. Also the folder is not an "item in a parent series", which has a certain position in that series. So I suppose, it would be considered as a misuse of series ordinal (P1545) to use it for a list of document numbers and ranges (e.g., "4-13, 15"). Cheers, Jneubert (talk) 07:52, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Lake with a bridge

I have Hinchinbrook Creek (Q115793814), which is a watercourse notable enough for a Wikidata entry, but with a bridge that isn’t notable on its own. I want show in the item entry that it has a bridge. How would I do this? - Chris.sherlock3 (talk) 11:32, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

I suppose has part(s) of the class (P2670) taking bridge as value and perhaps qualified with P625? Thing is, it would be quite non-standard, unlikely to be of much practical use. Meanwhile the coord value on the item does not seem to point to the watercourse, so much as to the general vicinity of the watercourse. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:41, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
Actually, I might need a bit of help on coordinates… where on earth do you add them for creeks and rivers? These obviously go on for some distance, how does one define their location(s) in Wikidata? - Chris.sherlock3 (talk) 13:42, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
@Chris.sherlock3: It's a good question. On the P625 statement I tend to use the coordinate of the river/stream mouth, and qualify the statement with applies to part (P518) set to river mouth (Q1233637). There are also origin of the watercourse (P885) and mouth of the watercourse (P403), both of which can take P625 as a qualifier - though not every watercourse has an item for its source. See an example for the standard used for Scottish watercourses at Claggan Burn (Q115677247). --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:01, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks so much, I’ll fix this shortly. - Chris.sherlock3 (talk) 01:51, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Abolished object but unknown date

In terms of Hoxton Park Water Pumping Station (Q115796146) this heritage item was demolished, but nobody knows when. How would I note it’s status? Chris.sherlock3 (talk) 16:46, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

@Chris.sherlock3: state of conservation (P5816) with a value of demolished or destroyed (Q56556915) and a point in time (P585) qualifier set to <unknown value>. There are other statements which might take a end time (P582) qualifier again set to <unknown value>. <unknown value> is selected by clicking on the three rectangles to the left of the data entry field, and selecting 'unknown value'. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:56, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! That’s exactly what I was looking for. - Chris.sherlock3 (talk) 01:51, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

A christmas puzzle-trail

Merry X-mas, Hanukkah or whatever is the appropriate term for your December celebrations.

I will be posting a single question every day from the 13th to the 22rd. For the first question we will be cheating by posting it today. This contest basically challenges your skills in looking up information.

All the answers for these questions can be found by knowing how to search Wikidata, Wikipedia and sometimes an external search engine. Can you make 10/10?

Please do not post any answers. All the correct answers will be posted on the 23th of December, and so you can see how well you did.

The questions

The question for December 13th: British passenger-ship designed by Stephen Payne that entered service in 2004, which was the last transatlantic ocean liner in service. Named after the consort of king George the fifth. Currently sailing under the flag of Bermuda. Infrastruktur (talk) 22:16, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

The question for 14th of December: English Franciscan friar and theologian born around 1285, which worked at the University of Oxford and later died of the Black Death. Has a very well known philosophical principle named after himself. Infrastruktur (talk) 22:33, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

but today is the 9th? i'm confused. BrokenSegue (talk) 01:04, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
Starting a little early. The third question will be posted the 15th, on schedule. Infrastruktur (talk) 11:05, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

The question for 15th of December: American voice actor with a characteristic voice born in 1968, whose notable work includes Futurama and Adventure Time. Infrastruktur (talk) 07:32, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

The question for 16th of December: House cat that worked as a mouser in Speaker's house (in the United Kingdom) between 2009-2019. What's its name? Infrastruktur (talk) 00:29, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

The question for 17th of December: The name of the World Tree in norse cosmology/mythology in the 13th century works "Poetic Edda" and "Prose Edda" by Snorri Sturluson. Infrastruktur (talk) 08:11, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

The question for 18th of December: In orbital mechanics this is the generic term for the nearest point of an object orbiting another planetary body. Infrastruktur (talk) 07:35, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

The question for 19th of December: A music album from 1960 named "Giant Steps" has a song by the same name that is known amongst musicians because? Infrastruktur (talk) 22:50, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

The question for 20th of December: 7GXHX4HM＋MM Infrastruktur (talk) 07:12, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

The question for 21th of December: What is the most unique mathematical property of the number ?

The question for 22th of December: Well-known oil painting made approximately in 1608 by an italian artist depicting the beheading of Saint John the Baptist. We want the name of the artist. Infrastruktur (talk) 08:33, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

The answers

13. Queen Mary 2

14. William of Ockham

15. John DiMaggio

16. Order

17. Yggdrasil

18. Periapsis (Related terms also accepted e.g. perihelion or perigee)

19. The Coltrane Changes / Challenging to play

20. The Great Pyramid of Giza

21. Double mersenne prime

22. Caravaggio

Wonder who partook and if they found the puzzles entertaining? If you want to post your score or other comments here, go ahead. Infrastruktur (talk) 07:28, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Weird error when editing unrelated part of item?

