DrThneed

Thank you for participating in the FindingGLAMs Challenge!

	Thank you for participating in the FindingGLAMs Challenge!
	With your hard work, you took the 9th place. Congratulations! By improving information about GLAM institutions on Wikidata, you made the Wikimedia projects better for everyone! Alicia Fagerving (WMSE) (talk) 14:41, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

LBS - statements

@DrThneed: Hi, saw your tweets thought it might be most useful to respond here. I'm glad to see you've been working your way through the LBS database.

1. Regarding - occupation (P106) for items with a Legacies of British Slave-ownership person ID (P3023) I think we need to look beyond occupation and subject has role (P2868). This data is most impactful when there is also a relationship with the "property" both the real estate and the people enslaved as property. Also, I would argue that there also needs be a statement in social classification (P3716) especially if the person is resident in a slave society. My preference would be to use Plantocracy (Q7201656) or continue with slave owner (Q10076267) (as "enslaver" my changes to the label keep being reverted) in addition to a statement for occupation (P106). As you know, slave ownership was a strata of society not just an individual man's occupation/investment.
2. Enslaved.org, a linked data project, at the Michigan State University have developed a set of controlled vocabulary and data modelling around enslavement. This might be a useful resource to shape work on Wikidata.
3. My preference would be to organise a project so we can systematise an approach.

MassiveEartha (talk) 11:20, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

@MassiveEartha: Thanks so much for your thoughts.

1. I definitely agree about the relationships, that's one of the things that has most interested me. The people in LBS are connected to each other, and to properties and companies and plantations and political groups, but those relationships are rarely reflected in Wikidata. I've also been working with data on other people, e.g. from David Richardson's work, who haven't made it into LBS but who might end up being connected by marriage and descent to people who are. I use this query to show things depicting/owned by/commissioned by/commemorating/named after slave owners and slave traders. Anyway, my focus has been on labelling people as slave owners or slave traders as that is a relatively straight forward thing to determine from the data. So far I've been through as many wikipedia pages as I could find that named people as such, and made sure they have an occupation in wikidata to match. I'm not concerned as such about the occupation statement as I am that there is a way to search these people and find what they are connected to. So I am less confident about making changes in social classification, even though I agree that changes there are appropriate. It's a broader concept than the individual act of owning a slave, so I wouldn't know who to apply it to, and using it in searches for my purposes wouldn't be so useful. But that could change.
2. My query about 'subject has role' etc was trying to figure out how best to reflect the multiple types of people in the LBS database. Is someone who holds a mortgage over a plantation (or maybe ten mortgages over different plantations) a slave owner, seeing as they got the compensation? It seems to me they are, but I am interpreting the data there and if I can label them in a more accurate way through their identifier then it is easier for me or others to make changes based on that as wikidata develops.
3. I am really interested to see how the Enslaved project looks when it's live. I've been keeping an eye on their website waiting for developments. Thanks for the link to their vocabulary - I had seen that they had developed one, but had missed clicking on the button to access it! I see they use master/owner and enslaved person. That translates fairly well to slave holder in wikidata I think? The word 'enslaver' implies to me the person who first puts someone into slavery, rather than someone who might subsequently "own" them. I wonder if that is why your changes are getting reverted? Happy to join a discussion on the talk page if you want to keep trying on that though.
4. I don't know anything about wikidata projects, having not been involved in one before, but it does seems like a good idea. I will go and read about wikiprojects...

