User talk:Gamaliel

Previous discussion was archived at User talk:Gamaliel/Archive 1 on 2020-02-25.

Hi Gamaliel,

please don't add generic descriptions in languages you don't speak. At least for my language the community dislikes the generic description "researcher": https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q95947228&type=revision&diff=1358337602&oldid=1286147308

It has been a long time since I did an ORCID cleanup, but if I do one again I will be glad to change the term in your language. What language and what is the community's preferred term?

I've looked, and despite I see nowhere in The Library of the World's Best Literature any claim that Æschylus was a "writer". The article there says he was a "dramatist", not a "writer". Please verify that you are adding accurate information.

Dramatist is a subclass of writer. Gamaliel (talk) 23:28, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

And yet "writer" does not appear in the source. It says "dramatist".

A dramatist IS a writer. Gamaliel (talk) 23:43, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

And a human IS a primate, but we don't note that on every entry citing the World's Best Literature. When you say that information is "stated in" a source, the source should actually state that information. If you are inferring the information from a source, you should say that is was inferred, not stated.

I share your view that we should not make inferences from sources. A Library Of The World's Best Literature is a 30 volume work. The biographies in the are from 2 volumes of that work called "The Reader’s Dictionary of Authors", thus I concluded that A Library Of The World's Best Literature is directly stating that every person contained within those biographical volumes is an author.

But an examination of the entries shows that is not the case. You are making an inference, not recording something that was stated.

I disagree, sorry. The work is stating they are all authors, and stating this specific author is a dramatist.

Incorrect. You reach that conclusion by using information that is not present in the entry for the author, nor actually stated anywhere. The fact that you had to create a multi-step justification should be a red flag that you are making an inference.

It is present in the source, and thus I disagree, sorry. You can edit the item's occupation however you wish, I am going to engage in an edit war over this.

It is not present in the source, and that is the problem. I will open a community discussion about whether we can use "stated in" in a situation where the information is not actually "stated".

Likewise, the entry for Aristophanes says he was a "writer of comedy", which is a separate data item here than "writer". I have corrected the reference placement for Aristophanes.

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q64013818&oldid=948532660

Imho this kind of same name = same person items doesn't make sense. If you do a 1 second research you see that NARA-Walter Vogel and LCAuth-Walter Vogel are two different persons.

I may recollect some details incorrectly, as this project was two years ago. These items were not matched by name. At the time I was working with a NARA employee (as a volunteer) to link as many of their authority records as possible with the plan to further develop Wikidata items once that was done. This may have changed, but at the time each NARA authority record was linked to a specific LC authority record. They are not visible on the page, but they were in the HTML so I could harvest them with OpenRefine. We discovered that some of the NARA authority records linked to (in our opinion) the wrong person, but we did not want to override their judgement and kept the links in Wikidata, with the hopes that we could get someone at NARA to clean up their authority records in the future. Unfortunately my contact no longer works for NARA and this project has ceased, so I have no objection if you edit any of these items any way you see fit.

Hi, I'm curious as to why you reverted my edit on Elizabeth D.A. Cohen -- she is Jewish and is correctly identified. Thanks.

Very strange, I don't remember making this edit at all! Perhaps I misclicked on something on my watchlist? Whatever happened, I restored your edit.

Thank you! I was worried I was missing something obvious.

Where does Chinese name of this person come from? (It is wrong.)

I found it in a number of places. Some examples:

https://www.chinavitae.com/biography/Wu_Wenying%7C3617

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Central_Committee_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party

• China Vitae is a very bad source for Chinese names (too many errors).
• The Chinese name you added is not mentioned in any of source you listed.

Perhaps I confused her with a similarly named person: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A6%E6%96%87%E7%91%9B

Does the source described this person as "black"?

https://archive.org/details/notableblackamer00jess_0/page/973/

I have found , which said the opposite.

You are welcome to add the disputed qualifier.

Is this some sort of mistaken identity ?

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q9354780&oldid=1015167667

Very strange, no idea how that happened. I fixed it, thank you.

Hi Gamaliel.

Somehow your open refine batch is running wild: has no years.

BTW, please add "()" to years. Sample: "(1865-1960)" instead of "1865-1960"

I'm aware of the problem. I set it up to add the dates pulled from the items, but I did not realize so many of these items would be lacking basic data! When the batch is over I plan on going back and rerunning it to remove the ones that just say "-".

A question: what difference does the parenthesis make?

none, but it's consistent with the format generally used.

I think it works better when there is some prepended text.

Sure, no reason I can't do that.

can you stop it instead and do new run afterwards?

I won't be able to stop it for about 20 minutes for real life reasons, but sure, I can stop it.

If you ask on admin noticeboard, they could stop it for you.

I'm out for a walk and on my phone, I'll be back to the desktop quicker than I can post the request.

I think many of us use the parenthesis to tell whether the dates indicate the persons lifespan or the years he had some job.

This query currently finds ca. 5000 such descriptions.

It's 4995 exactly. I have the full set in OpenRefine. Right now I'm trying to pull data from Wikitree but their API is slow so it will take a while.

BTW, maybe this lead to empty data.

I'm afraid I don't see the relevance.

For many, Wikidata still have the info in the reference section

Maybe I can grab it from there instead of using the Wikidata API. Brilliant! Thank you.

See Wikidata:Database_reports/items_with_P569_greater_than_P570 for the list, I am sure there are more that escape this error detection search. The same rogue date being added with Wikitree as the source. The rogue date is "30 November 2 CE".

Thanks. I'm running Quickstatements to remove anything with that date.

Thanks!

There are many born on "November 30" in some year at Wikidata:Database_reports/identical_birth_and_death_dates/1.

Can you double-check anything you added that has November 30 in some year?

Are you sure all are resolved? Do you have a query I can use to check?

The pairs on that page just happened to be there because you added identical dates to two items.

I do not know how to run a query to check every item that has the date of November 30.

Easiest might be to check the file for the batch(es) you run.

Alternatively, maybe Wikidata:Request_a_query can help.

I've found the Open Refine file used to create this edit batch and used it to hand check every item with a date of birth or death date of November 30.

Watch out for maiden or married surnames used as given names, e.g. for Q104595824, Fitch, Winslow, and Page are all surnames (family names), the last simply being that of the most recent husband. Maiden and married names can be qualified with P3831, see Lucy Burwell Page Saunders.

Thanks, it's a quirk of the new Q5 item creation tool, I'll watch out for that from now on.

Please do try to keep this in mind when creating new items. Thank you!

Where is the Q5 item creation tool? Any method of more quickly creating items is urgently needed in Wikidata.

https://new-q5.toolforge.org/ by @1Veertje

nice tool. The P734/P735 part could need some tweaks.

Jan Smith tries to link Jan (Q69523536) (I was wondering which one it uses among Jan (Q12173670) and Jan (Q18220903))).

Oddly, what it does there isn't very transparent to the user. Personal names with more than two parts are tricky and assuming everything but the last part is a given name is frequently wrong. If the input is in Latin script, items being used should probably use that too. I started adding Wikidata usage instructions (P2559) to items that are generally problematic. Maybe these should be skipped by default.

"Jean Dupont" ends up being female as Jean (Q4160311) is used.

@1Veertje:

"Marcus Smith" uses Marcus (Q6757977)

Previous problems with name parsing: Topic:Vyc6rv36ww6d0myv