Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2013/11

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Empty items

per the most recent dump, Wikidata has 761778 items without any link (txt file: 10MB ) and 36958 items without any links or backlinks and 15634 items without link or backlink that had links once but not now. I can write a code and delete all of the second or the third files but I think It needs to be reviewed by humans, So please review some of them and request for deletion. if you made a very long list and you're sure It can be deleted please send it bot operator admin (like me) and ask them to delete it, Happy Wikidataying :D Amir (talk) 03:02, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Huh, quite many. I would be happy to see some other way to find this kind of pages, not just the dump. --Stryn (talk) 10:19, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
Some items without links were added by chinese bots without any label in English: Difficult to say anything about them. Snipre (talk) 17:24, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
There are a lot of chinese village items, created by Lianbot, which do not have sitelinks or English labels but which should be kept because they do have statements and links to larger Chinese administrative units. Filceolaire (talk) 08:18, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
@Stryn It's one of the bug in the to be contributed by community, I took it one year ago but it seems I still did not achieve the work, so blame me /o\. I had something almost ready but I took more time to update my install than to code at that point, the code moved a lot, I'll think I'll take a few minutes to look at that again, amongst the other things that are on my TODO list ... TomT0m (talk) 17:35, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

merge.py can handle empty items (listed as in Wikidata:Requests for deletions/Bulk) that have been already merged with others. Regards, --Ricordisamoa 16:57, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

genre range

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Q11621) PGENRE (Pgenre) says it is a science fiction film (Q471839) ... it may be true, but it seems kind of oddly defined. ET is a science fiction movie for sure, I would not hesitate to say it's a class, but is movie a genre ? What is a genre ? TomT0m (talk) 21:52, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

I would say the genre was 'science fiction' however science fiction film (Q471839) is marked as a subclass of science fiction so it's not completely wrong.
If we want to have a general principal that we avoid intersection categories on wikidata then the genre should be 'science fiction' - in my opinion. Filceolaire (talk) 13:41, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
avoid intersection categories on wikidata do not make sense for me, a category is well defined on Wikipedia, but what is it on Wikidata and why should we have such a principle on Wikidata ? TomT0m (talk) 14:30, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Multilingual Jesus ontology

Conflicts on the multilingual Jesus ontology were documented and resolved over the last couple of days. As a result of this global cleanup, we can now classify the relevant pages about Jesus in various languages from more generic to more specialised topics:

Related items (not covered in my cleanup):

I welcome further comments and updates from other interested editors. In particular, there are probably some language versions which still have manual interwiki links to delete or disconnected pages to double-check against the above ontology and assign appropriately. — JFG talk 15:46, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I saw you moved the svwiki-article from 51666 to 13588125, looks good. When I compare the svwiki-article in Q302 with the English description here, I see no perfect match. The svwiki-article "Jesus", is mainly about the rabbi/messiah/prophet in the Abrahamitic religions. Not only in Christianity, but also in Islam, Bahai, Judaism and some others. -- Lavallen (talk) 14:10, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
Yes, the Swedish version has grouped the various views about Jesus in a single article, therefore it should remain linked to the most generic item Jesus (Q302). Note that the article sections match the topics above pretty well, so if the Swedes decide to split their main article some day, things will fall into place nicely. This was already done for their version of historicity of Jesus (Q13588125) which expands on sections 4 and 7.2 of sv:Jesus. — JFG talk 15:46, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
It's normal procedure in svwiki to have summaries of minor articles in the "main" article. In this case, the summaries are maybe a little long. -- Lavallen (talk) 16:36, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
Following your comment, I noticed that in the Swedish Jesus series box there is a page sv:Ahistoriska hypotesen which has no interwiki links, talking about the hypothesis that Jesus did not exist but explicitly stating that it is not the same as Christ myth theory (Q1073301). Perhaps you could find out if it matches some English page? — JFG talk 15:46, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
The content in "Ahistoriska hypotesen" looks like it can also be found in "sv:Jesusmyten". But Q1073301 as a subject, looks wider. I'm afraid that the content in the bible is more well-known to me, than theological theories. I will contact persons on svwp who have right kind of education. -- Lavallen (talk) 16:20, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
The response is: The Swedish "Ahistoriska hypotesen" fits the enwiki-redirect "en:Non-historical hypothesis". Normally svwiki would have done the same, but we have some zealous editors that prefer to have as many articles as possible in this subject. (And I'm not suprised.) -- Lavallen (talk) 17:02, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
Understood, thanks, matches a section of Christ myth theory (Q1073301) in other languages then, and maybe the Swedes will merge it some day. By the way, I have not kept Q10540033 that you added to the list above because it exists only in Swedish. — JFG talk 05:39, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, added to list above. — JFG talk 05:39, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