My bot ran into this weird API error while trying to add a reference: 

pywikibot.exceptions.APIError: failed-save: The save has failed.
[messages: [{'name': 'wikibase-api-failed-save', 'parameters': [], 'html': {'*': 'The save has failed.'}}, {'name': 'wikibase-validator-sitelink-conflict-unknown', 'parameters': ['[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-up_first_Love dewiki:Mixed-up first Love]'], 'html': {'*': 'The link <a class="external text" href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-up_first_Love">dewiki:Mixed-up first Love</a> is also used by another Item that is currently being saved.'}}];

I have never seen this error and don't know how it got triggered when I was editing a reference. RPI2026F1 (talk) 17:53, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

I don't know the actual answer and googling isn't helpful but bots should be robust to edit conflicts so you should catch/retry on some errors anyways. BrokenSegue (talk) 18:17, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
How do I know if an edit is an edit conflict without using regex on the error? Or should I always retry up to 3 times on API errors? RPI2026F1 (talk) 18:32, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
yeah I just always retry basically BrokenSegue (talk) 18:43, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
Alright. RPI2026F1 (talk) 18:59, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
@RPI2026F1: assuming you're using the Page object in Pywikibot, it should handle this error and retry if it's a recoverable error. If it's not, it should throw a higher level exception. Probably best to file a bug. Multichill (talk) 12:44, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
I was using claim.addSources(sources), where sources is a list of Claims. RPI2026F1 (talk) 14:17, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Appeal to create only more generic properties

Based on this description "Citadel Securities is one of the largest market makers in the world, and is active in more than 50 countries. It is the largest designated market maker on the New York Stock Exchange.", I want to state that:

Searching for related props, I find some matches, bot none really works:

  • item operated (P121): equipment, installation or service operated by the subject: subject=agent, object=item operated by the agent
  • operator (P137): person, profession, or organization that operates the equipment, facility, or service: subject=some item, object=sole operator of that item
  • operating area (P2541): geographic area or jurisdiction an organisation or industry operates in, serves, or has responsibility for: limited to object=geographic area
  • in operation on service (P10788): service that a vehicle is operating on: limited to subject=transport vehicle, object=transport service/route

I think the latter prop is closest to what I need, but because it's over-specialized to the transport domain, I cannot use it. Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 08:51, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

When creating a property it's important that the meaning of the property is clear. It's both important to formulate the property in a way that's not only focused on the use-case that it's creator has in mind and at the same time it's important to make it not as broad to include multiple different meanings so that a user doesn't really know which of those meanings is meant in a particular case. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 08:58, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
Are you getting hung up on the term 'operates', would a synonym do? I'd look at similar companies and see how they label their relation with NYSE, or look what links to NYSE and spot similar companies there. Vicarage (talk) 09:04, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
uses (P2283) seems to be a general property that's a lot nearer than any of the ones you listed. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 17:38, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

question for existing property

I'm looking for a property that is says something like film festival X showed film Y (eg. presented works). Example: 2022 Cannes Film Festival (Q107526152) - presented work: Triangle of Sadness (Q97304180)
Does anybody know if such a property already exists? Unfortunately I couldn't find anything that could be used like this --D-Kuru (talk) 11:24, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Probably exhibition history (P608) on the film item, taking the film festival as a value. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:56, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
Should really the film be tagged with this? The film could be shown on several film festivals. --D-Kuru (talk) 16:57, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Occupation versus honorific prefix

Should president (Q30461) also have a new entry "President" with a capital letter to represent the honorific prefix (P511)? Or would this be a lexeme? We have, for instance, "President Biden" (honorific) and "Biden, president" (occupation) and "Biden, President of the United States" (position held). We have a few other honorific prefixes not represented, that only exist as an occupation like "reverend". We also have "duke" and "baron" that exist as noble_title, but should also exist as "Duke" and "Baron" as a prefix. RAN (talk) 18:37, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

According to en:The_Honourable#United_States, US presidents and many other US politicians are often formally granted the title The Honourable (Q2746176), be they senators, governors, mayors, judges, or presidents. -Animalparty (talk) 21:26, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
@Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): In English, Duke and Baron are not prefixes. For example, John Hussey, 1st Baron Hussey of Sleaford (Q6240511) has the prefix, "Lord," (Lord (Q12826225)) making Lord Hussey. Dukes have the style, "His Grace," (Grace (Q3775981)) which would make something like, "His Grace, the Duke of Wellington" and not, "Duke Wellesley." I can't speak for how equivalent titles are handled in other languages. From Hill To Shore (talk) 18:12, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
  • I agree. It appears that "Duke" and "Baron" as a prefix are used incorrectly/informally, in the United States by newspapers, that do not have the knowledge for the correct formal usage. We see in newspapers of the time: "Baron von Richthofen" instead of the proper "Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen". There is even a warning on several Wikipedia page biographies about the proper usage of "Freiherr" versus "Baron". In the past we had several errors with "Judge" in entries like "Judge John Smith" where a bot thought "Judge" was a given name. I still see a lot of entries imported from The Peerage as "Captain John Smith", which may lead to a similar error. At one time we marked all people like "Sir John Smith", with prefix=Sir, to prevent that problem. We, at some point, have to harmonize those entries to either remove "Sir", or add "Sir" to all. I brought it up once before, but we were too busy merging duplicate entries from The Peerage. --RAN (talk) 18:29, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
(After edit conflict) For Reverend (Q841594), this started out as the title/prefix but was changed in 2021 to an occupation,[7] and then style was added as a second instance.[8] Are we content for the prefix and occupation to share the same item or is this a conflation of two concepts?
On the military imports from Peerage, these should have the rank in military rank (P410). I wouldn't use honorific prefix (P511) except for non-military titles (such as Kentucky Colonel (Q632482)). I put Sir (Q209690) in honorific prefix (P511) when I come across it (ideally with the date the style came into use - I can't think of any instances where a child has had the style at birth). From Hill To Shore (talk) 19:00, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
  • I agree no need to duplicate with rank, and we can always force capitalization if an infobox uses rank+given_name+family_name to get "Captain John Smith" where rank=captain. We do have ship's captains using the prefix "Captain". --RAN (talk) 00:15, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
  • @From Hill To Shore: Do you change "Sir John Smith" to "John Smith" after you add prefix=Sir, or do you keep "Sir John Smith"? We have a mix of both, I think the rule was to remove "Sir", but we imported so many from The Peerage, we stopped. At one point, one variation of the wikidata infobox was displaying "prefix + Label" to display "Sir Sir John Smith" for humans, instead of "prefix + given_name + family_name" (because we didn't have given_name fully filled-in in the database. I have no preference, just want harmonization. --RAN (talk) 22:56, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
@Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): I normally move labels with titles into an Alias field and leave a "clean" name in the label. I shy away from removing data without consensus but if anyone wants to clean up such entries, they can get a bot or script to do it later. My main concern is setting the structured data statements. However, I don't normally add an honorific prefix statement without a source. If all I am relying on is the label, I won't make the statement. I think well over 90% of the statements I make are referenced. From Hill To Shore (talk) 23:38, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Should we split