DrThneed (talk) 22:46, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Nationality

Thanks for the work you do on electoral candidates. You can safely add that their nationality is New Zealand as that is one of the few prerequisites that a candidate needs to meet (and the Electoral Commission does require proof). Schwede66 (talk) 00:43, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, I had thought about checking if you needed to be a citizen or not and then forgot to check. I'll go and add a citizenship statement to them all. DrThneed (talk) 00:47, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

OK, all done. Heaven help me, I've just asked Electoral Commission about candidate lists for previous years. DrThneed (talk) 01:08, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Well done! "Heaven help me" – I'm not well connected in that department; can't pull any strings. Schwede66 (talk) 04:01, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Books

Re creating a wikidata item to cite books as a reference in Wikidata or using the Wikidata Q item for that book in Wikipedia as a CiteQ item. I may be teaching you to "suck eggs" so to speak but just wanted to let you know you'll need to create not just an item for the concept of the book, but also an item for the "version, edition, or translation" of the book that you will actually be citing. It is the second of these you'll be using as that's the one you are actually citing. So for example if you want to cite Aotearoa Moananui a Kiwa Weavers https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q104668121 you'll need to create another item for the version or edition you have in front of you. For more info on books in Wikidata see https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books - hope this helps and that I'm not telling you something you already know! - Ambrosia10 (talk) 18:40, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

It's OK, I knew this - but only because you had told me before! I hadn't forgotten, but just wanted to create the main Wikidata entry so that it was easy to create the edition when I actually have it in front of me tomorrow (the library catalogue is a bit vague about editions!). And of course if anyone else finds the same resources, they may have different editions. I should have made a note about what I was doing in the doc though to be clear.DrThneed (talk) 20:10, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Stuart's list

I was getting ready to write about another NZ woman academic but got distracted... I found that you'd made US porn star, Hazel Tucker, a full professor at Otago, which gave me some amusement but has been remedied and an NZ Hazel Tucker (Q104709028) created with the relevant properties. From my own research, I don't believe Pat Cragg and Pat Nuttall are one and the same person and have sorted that out too. When I came to Jennifer Windsor (Q50246022), however, I was puzzled that you had added then removed the full prof info. The ref had been her VUW bio, rather than an announcement. What did Stuart's list give? At this point, I stopped, as I scrolled down and found many more names in your batch #46472.

I have also discovered that there are a number of NZ women academics to whom you have added the full prof info, but whose items lacked P21 = female. I believe I have found and added them all now, but perhaps you could run a SPARQL to find any other genderless full NZ profs who should be female? I'm afraid my SPARQL is not up to it.

The disappointing thing in all this is that the list of bios needing to be created has grown from 17 to 40; or 41 with Jennifer W. The upside is that the data is becoming better. --Oronsay (talk) 05:36, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Ugh, I SWEAR I had disambiguated from the porn star when I ran the batch! Thank you for finding these duplications & errors. The removal of the statement from Jennifer Windsor is v deliberate though. She specifically requested not to have a Wikipedia page when Stuart made one for her previously, so her page was discussed & deleted. I removed the statement from her Wikidata in order to stop her showing up in the redlists and getting another one made.

Yes, I'll do a query to look for genderless profs, good idea.

Don't get disheartened by the numbers growing - this is a sign of all the profs that we now know about that we didn't before. And of course people keep getting promoted and so the pool will never shrink.

Glad I asked about Jennifer Windsor and have just read the WP deletion discussion. Of course there will be new appointments to add each year, and the list doesn't necessarily include those who have retired from being full professors. Now I've got lots more women to add ORCID and other identifiers for, to make the creation process easier down the track. --Oronsay (talk) 14:55, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Stuart excluded honorary, emeritus and associate just to keep it manageable. Associate profs are less likely to be notable so that probably works for us, but I see no reason not to include emeritus professors or honorary profs in our lists, as notability is more likely, although as it's a different position statement I'll do a separate table for it at some point. Just imagine how easy this would be if all the universities actually sorted out their own senior staff on Wikidata, sigh.

I've figured out an error-checking step I can include next time I do a list through OpenRefine that should help avoid some the more egregious mismatches.DrThneed (talk) 22:37, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

"Super detailed Wikidata page history"

Hi. How do I enable the very detailed page history for Wikidata? I noticed in your YouTube video(YT ID=jE9ZvwYCNnQ) at 8:42 in relation to Alan Stevenson (Q103839875) ie.