How is this possible?

Umweltinstitut München (Q15119454) and Q15119460 appear to both link to w:de:Umweltinstitut München. I thought that one WP page could only be linked to once in Wikidata? --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 18:11, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

The ids of both items are very similar and they have been created in a very short time. Maybe too fast for Wikidata? :D -- Bene* talk 18:22, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
Yes probably. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:49, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
Happens from time to time. Such cases are collected at Wikidata:True duplicates, though I don't know if this collection will have any consequences some time. --YMS (talk) 14:34, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

first General Punctuation character detected

Hi! I was fixing Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P244 about Library of Congress authority ID (P244) when I discovered the first General Punctuation character. Please take a look at Talk:Q1162700 where you see:

Please do not delete the first LCCN (at Daniel Shays (Q1162700) ). The generated url is http://lccn.loc.gov/n79114009%E2%80%8F with an ending %E2%80%8F

There is a list of links from Yiddish Wiktionary created some years ago. You may find some reference links. It is a RTL wiki. It might be useful to change your preferences to your native language.

I suggest that one should create a no General punctuation characters (a subset of no whitespace) constraint violations and try it first at Library of Congress authority ID (P244) (by adding it to Property talk:P244?).

I assume that in a second step this new constraint might be added at many properties, statements etc.

Best regards לערי ריינהארט (talk) 04:39, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

P.S. These characters are about the BiDirectional algorithm (BiDi). Other keywords are: Left To Right (LTR) and Right To Left (RTL) as well as Left to Right Mark (LRM) and Right to Left Mark (RLM) etc. (as overwrite). see bi-directional text (Q856986) לערי ריינהארט (talk) 05:11, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
https://www.wikidata.org/?oldid=83029501#URLENCODEbug is a shortest link to the relevant line in Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P244. לערי ריינהארט (talk) 06:14, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Merging two entities?

As far as I can tell, en:Category:Protector gods (Wikidata Q6349489) and en:Category:Tutelary deities (Wikidata Q9483544) are completely synonymous, and categorization on the English-language Wikipedia reflects this. In an earlier era, I would have edited the interwiki links on the various language edition Wikipedias to reflect this. However, I cannot work out how to do so on Wikidata. Can anyone help me with this? -- The Anome (talk) 20:56, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

While the english language categories are redirected this is not so for the Esperanto (eo) and Spanish (es) wikipedias. Each of these have separate pages - one linked to each of these wikidata items so these wikidata items cannot be merged until the eo and es wikipedia categories have been merged first.
All the merging that can be done on wikidata has effectively already been done, with all the languages linked to Category:Tutelary deities (Q6349489) and only languages with a second page linked to Category:Tutelary gods (Q9483544). Filceolaire (talk) 22:25, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Connecting Deutsch Obermaat to English Petty officer second class

To whom it may concern,

I tried to connect the German page for the rank "Obermaat" to the equivalent in English "Petty officer Second class". Perhaps someone could assist me in this matter. I think there are also two other languages that should be merged into one profile.

Thank you,

Petty officer, second class refers to a rank in the US military armed forces while de:Obermaat is about the German Navy, so they should not be merged. Actually, Obermaat (Q1512199) should be split, because the Polish, German and Estonian articles do not match. --Zolo (talk) 07:15, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Merging

Quote: "Site link Dead in Tombstone is already used by item Q3704222. Perhaps the items should be merged and one of them deleted? Feel free to ask at Project chat if you are unsure".

