DavidMCEddy

Welcome to Wikidata, DavidMCEddy!

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Best regards!

— Cirt (talk) 15:28, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Proceedings question

No one answered that question of yours, but is proceedings from (P4745) was the property you were looking for over at JSM proceedings (Q66458485). Next time, try an obvious word or two (typing "proceedings") in the property field before posting a question like this. typing "proceeding" immediately recovered the property. Circeus (talk) 21:42, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. DavidMCEddy (talk) 08:58, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for answering regarding my question

Thanks for replying to my question about "Does every wikidata item need a reference?". LotsofTheories (talk) 07:22, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata_page_Q105645875_has_been_deleted...

Hi DavidMCEddyː I saw your interaction here and it made me wonder why wikidata uses a different deletion process than enwiki. Why not simply notify users at the time the page is proposed for deletion rather then afterwards? If Users knew ahead of time that their page is considered for deletion it would not be necessary to send them emails after the fact? But yes I agree the notice should provide more than just the item#. Just wondring. Ottawahitech (talk) 02:11, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech: Many and perhaps all deletions in Wikimedia Foundation projects result from discussions. I think that each deletion message should include a link to that discussion. That would be an improvement for all Wikimedia Foundation projects, I think.

With deletions in Wikipedia, the names of the articles deleted are sufficiently descriptive that the person receiving the email at least has some idea of what was deleted. That's not true with Wikidata items, which are identified in the deletion message only by a Q number. That's too cryptic.

Thanks for sharing my concern. I don't know what to do about it. DavidMCEddy (talk) 03:44, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your prompt reply. The topic of giving notice has long been a concern of mine on enwik. I have never been involved in deletions at WD, but after I saw your exchange on the topic I went and checked my history and saw that four of my 25 additions to WD had been deleted, three in mainspace and one in talk-space. I have no idea why and no idea what they were, but if I really wanted to I could click the link that says log at https://xtools.wmflabs.org/pages/www.wikidata.org/Ottawahitech/all and see further information.

Here is an example of one log:

05:56, 22 November 2017 MisterSynergy talk contribs deleted page Q43383801 (Does not meet the notability policy: content was: "", and the only contributor was "Ottawahitech" (talk)) (thank)

I agree with you that getting a message about it at the time may have helped me learn how and what to create at WD. In case you are interested here is some of the knowledge I gained on the topic of deletions while I was still permitted to edit enwiki:

enwiki has (or had, I have not been involved there since 2017) 3 different deletion processes for articles. They also have several other processes for deleting categories, redirects, and more...

These are the three methods enwiki has for deleting articles:

• Speedies
• PRODs (two flavours)
• AFDs

Only the third involves discussion, and each process has its own set of comlicated rules and processes. By 2017, it was recommended that notices of deletions of any of the three types of article deletions should be made on usertalkpages of the person who created the article, but no one else other than the creator, no matter how much they contributed. As you can probably imagine that creates some situations that were not good for the health of enwiki, for example when the person who created the article was no longer around. Then there is also the problem that sending a notice is only recommended, not mandatory, which in my case meant that I was not informed on quite a ew accassions of pending deletions of articles that I spent time creating.

I have lots more to say on the topic, but I am probably boring you. Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 16:04, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech: Permit me to call your attention to one example: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Haifa International Conference for a WMD-Free Middle East. I created that article 2014-02-09 and -10 with 11 references to articles in places like the w:New York Times, w:The Washington Post, w:The Times of Israel, w:Huff Post and w:Haaretz as well as w:Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and others. I recently got a notice that it was a candidate for deletion. It now has only one source, and that source "doesn't discuss the conference", according to w:User:Extraordinary Writ. w:Haifa International Conference for a WMD-Free Middle East: Revision history now lists 21 edits, four of which are mine: three in 2014 when I created it and one in 2016.

w:Reliability of Wikipedia#Articles on contentious issues cites two important references about the value of Wikipedia for conflict resolution. This article on the w:Haifa International Conference for a WMD-Free Middle East suffered from a lack of enough editors to assure that it's quality was maintained in the face of biased editing, in my judgment.

I think we need an v:International Conflict Observatory. The human psychology that drives conflicts and produces a need for such is summarized in v:Confirmation bias and conflict.

I hope these comments may help you figure out something to do to strength how Wikimedia Foundation projects can better manage these issues. DavidMCEddy (talk) 17:29, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

I intend on checking out all the links you provided in due course. In the meantime I just want to make one comment about your mention of w:Reliability of Wikipedia, which I just became aware of and started reading today.

This is an article discussing at length (lots of pages) how reliable Wikipedia is as a resource for people seeking knowledge. In its own (legthy) introduction it talks about Gender bias which is presented as a fact, even though it has only 3 references dated 2015, and 2020, and is mentioned in passing only once in the body of the article (w:Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Notability_of_article_topics: The gender bias on Wikipedia is well documented and has prompted a movement to increase the number of notable females on Wikipedia through the Women in Red Wikiproject ) without references. Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 18:02, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

An attempt to improve the deletion process at Commons

By a strange co-incidence it appears that earlier today a Commons contributor has presented a proposal Re-thinking deletion requests to make them more accessible. Suggestions for improvement can be very complex and invite criticism :-) Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 20:57, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

XiaoMing is being an sock puppet of w:en:user:Projects. 46.134.9.173 17:47, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your work in maintaining Wikidata. I have a small suggestion to improve your future work. If you notice that two items are duplicates, please merge them instead of blanking one of them as you did with the item Q102261456. External sites use Wikidata identifiers, so it is important that we preserve the chain of references. We do this by making one item a redirect for the other. In particular, item ids are intended to be a permanent identifier, so we never reuse them for another concept. See Help:Merge for more information on how to merge items, and consider installing the Merge Gadget. Thanks!  Bovlb (talk) 22:21, 2 January 2022 (UTC) --Bovlb (talk) 22:21, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

@Bovlb: Thanks for the suggestion, but I tried to fix the duplication by following the instructions I found. Sadly, I was confused by much of what I read. I did what made sense to me to do and left it to someone else to take the next step if needed. After reading your comment, I don't know what I could have done differently. Thanks for your support of the Wikimedia project. DavidMCEddy (talk) 22:42, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for following up. To be more specific, I recommend you follow the instructions at Help:Merge#Gadget to enable to merge gadget. Cheers, Bovlb (talk) 22:48, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. Sadly, parsing those instructions seems to require more time than I have for this right now. I could easily be wrong in this judgment, but ... :-( DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:37, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

That's a fair point. These instructions can be hard to follow. I have just added a couple of screenshots to Help:Merge#Gadget that hopefully make things a little clearer. I'd be delighted if you could take a look and let me know if they resolve your problem. Otherwise, can you please let me know where you're getting stuck? Thanks, Bovlb (talk) 01:21, 3 January 2022 (UTC)