• Label: Alan Stevenson
  • "by DrThneed"
• Description: 1978 - Evening Post staff photographer.
  • "by DrThneed"

Statements

• instance of (P31) = human (Q5)
  • "by DrThneed"

Identifiers

• Alexander Turnbull Library ID (P6683) = 216066
  • "by DrThneed"

If I could enable this I could see(I assume) item history for every item which I usually appreciate a lot. It saves me lots of time from having to look in the page history(which I do a lot btw and it costs me a lot of time) who added a specific statement or who was the last editor for a specific statement etc. LotsofTheories (talk) 00:01, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

It's such a handy tool! It really helps me. It's called WikidataTrust, and you can find tools like this in the Tools section under 'Enhance user interface' (linking so you can browse in case there are any others that would help you). You add it to your Common.js file (here's mine - if you ever see anyone using a cool tool, you can look at their Common.js file yourself to see if you can figure out which tool it was). -DrThneed (talk) 00:17, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

Why note the first author's name in article description?

Greetings. Why is it necessary to state the first author's name? There are other authors. Do you have any reason to think the other authors didn't contribute equally? I've seen the overwhelming majority simply describe articles as "scholarly article" or maybe "scholarly article published in yyyy". I caution against adding one author's name, particularly when there are others given credit. Trilotat (talk) 01:05, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi Trilotat, thank you for your interest. I'm not adding authors to article descriptions to give credit, but to aid in disambiguation. I'm adding descriptions only where a scholarly article currently doesn't have one at all. As you probably know, when there is no description Wikidata items show up in a Wikidata search with just their label, which can be very frustrating, especially when titles are short or relatively generic or in the case of biographies, just the subject's name. Academic papers are by convention cited by first author and year (e.g. Smith et al 2000), so I am simply reflecting the way these papers would be referred to in academic writing, and hopefully making it easier for people to find the item they are looking for. Besides, including multiple authors in an item description would be impractical, some genome or physics papers have >1000 authors! DrThneed (talk) 01:30, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I share your frustration about very short article titles without a description. I appreciate your updates to include et al if you want to put an author’s name. As for articles that I add to wikidata, I’ll try to add a description. Regards, Trilotat (talk) 05:40, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

leading 0's in ANZSRC FoR codes

Thanks for your work on the FoR codes. It looks like you have dropped the leading zeros from some of them. I think this is an error, as it (at least) messes up the URL links. For example, try clicking the two current links in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q170201#P5922, where only the full string works. --99of9 (talk) 11:22, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

Gah, thanks 99of9. Luckily only a problem for the 2008 codes. I think I've fixed them all now. I'll be running through them again to check for other problems (matches to disambiguation pages etc) so will double check then. DrThneed (talk) 22:34, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

"reseacher in New Zealand"

Hi! I've noticed that Wikidata has about 1,000 occurrences of the phrase "reseacher in New Zealand", where the word "researcher" is missing a letter. I've checked the history of some of them; it looks as if you created them using the "OpenRefine" tool. Could that tool fix the spelling efficiently? I'm happy to work through them manually, but it would take a while. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:25, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Oops! I can definitely fix those, thanks for letting me know @John of Reading. I'm working on a batch of new professors over the next couple of days but will get to this as soon as I can. (There's no need to fix this sort of thing manually, both QuickStatements and OpenRefine are easy ways to make mass edits like this). DrThneed (talk) 20:10, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

@John of Reading All fixed now. Thanks again for letting me know! DrThneed (talk) 22:25, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Request for video to demo how to add thesis information to Wikipedia pages