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_in_Tombstone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_in_Tombstone

How to merge them? I don't want to cause a huge mess. Thanks. Cheers, --Michi81 (talk) 08:00, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

  Merged from Dead in Tombstone (Q15098874) to Dead in Tombstone (Q3704222). --by ReviDCMG at 08:10, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Next office hour

Hi everyone,

I'll be holding an office hour together with addshore on Wednesday, November 13 at 17:00 UTC. We'll be meeting in #wikimedia-office on freenode. I'll start with a short overview of the current state of Wikidata and then there will be time for all your Wikidata related questions. I hope to see many of you there. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:27, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Migrate P107 place claims?

I think we can use located on astronomical body (P376) (usually its value is Earth (Q2)) instead of P107 (P107)=geographical feature (Q618123). Can't we?--GZWDer (talk) 09:00, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

can't we just remove P107 (P107)=geographical feature (Q618123) in case there is a located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) and/or coordinate location (P625) available? No need for replacing this P107 with another 'generic' claim like P376=Earth (Q2) for 99% of these items. Michiel1972 (talk) 12:48, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
In general those of us who value a main type use country (P17) as a main type for places on earth. For places larger than countries you can use 'located in/on physical feature (P706)' with 'Earth (Q2)' or with a smaller terrain feature (ocean, continent etc.) as appropriate.
If you don't see the need for a main type then use 'located in/on physical feature (P706)' and 'located in the administrative territorial entity (P131)' to link to the next biggest local natural and political feature.
located on astronomical body (P376) is used for places on other objects, not for places on Earth, and I think it makes sense to stick to this.
For extraterrestrial places larger than a planet/planetoid we use 'part of (P361)' to link to the next biggest astronomical feature, creatiing a hierarchy of ever larger astronomical objects all the way up to 'Universe (Q1)', with 'P60 (P60)' to indicate what type of astronomical object it is. Filceolaire (talk) 13:12, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
If we want to communicate, we will have to have a common vocabulary and a common understanding. So what does mean use country (P17) as a main type for places on earth in your mind ? Because a country is nothing like a type by itself. TomT0m (talk) 13:24, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
The P107 Main Types were fairly high level/broad classes which were applied widely to a large number of items. For places on Earth country (P17) has been used in this way - i.e. it has been applied to any item connected to that country, rather than linking to the lowest level item which applies to the place. That is why I said 'Country' is being used like a Main Type. Filceolaire (talk) 22:37, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
  1. coordinate location (P625) is also used in organization or event.
  2. located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) is probably also used in organization.
  3. Is Antarctica a country?

--GZWDer (talk) 13:36, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Antarctica is a continent, but several countries claim parts of it (some claims are overlapping). πr2 (tc) 13:58, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
No such claim is recognised. I guess the combination: P17:Antartica may work, even if it isn't a independant country in the description of P17. -- Lavallen (talk) 17:40, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
There is some international recognition of the claims, although it's not widespread. But there are parts that are unclaimed by any country, so they wouldn't solve the whole problem anyway. --Avenue (talk) 21:18, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

How about removing P107 (P107)=geographical feature (Q618123) if there is a statement with the property instance of (P31) and an object which is a subclass of geographic location (Q2221906)? This would include cities, countries, churches etc., cf. subclasses of place. Also there would be some strange things like "fictional locations" or "spaceports", but maybe especially for them it would be good to remove the P107 statement. Moreover, everything which has the property P132 (P132) could be handled that way. But this will just sum up 15% of all P107 (P107)=geographical feature (Q618123) statements: 265.899 of a total 1.703.819 (slow performance on these queries!).--Zuphilip (talk) 15:16, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