Split "motorcycle rider" (Q3014296) into those that ride for recreation and those that race professionally? RAN (talk) 07:03, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

No, use a qualifier to indicate why they do it. Otherwise we'd have a huge poliferation of entities, and many do things for multiple reasons Vicarage (talk) 08:22, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
Or yes. The advantage more granular, subclassed items have over qualifiers is that they can be accessed with wdt:P31/wdt:P279 in a way in which qualifiers cannot. I don't think we normally split concepts by qualifiers, but by class trees. --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:59, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
But we'd need to do it for every activity people take part in on boh an amateur or professional basis. Not just sports, but firefighter, lifeboatman etc. A long list, and who knows if a person gets paid (presumably the distinction for professional, or is it level of commitment) for doing something, and over what period. A can of worms. Vicarage (talk) 11:11, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
  • At one time we created amateur photographer (Q21694268) versus photographer (Q33231) to distinguish the hobbyist from the person earning their living by performing the function. Many local archives and libraries have images from hobbyists with a camera, we needed to distinguish the two to aid in matching against imported lists of known commercial photographers, and matching against external identifiers. --RAN (talk) 22:41, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
And shouldn't the use of term show the level of commitment. So a occupation (P106) shows a level of professionalism, and you could create a property from hobby (Q47728) for amateur involvement. A lot less work. Vicarage (talk) 11:21, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
@Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) @Tagishsimon We actually already have motorcyclist (Q45787133) too. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 11:06, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Message by NDP Record Prod (Noël DEPARIS) (talk) 18:15, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello community, I don't know how to creat a page. Please help me.

Athlete

Hi everyone. I was talking with @Vojtěch Dostál: and @Frettie: about the Frettiebot's edits in the last few days. Thank you very much for your explanations, but I would like to find other opinions on the matter. If we have value ice hockey player (Q11774891) in occupation (P106), I would never put something like this (athlete (Q2066131) and Olympic competitor (Q58825429)). First, because if you say that he is an athlete is obvious when he is already something more concrete, an ice hockey player, and second, because being an Olympic athlete is not an occupation, it is a concrete situation within your occupation. There are properties to indicate that it has participated in Olympic games. I think that we are filling Wikidata with information that is obvious, and the bots should analyze the content that is already there so as not to add unnecessary information. If we say that this is ok, in the future someone will add sportsperson (Q50995749), that would also be correct. Would it be okay for us to have all the options? Let's remember that it is a field that is also usually inserted in the Infobox of all Wikipedias, and personally I do not see the use of sports personality, athlete, Olympic athlete and ice hockey player in the same parameters in the Infobox. Greetings and thank you. Vanbasten 23 (talk) 18:15, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