Kia ora, The Wellington Meetup discussed the thesis project and the task to add thesis information into Wikipedia pages. A number of editors wondered whether there was a particular way of doing this as one attempt needed a lot of changes to get right. Would it be possible for you to demo best practice editing for this part of the project so newish editors can use this as a training exercise? Einebillion (talk) 22:10, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Einebillion. Sorry I meant to reply at today's call and forgot! I will make a video after Wikicon. I delayed answering as I was waiting on a response from Altmetric about whether they will begin tracking Cite Q. They are investigating, but if it does happen, it won't be soon. That means (unhappily) that the best way to cite a thesis is no longer using Cite Q. So instead the QID of a thesis can be pasted into the Citoid tool (ie clicking the 'Cite' button, pasting the QID of the thesis into the box), and then going into the source code to add the type of thesis (because otherwise it stupidly says 'thesis thesis'). But for new editors that's quite a few steps and a video would definitely be a good idea - I'll let you know when I manage to do it! Cheers DrThneed DrThneed (talk) 00:45, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Cool! Thanks for the update. Looking forward to seeing the result in due course (no pressure!). Einebillion (talk) 01:23, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Einebillion Finally got to it! I've created a prefilled citation template for all the theses where the author has an English Wikipedia page (obviously theses can be cited on other Wikipedias too but I am not sure what citation templates are supported). So there is now a Google sheet with citation templates which can just be pasted in from visual editor, without any need to go into source editing Video showing the process is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDP6NMp4LeM and both video and Google sheet at on the Wikipedia project page. DrThneed (talk) 01:28, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Fantastic! Thanks so much User:DrThneed! Awesome work. Einebillion (talk) 06:43, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Trying to locate Q104837720

Hi @DrThneed, I'm working through articles in Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute (Q7833731) and I can't locate On charity organization (Q104837720) that you've added. There is no volume, pagination, or URL provided, so it's not obvious to me that this article actually exists. Rdmpage (talk) 14:40, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Rdmpage I've added the volume and page number now. If you had followed the url given as a reference to the publication date, you would have found the contents page for the volume that lists the article on PapersPast. DrThneed (talk) 20:05, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

@DrThneed thanks! Perhaps not the most obvious way to find the article. I've added Papers Past ID (P8108) and BHL page ID (P687) identifiers to the item. Apologies if this seems pedantic, but I'm considering bulk uploading the remaining articles for this journal and I rely on the existing metadata being reasonably complete to avoid duplicating existing items. Rdmpage (talk) 20:28, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

@Rdmpage it's unusual to be asked about individual articles but not at all a problem! I'm not sure why I didn't upload the volume/page number at the time (and good point about the identifiers, I'll try to add those in future). There's a Wikisource project to digitise the Transactions just beginning - is your work related to that? DrThneed (talk) 20:33, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

@DrThneed I spend the bulk of my Wikidata time working with individual articles, focussing on bulk uploads and cross linking to existing identifiers. I also work on visualising the results, so I tend to spot potential problems (some of my own making!). No, I don't use Wikisource (but am familiar with the project). Rdmpage (talk) 20:43, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Your revert on Q117407022

@DrThneed Hi, you reverted the claim, that Adriana Pálffy-Buß wrote an academic thesis at University of Giessen. I do have two references: the one already given [1] and also here [2]. Moreover, as i am currently preparing a German article on her, I did have mail conversation with Adriana, and she additionally sent me the Link to her thesis: [3].

Did I misunderstand what the claim "academic thesis" means? Are PhD thesis usually put under a different claim? Or do you have other evidence against the claim I added? Thanks, Tomtiger (talk) 07:25, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Tomtiger, I'm not disputing that Adriana has a thesis or where it is or anything like that, but you entered the information incorrectly (and there are hundreds of examples like this so I could not fix them myself). P1026 "academic thesis" is meant to point to the Wikidata item for the thesis (if you look at the property page you will see three examples showing exactly that). So what I would suggest is that you create a Wikidata item for her thesis, with the sources that you've got, and the link to the digitised version etc, and you can then use P1026 on Adriana's entry to link to it. Does that make sense? Here is an example of a thesis (Q112876888) linked to its author in case that helps. DrThneed (talk) 07:38, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi @DrThneed, thanks for the explanation! Understood, that makes sense. Until creating an Object for the theis, would it be ok to in the meantime add a claim "educated at" University of Giessen, or is the University during a PhD thesis more an "employer" than an "educated at"? Or is it sufficient to add the university under "academic degree" -> "dissertation submitted to"? Tomtiger (talk) 07:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Tomtiger Yes, it's perfectly fine to do that, "educated is" is what I generally use for a PhD student (a postdoctoral position would go under employer instead, generally speaking). So I would put 'educated at' University of Geissen, with a qualifier of "academic degree" PhD (and you can add start time/end time if you know them). And use a reference URL that links to the sources you have. You can also create a "doctoral advisor" statement if you know who that is (and the person is in Wikidata - in which case you can also add a link back to Adriana's item using "doctoral student"). And you can add "academic degree" PhD with qualifier "dissertation submitted" to University of Geissen as well - it seems like a lot of redundancy but it exposes the data in different ways depending on how people search for it. DrThneed (talk) 08:27, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