I think we can simply remove p107 and do nothing when there is already a value for p31 or to p132, and add p31: geographical feature (Q618123) if there is none yet. I would guess we could also list as potential error items that use subclass of (P279) as places do not seem likely to be a subclass of anything an there seems to be quite a few errors in p107 like "town: p107: geographical feature (Q618123)" --Zolo (talk) 16:15, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
Items in Antarctica are usually dealt with by using continent (P30) -> Antarctica (Q51). See New Swabia (Q252609). Pikolas (talk) 18:49, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
Would the new added statemenc be permanent or could it be deleted if a more specific statement with P31 is found in the future? Is this the error list you meant? (A more general error list) --Zuphilip (talk) 19:04, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2) is easier to query, and is a more useful way to identify geolocalisable items and not to mix administrative units and galaxies.--GZWDer (talk) 06:25, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
Yes, this list ! And P31: geographical feature (Q618123) only when we have nothing more specific (that is why I was suggesting to add it only when no other value already existed).
What do you mean by "easier to query" ? The globe should be provided in coordinate location (P625), adding located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2), and is also somewhat redundant with located in the administrative territorial entity (P131). I do not see why it is useful. The main problem is that we have to add the globe to the coordinates query. That is not really a problem for Wikipedia, but that may be tricky for other websites (see Denny's map that included extra-terrestrial coordinates). But if we want to avoid that the simplest solution is to create one (or several) properties for extra-terrestrial coordinates.
If we want to avoid mixing galaxies and admnistrative units, we should say that administrative units are instances of administrative units and galaxies instances of galaxies (or using the current system P132 (P132) and P60 (P60). I do not see a problem here: these data need to be added in any case. --Zolo (talk) 07:25, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

In most of the cases there is another property, like P132 (P132), parent astronomical body (P397), instance of (P31), P60 (P60), located on astronomical body (P376), located in the administrative territorial entity (P131), coordinate location (P625), country (P17), constellation (P59), and the statement P107 (P107)=geographical feature (Q618123) will not give us more information. If we delete the P107-statement and all these cases, we would end up with approximaltey 21.971 entities (1%), which probably could be transformed manually (in a new taskforce?), i.e. to goal would be to add an appropriate statement with one of the above properties for each of the remaining entries. What do you think? --Zuphilip (talk) 11:44, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I think that:
  1. We can use located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2) if it is a place on Earth; (If there're P132 (P132), located in the administrative territorial entity (P131), or country (P17)) It can at least prevent mixing place outside Earth and query result we really need.
  2. We can use located on astronomical body (P376) if it is a place outside Earth and located on astronomical body (P376) is useful of course;
  3. We can just delete P107 (P107)=geographical feature (Q618123) if it is an independent star; Use P60 (P60) to identify both stars and planets.
  4. coordinate location (P625) is used in organization or event unless we migrate them to P766 (P766) and headquarters location (P159), and is useless to identify places on Earth unless we can query only "globe" in its value;
  5. parent astronomical body (P397), constellation (P59) means this subject isn't on Earth.

--GZWDer (talk) 14:34, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Maybe, we can split these into two points: (a) How to proceed with the 1,7 Mio statements of the form P107 (P107)=geographical feature (Q618123)? (b) For which entities should we add located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2)? Please note that there also astronomical items - not on earth - with only the statement P107 (P107)=geographical feature (Q618123), e.g. Pipe Nebula (Q16016), Delta Telescopii (Q29434). A simple replacement for (a) is therefore maybe not applicable. I see a need with coordinates to know if they are on earth or not. There was a discussion with possible solutions for (b) at talk P625. Is this useful? Moreover, there exists a lot more object types: rivers, bridges, subway lines, churches, fictional places,... Would you suggest for all of them to add located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2)? --Zuphilip (talk) 15:12, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
I think the answer is yes. located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2) is a good way to identify places on Earth.--GZWDer (talk) 15:58, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Following the idea of GZWDer and others expressed above:
  1. terrestrial geographical items could be identified with the property instance of (P31) and hierarchy starting from geographic location (Q2221906) and (optional?) located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2);
  2. also extra-terrestrial items (e.g. craters...) could be identified with located on astronomical body (P376) and P31 with the same hierarchy or with a new one starting from an item called "extraterrestrial place";
  3. other astronomical bodies could be identified with the property P60 (P60).