These claims come with a source, thus they are okay. However, the bot should manage ranks for the occupation (P106) claims; if it finds more specific values already present, it should raise all (?) existing P106 values to preferred rank. —MisterSynergy (talk) 18:21, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for starting the discussion, it is important to discuss these issues openly. My opinion is similar to that of MisterSynergy. Although I am not sure that Frettiebot should be doing those rank changes. Setting the ranks the way MisterSynergy suggests may be a very complex procedure and I am not sure we (me and Frettie) have the know-how to do that properly. This is a more general issue, bigger than one import. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 19:53, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
I personally think that in a database we should collect the most specific values ​​and not accumulate inaccurate information. Yes, to say that a person is an athlete when it is already indicated that they are a hockey player, is to be inaccurate. If we want to keep all the possibilities we are accumulating information without need, inaccurate, making the queries slower and without thinking about the future volume that we are accumulating without need. But if you are not sensitive to these aspects, at least we should modify the range, because otherwise we will be putting all this information on Wikipedia. For these kind of things, Wikipedia editors don't trust automatically collecting the data from Wikidata. We can see an example here: ast:Nikola Mazurová. Thanks. --Vanbasten 23 (talk) 21:04, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
Considering the "secondary database" character of Wikidata (record what is stated elsewhere), I think we really should keep those. Ranks are also visibility controllers, thus perfectly suitable to avoid the issues mentioned by you that downstream users such as Wikipedias might experience. It should roughly be one WDQS query and one edit to manage this with a bot. —MisterSynergy (talk) 21:25, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
I think WD needs to be taughter. It might be laudable to contain multiple statements from different authorities, but often I see vague assertions next to specific ones, and no attempt to qualify, promote or deprecate them. Lots of my queries are timing out, and that seems to be due to sub-class following. Until the back-end can be made faster, I think we need to be cautious with having too many statements. And our coverage is very patchy, with some items having so many more properties than others, so query results are not comprehensive. Bots that prune back duplication could help WD walk better before it runs. I keep away from people, so don't have views on their ontologies though. Vicarage (talk) 22:17, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
As they say in OSM: “Don’t remove statements for the query.“ If you fancy a fast query experience accessing a smooth and uniform database, you can’t use Wikidata, at least not in the next ten or so years (if ever). --Emu (talk) 22:46, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
If WD is not fast and uniform at some point, we have failed, and will be relegated to history like Yahoo trying to manually index the Web in the 1990s, overtaken by Google, or the attempts to define monolithic rule based AIs that were overtaken by big data. I assume there there are metrics kept, like duplication, constraint violation numbers or speed of standard queries, to show the project is improving, rather than just growing. Vicarage (talk) 23:28, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
Exactly what Emu said; the struggles of your queries lend no support to the suggestion that WD should trend towards a slimline version of itself. WDQS's Blazegraph SPARQL reporting service is very slow in comparison with, for instance, QLever; queries which time-out here most often work there. And that would be before the question of whether your queries are or are not well optimised. Exactly contra to what Emu said, lack of 'fast' just is not a problem at the moment (or, probably, ever). As for uniform, that would be WD, per MisterSynergy, recording what is stated elsewhere, and using rank to deal with, for instance, the 'athlete' vs 'hockey plaer' class tree issue. More & better qualifiers are always welcome, but their absence is, again, not a good reason for slimline WD. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:38, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for your opinions. I find it curious that MisterSynergy says that "record what is stated elsewhere". So we collect data from whatever databases we're looking at that are inaccurate? Doesn't seem like the best idea to me. The quality of Wikidata will only get worse. --Vanbasten 23 (talk) 08:58, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
@Vanbasten 23 Actually, no. This practice even makes Wikidata more useful. Consider the following situations:
  • Matching against Wikidata: Take Q94694204#P569. In a lot of older encyclopedias, her birth year is recorded as 1841. If you are trying to match a source that relied on this information, documenting the wrong value will make matching much easier.
  • Even after matching, you might think: “Well, Wikidata must be wrong. I have this very trustworthy source, let’s change the value to what I think is correct.“ Recording wrong or outdated statements will hinder premature changes of sound data.
I concede that Wikidata’s approach is a far cry from the values of, say, most Wikipedia language editions. But it has its merits, especially if the statements are combined with proper ranking. --Emu (talk) 11:02, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
Ok, whether or not we agree about what Wikidata should contain, what I think we all agree with is the fact that we can't include massive data in Wikidata without first analyzing the content and indicating that those values ​​have a deprecated rank. Right? Thanks. --Vanbasten 23 (talk) 11:12, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
@Vanbasten 23 In effect, are you trying to say that mass imports are wrong and we should go through all the entries one by one? No, I don't agree with that. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 11:09, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
@Vojtěch Dostál: Of course I'm not saying that, we can die before we finish. There are two ways to do it, depending on the tools with which we work. If we enter the data with a bot, then we have to see if there is more concrete data inside. If there are, then add the value but with a low rank. If we do it with another tool, then we have to do it later with a bot, changing the rank in all those cases that need it. All the best. --Vanbasten 23 (talk) 11:21, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
Note however that deprecated rank means that the statement has never been true (although there are some borderline cases like withdrawn identifiers or redirects). It isn’t meant to be used for data from questionable sources per se. In either case, there is no real problem with sourced occupation (P106)athlete (Q2066131) when other more precise statements are present and I doubt that we even need ranking here. --Emu (talk) 14:21, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
@Emu: If we don't do this, the amount of data that the infoboxes are importing, especially from the smaller languages, will be very large and inaccurate, which causes less trust in Wikidata... even more. Aren't we worried? Especially when we can give a better solution... --Vanbasten 23 (talk) 19:29, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
I’m no expert in LUA programming but isn’t this something that can be fixed in the template? --Emu (talk) 20:07, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
@Vanbasten 23: As I see it, there are three broad approaches we can take here.
  1. Design and implement an upgrade to Wikidata that will allow more nuanced handling of entries beyond the ranks of "preferred," "normal," and "deprecated." Much of the constraint logic we have implemented expects a single "preferred" statement/claim for a property but (as discussed here) there are times where we may want to mark other claims as a "better" choice than "normal" claims without having multiple "preferred" claims. Implementing this would require a lot of thought, developer time and money.
  2. Adjust Wikimedia templates that rely on Wikidata to only extract the required information. This would require the effort of someone familiar with the coding to implement. If the changes required are extensive enough, this may need developer time and money to adjust back-end systems. Also, it may be that improving Wikidata's data ranking (as in option 1) is needed to give the template enough targets to extract the relevant information correctly.
  3. Limit Wikidata's remit (per your suggestion) to only collect statements suitable for use in Wikimedia infoboxes. This would require no developer time or money. However, we would need to change the entire premise of Wikidata and purge millions of structured data statements imported by volunteers over several years. Wikimedia is not the only end user of Wikidata. Wikidata's output is incorporated into thousands of databases around the world (including search engines). Limiting Wikidata to make the job of some Wikipedia editors a little easier harms all other end users for very little benefit. Any benefit from this option is also short term as a technical solution (like options 1 or 2) could be implemented in a matter of months with a bit of investment in cash and developer time (all without damaging years of effort).
Personally, I would recommend options 1 or 2. You are suggesting to make a far reaching change to Wikidata's methods to fix today's technical problem. Developer time, money or even the evolution of computer hardware will improve the processing of data queries eventually. Rebuilding our database from a purge intended to fix a short term issue may take years and is not a wise course of action. From Hill To Shore (talk) 02:20, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
@From Hill To Shore: In option 3 you are using the word limit, but I really don't see it as such. If we say that a person is a roller hockey player, I assume that person is an athlete, that he is a sports personality, that he is a hockey player, that he is a roller skater, that he is a competitive player ... all of this reports rink hockey player (Q20900796). We include information from other databases to improve the item descriptions we have here. But including a generic option does not improve it, moreover, it degenerates the quality of the information. I am not saying that we have to review thousands of data that have already been entered, I am saying that we have to worry about what we are doing now. And maybe change something to the future, but for me, including more and more obvious information it´s not correct. --Vanbasten 23 (talk) 08:42, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
A key premise of Wikidata is that we record valid claims made by different sources. If the Library of Congress describes someone's occupation as an ice hockey player then we record that claim and attribute it to LoC in the reference field. If the British Museum describes that same person as an athlete, then we record that claim and attribute it to the British Museum. Likewise, we will record the claims of other authorities and sources.
Another key premise of Wikidata is that we make minimal judgements about the claims we import. We will of course fix obvious errors, such as marking a claim as deprecated that describes a person as a bookcase (instead of a librarian). We use deprecated rank, rather than wiping the entry, as that prevents bots from reimporting the same error later. If all other claims are valid then they are given a "normal" rank; we don't decide whether the Library of Congress, British Museum or International Olympic Committee has the most valid claim, that is for our multitude of end users to decide based on their varied needs. For some types of statements, there is only expected to be a single "correct" answer, such as a person only having a single date of birth. For those types of statements we set the most reliable of the valid claims as "preferred" to tell our end users which one we recommend (ideally with a qualifier giving the reason for preferred rank). End users can export preferred, normal and deprecated claims depending on their needs.
There are suggestions above to mark individual occupation statements as, "preferred," but this has two problems. First, does having multiple preferred claims clash with any constraints in the system? Second, what is our logic for ranking a particular occupation as preferred or normal? Is it the random judgement of individual editors (which could lead to edit wars over ranking if it affects output on Wikimedia infoboxes) or is there objective criteria? This is where my "option 1" comes in to build a more nuanced ranking system.
You say that you don't want to touch existing data but precedent is very powerful here at Wikidata. If we set a particular method of working as the standard for future statements, we know that one of our editors will believe they are helping by applying the same logic to existing statements. Your suggestion is to limit the number of occupations recorded in Wikidata. If your idea is established as good practice, I expect another user following your good practice to implement a purge of existing contradictory data in the next few months. This is a key difference between Wikipedia and Wikidata. If Wikipedia sets new guidance, it will take years of effort to apply the change to every article. For Wikidata, a single user can change millions of records in a single day/week. That is why you find vigorous debate over setting new precedents here; we need to test if the logic of the precedent works in both the short and long term. From Hill To Shore (talk) 09:50, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Genres on Wikidata?

