Nate Wessel

Call for participation in the interview study with Wikidata editors

Dear Nate Wessel,

I hope you are doing good,

I am Kholoud, a researcher at King’s College London, and I work on a project as part of my PhD research that develops a personalized recommendation system to suggest Wikidata items for the editors based on their interests and preferences. I am collaborating on this project with Elena Simperl and Miaojing Shi. I would love to talk with you to know about your current ways to choose the items you work on in Wikidata and understand the factors that might influence such a decision. Your cooperation will give us valuable insights into building a recommender system that can help improve your editing experience.

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

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

I’ll follow up with you to figure out what method is the best way for us to connect.

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

Thank you for considering taking part in this research.

Regards

Kholoud

Deletion of valid content from Wikidata

Hi Nate Wessel,

The other day I reverted your edit at [1] where you deleted valid content from Wikidata. In case you haven't received a notification, please let it bring up here once more. Please avoid doing so in the future as [2] or [3], etc. You may want to double-check your edits and repair where needed. Thanks. --- Jura 15:01, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

@Jura1: I believe we are in some disagreement as to what constitutes a valid alias. I have noticed your reversion of several of these types of aliases after I removed them. To my mind, I would call these "addresses", not aliases, as such comma-separated lists of nested place names are generally used in addressing / geocoding. These kinds of address could easily be derived from located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) or the like and are in general NOT aliases in the sense that people may actually call it by that "name". I have never in my life heard someone refer to the city as "Calgary, Alberta" the absurdity of which can be demonstrated by the sentence "Calgary, Alberta is located in the province of Alberta." Is it not Clear that Calgary (Q36312) is distinct from Alberta (Q1951) and that "Alberta" is used only to help locate the thing called "Calgary"? It is not itself part of the name that the city goes by. I would be eager to hear your rationale for including these addresses in the alias field, if you have one. Nate Wessel (talk) 15:23, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

It's an alias in the sense that in Wikidata it's generally added in the "alias" part of an item. This may or may not be consistent with other definitions of "alias".

The idea is that (e.g.) "Windsor, Nova Scotia" can be used to select an item without having to go through all "Windsor". There is no need that the Wikidata alias can be made into a valid sentence. Also, it helps find the item for the concept people may refer to when writing "Windsor, Nova Scotia".

If you consider deleting more parts of Wikidata, please seek input on project chat before doing so. --- Jura 15:29, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Accepting that it may be different, can you point me toward Wikidata's particular definition of alias? Is this documented anywhere? Nate Wessel (talk) 16:07, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

There is Help:Aliases that is somewhat dated. The archives of Wikidata:Project chat might provide more info. --- Jura 16:29, 7 June 2021 (UTC)