--Paperoastro (talk) 20:56, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I am aggainst adding statements located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2). It is for me like the standard assumption that the things are on earth and if I want to speak about extra-terrestical things I will mention that explicitely. I would suggest to handle things in wikidata in the same manner: if there is no astronomical property present, then the things will be earth-based or maybe without a base (e.g. fictional). Otherwise, for extra-terrestical objects there will be an astronomical statement indicating that. I am a little sad, that we only speak about "located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2)" and the rest of the discussion is ignored. --Zuphilip (talk) 10:16, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I can accept that Astronomical entities, found on Sol III, can use located on astronomical body (P376)=Earth (Q2). It would for example be logical for such entities as impact crater (Q55818). -- Lavallen (talk) 17:34, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Inverse properties

IMHO we should keep only one between category's main topic (P301) and topic's main category (P910). --Ricordisamoa 15:53, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

It's not really a problem to have both, and as a user I like to being able to go back and forth just by two clicks. It's also an opportunity to find some mistakes, if one of the two is wrongly put or wrongly changed, the inconsistency can be detected and listed. TomT0m (talk) 16:05, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
These two are not actually a bad pair in my opinion, as one could be used (pending the Commons RFC, I suppose) to delete the Commons category property. --Izno (talk) 17:49, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata on Stackoverflow

Hello all,

We have open a #wikidata channel on Stackoverflow.com : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wikidata . Stackoverflow structure push for concise, precise Question > Answers. Since stackoverflow is specially design to manage Question / Answers, let's use this tool to ask your technical questions, store your technical tricks, and search for answers. I myself put some questions together with its answer for big troubles I met, but small questions like big ones could get there to build up a searchable database of questions/answers. Yug (talk) 00:37, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Example : Stackoverflow.com > #wikidata chanel > WikipediaAPI & JS: Retrieving an article's introduction? question & answer > JSfiddle working code-demo. Just handsome ! Stackoverflow is the world leading forum for webdevs, it will be great when we will get more of that. Yug (talk) 20:16, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Merging

Please merge Q9128026 in to Pear cultivars (Q9601130) --Vhorvat (talk) 01:05, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Seems like Hoo man already handled this. — ΛΧΣ21 04:44, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Infobox in lua using Wikidata ?

Does someone know some applications of lua infobox using Wikidata ? I am developping an infobox in lua and I want to compare some code to see if I am doing right. Snipre (talk) 18:46, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Did you talk to the people at Wikidata:Taxonomy task force. They have a working Lua infobox. --Tobias1984 (talk) 11:15, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
Some examples: Occitan is building complete infoboxes without parameters, see oc:Modèl:Infobox. Russia is using some wikdata properties in infoboxes, see ru:Модуль:Wikibase ru:Шаблон:Wikidata/page and ru:Шаблон:Wikidata/link, zh: might be using zh:模块:Wikibase for Adminstrative regions. HenkvD (talk) 19:35, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

point in time vs as of

I noticed that when I search for the qualifier "as of", I'm redirected to point in time (P585). Are we sure we want those to be the same property? I think "point in time" should be for providing facts, like that a given natural disaster occurred on this date. "As of", on the other hand, should be for our own reliability; if I add the fact that the mayor of some small town is Mayor So-and-so as of 2013, and no one looks at the page for ten years, it would good for a future reader to know that So-and-so may no longer be mayor in 2023. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 18:28, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I would think that a "start date" without "end date" infers "as of", and where possible, we should be using start date. --Izno (talk) 19:44, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
That makes sense, I agree. Should we take off "as of" as a redirect to "point in time". --Arctic.gnome (talk) 01:50, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
Please don't remove 'as of'. For things like population figures 'as of' May 1812 redirecting to 'point in time' is appropriate. Even for events that have a duration but where we don't know the start and finish dates - e.g. all we know Foo is that he was chief of the Bar in 1790 because the slave trader they attacked that year recorded the fact - we can still record
  • Foo
    • office held:Chief
      • of:Bar
      • point in time:1790
      • start date:unknown value
      • end date:unknown value
OK? Filceolaire (talk) 12:26, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
"Where possible" being my point. I am in general agreement with Filceolaire otherwise. --Izno (talk) 23:10, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Laws as sources