Why are there so many forms of genres? I don't see how the romance genre needs all of romance comics (Q5742640), romance film (Q1054574), and romance novel (Q858330). Isn't romance standard for all creative works? In my honest opinion all of these should be merged to a singular romance genre and the differentiator can be the value of instance of (P31). RPI2026F1 (talk) 04:37, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

You've established that there are (at least) two ways of skinning this cat. Why is your proposed model better? Why is a romance genre class tree a problem? --Tagishsimon (talk) 08:31, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
For art (paintings) we documented this at Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Genre (see also the top genres). This is a modelling choice to make the data more consistent. I would always do this on a case by case basis.
In your case you would consolidate (not merge, these are three distinct concepts) on romantic fiction (Q19765983). You would need to get consensus from the different domains that this is an improvement. Probably good to make an overview of the genres per domain like I did for paintings. That way it's easy to see if more genres can be consolidated and what the impact would be. Multichill (talk) 12:43, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
I ran into a consistency error while trying to deal with the fact that for anime and manga items, there are romance anime (Q104536771), romance anime and manga (Q15637310), and romance manga (Q104536775). This is just one example in the anime and manga sphere. It becomes an issue because not only is it not obvious when to use the subclass vs the parent item due to items containing both anime and manga (WIP to split them but it's complicated), but there are some other things adjacent to anime and manga (like light novels and video games) where you need to figure out the appropriate item for those. This makes it hard to work with for bots since you have to store many more items. RPI2026F1 (talk) 13:02, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
As long as items of the same medium are consistent then I don't see the problem. All novels/novellas/novelettes/short stories et al "should" be using the same general fiction genres like fantasy (Q132311) or horror fiction (Q16575965) with form of creative work (P7937) specifying the type of work. You don't need to do that with video games so there's no problem with them having separate genres, not to mention they have lots of unique genres anyway that don't apply to other media. —Xezbeth (talk) 14:09, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Not sure where to post requests to merge entities

Q83605511 and Q104855088 desribe the same entity. Need merging. -- Wesha (talk) 08:14, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Help:Merge#Gadget is your friend; here if that does not work for you. I've merged the Samuel de Champlain items. --Tagishsimon (talk) 08:28, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Is someone who is a patron of a street always notable enough for Wikidata identifier?

I am making https://matkoniecz.github.io/OSM-wikipedia-tag-validator-reports/ and I am planning to introduce special report for cases where wikidata item for whoever/whatever gave name to a street was marked as nonexisting using name:etymology:wikidata:missing OSM tag ( http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1pid ).

Would it be correct to claim that if street was named after someone or something then they are always notable enough to got created a Wikidata item? What if this is some minor fictional character or composite ("1902 oaks")? Or some very minor historical figure, like local teacher? Or very minor object/event like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/37274301 ("Posag 7 panien" = "Dowry for 7 maidens" - referring to specific risky investment source where group of industrialist invested funds intended as dowries for their daughters)

To repeat: is it always OK to create item that matches etymology of a street? Is it a good idea to claim that it is always possible/welcome?