Completed :-) (except for creating an object for the thesis itself, this may be a bit too much...). Thanks a lot for your help! Tomtiger (talk) 05:44, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Q82869534

Why did you blank this item: CSROC Expert Panel (Q82869534)? Items should never be left blank BrokenSegue (talk) 00:59, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Somebody (or I think a combination of bots) had made a weirdly conflated item with a person, Paul Brocklehurst Paul R. Brocklehurst (Q82632843). Another editor asked on the Wikidata Telegram group for help, so I shifted the all statements that applied to Brocklehurst across to his item. That has left the item blank except for a label. However as I reported back to the group, I don't what the original item was meant to represent. I've added instance of panel as my best guess, but go ahead and edit if you know more. DrThneed (talk) 01:10, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Te Papa agent ID

I've just been notified that the MixnMatch is importing incorrectly to Wikidata. e.g. On Simon Monckton-Arundell, 9th Viscount Galway, it appears as "tepapa:collection/agent/65529" rather than just the numerical value. This means that clicking on that ID takes to a Page not found notification. (I posted this here as I see you, too, have been working on the MnM.) I'm happy to correct the errors that I've created, plus for you and User:Ambrosia10. Oronsay (talk) 01:39, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. I'll have a go correcting what I've done too as I've been working on the Mixnmatch set for a bit today. Ambrosia10 (talk) 01:41, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Annie! I'd moved back on to thesis advisors for the time being anyway. I should have looked more carefully at what the catalogue was doing, I just assumed it was correct! Doh. I'll go fix a few too. DrThneed (talk) 01:44, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

I'll email User:Avocadobabygirl to let her know what's going on. I also noticed that the dataset doesn't seem to let you create a new item for those unmatched names - though I'm never sure whether this is just a mix'n'match issue rather than a particular dataset issue.

She's aware of the issue with identifiers (she said so on Telegram) but possibly not the inability to create new items. Looks like that is something to do with the catalogue as it is working ok for me in other Mnm cats. DrThneed (talk) 01:56, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I just got a reply from her - she's attempting to fix the issue now but of course has to wait for everything to update. Hopefully it should be sorted soon. I'm going to step away from the dataset until I get word that things have been resolved. On the bright side I had a VERY easy time locating new folk to add Te Papa identifiers to and even got two or three NZThesis folk linked. Ambrosia10 (talk) 02:13, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank goodness for Vera's gadget that trims IDs! Makes correcting the errors easy, even if it has to be done one by one. Oronsay (talk) 02:14, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Oh that's interesting, I just went in and deleted the front bit of each URL on mine! They didn't seem to trigger the gadget to trim them (but maybe if I repasted them?). Anyway, I think I got them all. We'll just have to be patient and wait for a new catalogue. Yay for finding thesis authors, Siobhan, I reckon there'll be quite a few in there, between the artists and the collectors and so on. DrThneed (talk) 02:18, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Mine all fixed now. Gadget only triggered by copy and paste, which I find less fiddly than positioning the cursor and deleting the unwanted bit. Oronsay (talk) 02:25, 8 September 2023 (UTC)