Should there be a property specifically for when a source is the original initiator of something (laws, constitutions, etc), rather than just where we know about it from? Using "stated in" isn't very specific, and more information could be given if whether something is the original source of the fact was specified. --Yair rand (talk) 23:26, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Maybe "legislated by"? Side note: Wikisource integration could really help with the sourcing, as many of these laws might have entries on Wikidata. Pikolas (talk) 23:46, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
There are main regulatory text (P92) and foundational text (P457) but they seem to be more appropriate as qualifiers than as a sources. --Zolo (talk) 06:40, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
I notice that main regulatory text (P92) was originally labelled "legally established by", and the property has some leftover uses which don't fit with its current label. --Yair rand (talk) 23:17, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

ZH: Chinese variants ?

Hello all,
I'am digging within wikidata for some linguistic researches about Chinese language and it's variants. I'am a bit puzzled by the following things.
Given a variant of a Chinese entry's title, is there a way to get another target Chinese variants via the wikidata API ? I can't find any such thing in the API. converttitles simply convert the string of variant A back into the string in variant B, B being where the wp article is indeed stored. But if you have a string of variant B (where is the article), there is no way to get the string of variant A. Is this really a functionality of the API, or is this a side effect of zh-wiki => wikidata's structure ?
Anyone to contact about converttitles & these Chinese variants ? Yug (talk) 23:54, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

What there is a zh-hans and a zh-hant version of Wikidata ([1], [2]). There are also zh-cn, zh-tw etc. (languages are defined in MediaWiki I think). So the most natural thing to do, is to compare the different versions. There is no guarantee that labels and descriptions will always perfectly match, but I do not think an automated translation tool would make much sense for a researcher, what you would retrieve would have to be the data stored in the converting software, not those in Wikidata.--Zolo (talk) 07:04, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Aggregating sources.

Suppose that if I want to state when and where an object was discovered, I should state. "Discovery place: X, qualifier: date: Y". Now I have two sources about the discovery of four-ram zun (Q10925255):

  • source 1: place: Xiangshan, date: april 1938
  • source 2: place: Huangcai, Xiangshan, date 1938

So source 1 is more precise for the date, source 2 for the place. As far as I can tell, both sources are of equivalent reliability. So what should I do ?

  1. A single statement with the two most specific values, and the two sources.
  2. Two statements ?

Solution one is a bit misleading as to what is stated in the sources, but solution 2 makes it hard to automatically retrieve the most precise data. So what should we do ? --Zolo (talk) 06:49, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I'd go with option 1 but each source can have the additional property P387 (P387) with the information you gave above. Filceolaire (talk) 12:10, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
Actually, at second reading, there is one source that is more precise on both counts than the other so that the problem is slightly different (one source is more precise, but it is in Chinese, and gated, and I am not even sure of the article exact references, even though it is in a supposedly scholarly database). Regardless, I think we should have guidelines for such cases, so that things are clear. --Zolo (talk) 09:27, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Attributing museum directors

Looking at items like Louvre Museum (Q19675) I was wondering if there is a consistent approach on attributing museum directors (and directors of other cultural institutions). Properties like chairperson (P488) or chief executive officer (P169) don't seem to apply to a museum director. Would be great to know if this should be realised on the museum's item, the director's item (e.g. through position held (P39)) or both. From what I see director (Q5280516) could work to indicate director status. Thanks for your feedback and thoughts on this issue. Regards, Christoph Braun (talk) 14:37, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

We could expand the scope of director (P57). The Anonymouse (talk) 06:18, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
What we have here is much more similar to chief executive officer (P169) or chairperson (P488) than to director (P57) (movie director). I would say that we could have a new generic "manager" property, or whatever sounds generic enough to be applied when no more specific property is available. --Zolo (talk) 08:22, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
I went ahead and proposed a new property: Wikidata:Property proposal/Organization#manager/director The Anonymouse (talk) 15:18, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

delete template

Hi.

Would like to ask how to tag an item with the delete template instead of raising up at Wikidata:