Searched for following discussions: [9][10][11]

Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 06:02, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Notability on wikidata is decided based on the criteria on Wikidata:Notability. There's two relevant arguments here. First is you could argue a structural need through the named after (P138) claim. In my experience people are generally skeptical of uses of that even that even though the wording of the criteria is very broad. Arguably this is enough to justify making an item. The other option is "clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity". The relevant condition here is whether you actually have a reference for this claim or item. What are you using as evidence that there is some person the street is named after? If you have a solid reference for that and for some basic facts about the person I don't think many people would complain. If all you really have is "there is some person named Foo that the street is named after" then people would be more skeptical since it's not a clearly identified entity. Another issue would be are you taking steps to link to existing items in Wikidata instead of just blindly making new items assuming they don't already exist. Hope that helps. BrokenSegue (talk) 06:12, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
I would see it as a structural need. Storing why a street is named the way it is is useful and creating items for the person is the way to do so. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 15:17, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
There could be potential sensitivity issues involving living people who are not public figures, especially if they are children. "Can we" is a different question from "should we". I saw an item created for the minor child of a biologist who named a new species after her. The name was verified in a scientific paper, and the structural 'need' was to fill the etymology of the species, but it struck me as a borderline case. I frankly wouldn't trust Wikidata to favor privacy over verifiability should the opportunity to create items for a bunch of living children arise. There may be ways to indicate some namesakes without creating a dedicated Q item, such as "child of X" (X being a more notable figure). -Animalparty (talk) 13:39, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
@Animalparty I get your point but are there really cases where streets are named after living people who are underage? Of course anything is possible but I imagine that there are so few such cases that we can handle them case by case. --Emu (talk) 14:07, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
If a street is named after a person, that means that the person is a public figure in some sense even if it's in a minor sense. When it comes to the privacy consideration for a child in a case like that, it's likely different when the item contains just the name of the child which is relevant for the etymology of species or if the item contains more than that. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 08:56, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
We've been linking Dutch streets to who or what it's named after. Haarlem is quite complete, see https://hicsuntleones.nl/straten/?gemeente=Q9920 (by @Denengelse:). Not sure how many items didn't exists, but my guess would be not too many. In other countries the system might be different. I would start linking streets to existing items and see how much is left.
The underage argument seems a bit farfetched, but did make me wonder who the youngest person is to have a street named after them: Princess Alexia of the Netherlands (Q1061685) followed by her sister Catharina-Amalia, Princess of Orange (Q855749). Multichill (talk) 23:22, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #552

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to and read the newsletter this year. If you have a moment, please let us know what you would like to see changed in the newsletter in 2023. Thank you again for your support and have a happy new year!

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming
      • The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, November 9th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
    • Ongoing
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Point in time versus retrieved

See Helen Loring Grenfell (Q43298636) where we have two dates given as a birth date, by the person themselves, at two different years. How best to show that without getting a warning flag or error flag. RAN (talk) 18:15, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

I tried to model the information in a suitable way. --Emu (talk) 09:14, 26 December 2022 (UTC)
Outstanding. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:13, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Matching Wikidata Items with Persondata in de-Wikipedia: Persondata in Redirects

Hello, in de-wikipedia, we're currently discussing the migration of persondata to Wikidata. Overall, there is much to gain from this migration for Wikidata. Among the problems that have come up (others I will work on in due time) are the 1071 redirects in de-wp that have persondata, example: w:de:Bobby Lester. Lester has a Wikidata item, but unfortunately it cannot link to the redirect in de-wp, and thus turns up in a Fehlerliste (error list). Is it possible to make an exception from the rule that Wikidata items cannot link to Redirects for this purpose? Best, Tolanor (talk) 01:18, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Since October/November this year, sitelinks to redirects are actually allowed. See Wikidata:Sitelinks to redirects for details; you need to add the "intentional sitelink to redirect" badge alongside the sitelinks if you want to add your redirect pages to Wikidata items. —MisterSynergy (talk) 01:24, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
Awesome, that helps a lot! Would anyone be willing to help work on the error list listing persondata that are unconnected to Wikidata items? Best, Tolanor (talk) 01:45, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
PS: @MisterSynergy: Du kannst übrigens gerne drüben in der Diskussion mitmischen. Mir scheint, Du hast da schonmal ausführlicher drüber nachgedacht und könntest ggf. auch Bothilfe beisteuern. Das wäre sehr sinnvoll. Viele Grüße, --Tolanor (talk) 02:01, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
Hab nicht die Zeit dazu und bin schon in zu vielen anderen Projekten involviert —MisterSynergy (talk) 11:17, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
@Tolanor: is this related to deprecated GND statements getting removed? Multichill (talk) 16:28, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
No. ---MisterSynergy (talk) 16:49, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

The redirects, which are not connected to a wikidata object

can also be found using PetScan with

Is there a way to connect resp. create objects for redirects with redirect-badge using QuickStatements/PetScan, for example like

Also see

--M2k~dewiki (talk) 13:42, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Fusion de Q91301321 et Q525397

Salut. Je crois que Q91301321 et Q525397 devraient être fusionnés. J'ai essayé de le faire à l'aide de Special:MergeItems, cependant ça a échoué, car l'erreur « The two items cannot be merged because one of them links to the other using the properties: P279 » est survenu. Aucune idée, que ce soit, ce P279. Quelqu'un ? Merci ! Pápiliunculus (talk) 10:19, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

@BohemianRhapsody: - you set the P279 on marc (Q525397) ... could you help? --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:15, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
@Tagishsimon, Pápiliunculus:. Hi! pomace brandy (Q91301321) is the generic term for every liquor distilled from pomace. marc (Q525397) is a specific type of pomace brandy produced in France. There are a lot of different pomace brandies all over the world, you can find them with this query ;) --BohemianRhapsody (talk) 12:04, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Noble title list

If we have position=, we can make a chart with Template:PositionHolderHistory. Can we modify the template so that we can do the same thing with Noble_title? For instance: Baron De La Warr (Q115770797) would organize all the entries at Special:WhatLinksHere/Q115770797 chronologically. Because it looks at the math used in the dates, it flags errors when people overlap. RAN (talk) 23:21, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it would be too difficult to modify PHH to also handle these cases, but I don't really have the time to do so myself any time soon, and I also don't really have enough domain knowledge around noble titles to know what sorts of edge-cases might arise, and what to do about them etc. I'd happily look at patches if someone were to work on it. --Oravrattas (talk) 05:40, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
No, that would be deficit of bot minders as peverse incentive to bork WD. Noble title should take the most granular noble title; the granular noble title's item should deal with its relation to a class of titles. Having separated noble title from position held as WD does, it seems unwise to introduce noble title back into position held. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:08, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
@Tagishsimon, Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): Ideally this sort of thing shouldn't even need bots or custom tools at all. This certainly isn't the only other property that a PHH-like tool has been suggested for, and it presumably won't be the last either. I wonder if there might be a more generic solution through some custom-Javascript that examines a Listeria-style table for date-overlaps and gaps? --Oravrattas (talk) 17:15, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
  • I agree, a generic version would be ideal. We should also consider creating a WikiAlmanac or WikiTable that stores all the tables. We currently house them on the discussion page, where no one sees them. I display them just to look for errors and incompleteness. --RAN (talk) 17:59, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
I was playing around with a proof-of-concept for something built atop of Listeria, but I hit the perennial problem of it grouping together all rows for the same person. I have a vague memory of this behaviour being changed in an update a while back, but I can't see anything obvious in the documentation. Did I imagine this, or is there some way now to force separate rows even when ?item has the same value? --Oravrattas (talk) 19:37, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
  • @Oravrattas: Another use for the automated chronological table making program, would be for award_received= . They are made by hand at English Wikipedia. The advantage to using Wikidata is that they can be automatically made in any language, once the data is in Wikidata, and corrections would flow through all languages once the change was made at Wikidata. Wikidata also performs logic on the data to look for mathematical errors and errors/gaps in the sequence. --RAN (talk) 18:17, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
    @Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): I might be missing something really obvious here, but I'm not really seeing what the checks would be for these. The vast majority of award recipients are qualified with a point in time (P585) rather than start time (P580) / end time (P582), so the problem of overlapping ranges doesn't really apply. And most are (or can be) awarded to zero or many recipients in any given time-frame. Being able to view a table of recipients can certainly be much more useful than viewing these one by one, but that can fairly easily be done by Listeria. Do you have some examples where date calculations would also be useful? Oravrattas (talk) 05:12, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
  • @Oravrattas: I have never used Wikidata:Listeria, why don't you create a list and display it so I can see how it flags errors, and I can see how useful it would be in detecting completeness. See for instance: Talk:Q6797737 where PositionHolderHistory gives me error messages. See also Talk:Q19546 where a month of work harmonized the data to remove errors. No one was even aware there were errors since the data was never displayed. Since it is displayed right on the discussion page, multiple people can work on it at the same time. As to point in time (P585), the version for award, would just use that data point. I see the value of posting the results to Wikidata instead of just getting a window of results via an SPARQL query. --RAN (talk) 17:33, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
    @Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): I think I have some degree of understanding of why PositionHolderHistory is more useful than Listeria for position held (P39) statements :) But the things that make it work in those cases don't really apply to award received (P166) as far as I can see. What are the potential errors you would expect a tool to be able to highlight in a list of award winners? Oravrattas (talk) 20:16, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Merge of Q56312673 and Q2112447

If I'm not mistaken, Q56312673 and Q2112447 both talk about the belfry of Hesdin and should be merged. Jurre (talk) 19:16, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

→ ← Merged -wd-Ryan (Talk/Edits) 15:45, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! Jurre (talk) 18:16, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Merge of Q2372329 and Q28041186

Another set of belfry-related pages: Q2372329 and Q28041186 refer to the same belfry of Doullens and should be merged, I think. Jurre (talk) 18:15, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

@Jurre: if you read Help:Merge#Gadget you can merge these yourself BrokenSegue (talk) 18:18, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

'Authority control'

I hate to be a dummy but what exactly makes an identifier 'authority control'? What makes an identifier not authority control? Or is it just something most people call identifiers without knowing exactly why? Trade (talk) 02:35, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

I was wondering about this a while back too, seeing the terms frequently conflated. From what I could find, I understand authority control to be a subset of identifiers. So not all identifiers are authority control but all authority control IDs are identifiers.
AFAIK to qualify as AC the IDs must be able to have the single-value and distinct-value constraints put on them (with no exceptions). The IDs must also be issued from a single authoritative source, or from someone the authority has granted the power to issue the IDs. So for instance a library, or in the latter case a domain name registrar.
I would be interested in knowing more about this too. Infrastruktur (talk) 17:21, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
There should probably be a constraint that prevents identifiers without the single-value and distinct-value constraints from being labeled authority control if it's a requirement. I guess the 'Issued by' property should be required as well Trade (talk) 23:41, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Semi-automated adding of coordinate location from capital?

I've noticed that a number of the entries for territorial entities (historical countries, for example) have a capital listed, but no geographic coordinates listed. For example, Kingdom of France has no coordinates listed, despite Paris obviously having them.

I did a SPARQL query to check how many there are of these, and it seems like it's ~37,000 entries.

I could probably hack something together to do this in a semi-automated way, but as I'm a newbie, I first wanted to make sure I'm not breaking any rules, overlooking something, or otherwise doing something unhelpful/not good. Unsure where to post it, so I thought I'd ask here

Thanks in advance (and for all your work on this amazing resource!) :-) Cordial Puma (talk) 09:24, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P625#There_should_be_a_applies_to_part_(P518)_qualifier_on_this_property_when_used_on_large_objects . There are also properties for geographic center, easternmost point etc. Infrastruktur (talk) 13:41, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
thanks for your reply!
from what I gather from the thing you linked, it's okay to link those, provided a applies to part (P518) qualifier is added as well (?) Cordial Puma (talk) 13:56, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
@Cordial Puma: Adding coordinates to items based on the coordinates of their capital (P36) value looks tempting, but doing it in a semi-automated fashion will result in the addition of very many unhelpful coordinates. Does Portuguese Empire (Q200464) need a coordinate? Zirid Dynasty (Q205718)? Aetolian League (Q245273)? United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (Q540194)? These, and very many many more, feature in the list of ~37k you have identified. There's also the question of what coordinate is most appropriate for items on larger territories; I'm not convinced the capital's coordinate is in many cases the most appropriate; and anyone who wants to rely on capital coordinates as a proxy for territory coordinates can do so easily because the capital is linked to, from the territory. So for me, it's not clear what is usefully added by the work you describe, whereas it is fairly clear that without quite a lot of effort, a good deal of useless and/or miselading cruft will be added. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:11, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
A key question is whether you have a good source for it. Ideally, one without copyright concerns. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:59, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
No. The proposal here is copying coords from WD capital items to WD country &c items, per the title of this thread. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:16, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

I need the help of BorkedBot like when it did edit Twitter (X) username (P2002) for Samuel Oakford (Q115857046) but I want it on demand for Wikidata items I create

I liked the work BorkedBot did when it found the exact start date for when this person joined Twitter. On the web interface I could only find "Joined December 2011", not never December 3 which this bot found out. If you tell me how I can find out the start date and I don't need to be a programmer to understand it then I won't need this bot to help me.

Otherwise is there a way I can tell the bot to help me with a specific Wikidata item when I want to? Then I can choose to not input the start date at all and let the bot do it instead, am I right? Mastodeas (talk) 07:07, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Is there a problem with just waiting for BorkedBot to do its thing? It found Q115857046 without your help. Chances are it'll find all other qualifying items as they arise. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:24, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
Waiting for BorkedBot to do its thing is fine for me. Now I know this is the only solution.
Bots are not to be ordered around like some waiters who are called to specific tables to get people their food, got it. Slightly more inflexible than my expectations but waiting is totally fine. Wikidata is about patience and there is nothing wrong with patience. Mastodeas (talk) 23:03, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
I think this information isn't important to immediately add, it is probably best just to wait for it. -wd-Ryan (Talk/Edits) 21:31, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
I operate this bot. It runs once a week though sometimes its SPARQL query times out and so a week or so is skipped. I could run it more frequently if I had more toolforge capacity. BrokenSegue (talk) 04:45, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Property:P122 removing "one-of" type constraint

I suggest removing basic form of government one-of constraint. We already have a value-type constraint for instance of form of government - this should handle all the cases and it's pointless to maintain a list for all the options when the value-type constraint specifies this more simply HeliosSunGod (talk) 02:48, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

The list isn't pointless. The one-of constraint gets currently used by Wikidata for suggestions. If we would remove the constraint users would get less suggestions. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 14:21, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
I do think it would be nicer if there was a way to make a "suggested list" of options without forcing it to be mandated. Maybe we can supply an item and all instance of values of that item can become the suggestions. RPI2026F1 (talk) 20:56, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
It already exist: add constraint status (P2316) suggestion constraint (Q62026391) as qualifier of the constraint. 2A01:CB14:D52:1200:49D4:AEDA:D0CE:FF8D 08:48, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
I deprecated the statement. Now there should still be a "suggested list" but no constraint violation if a value is not present in this list. - Valentina.Anitnelav (talk) 10:42, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
I'll just drop Wikidata:Property proposal/autosuggest value here. Multichill (talk) 12:46, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

IP user creating lots of items for commons-only cats

please inspect Special:Contributions/218.102.0.123. i would consider most of these items useless and they should be deleted.

these edits are most likely related to User:G6zLZz2cEPKdEXB (see edit histories of Q115937505 and c:Category:User talk pages where template include size is exceeded). previously this user was vandalising c:special:permalink/721286966#Duplicate_categories_with_Greek_alphabets c:Special:Contributions/218.102.0.123. RZuo (talk) 08:42, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Indeed, those items shouldn't have been created. They are all deleted and the IP user has been informed. —MisterSynergy (talk) 09:53, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Number of Downloads

Am I right in that you don't track data about downloads for apps? Not even in proposed stage? I don't know, that's why I'm asking. We have amount of followers, amount of registered users on services but amount of downloads for a specific app, I don't think so? Mastodeas (talk) 15:05, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

units sold (P2664) works for paid apps and games. Otherwise not that I know of. -wd-Ryan (Talk/Edits) 15:43, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps total produced (P1092) as it has an alias for circulation, and downloading produces a copy. That would allow comparison with AOL CDs! Vicarage (talk) 21:34, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
Yeah but it would be a workaround and I don't think our community members would approve. Fact is nobody has made a property for it. We can close this case now. Thank you for your participation! Mastodeas (talk) 04:29, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
Who is "our community members" and why should WD care about their approval? --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:35, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
Neither is the matter closed. number of subscribers (P3744) seems appropriate. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:35, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
"number of subscribers (P3744) seems appropriate" ... for? Mastodeas (talk) 22:59, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
For the number of users who have subscribed to the application by downloading it. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:19, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
It's appropriate the same way as using Inception (P571) to indicate the date when a humans begins to exist is appropriate Trade (talk) 23:49, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Many of WDs properties have wide scope, many aliases. P571 has about 50 aliases such that it can be used in a very wide variety of contexts. Can you explain, @Trade:, why the same should not apply in the case of P3744? --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:53, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
I have never ever heard anyone calling the download of an application a subscription. Trade (talk) 23:56, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Is that all you have? --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:57, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
I think it is worth proposing a "number of downloads/installations" property to see the consensus. -wd-Ryan (Talk/Edits) 18:55, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
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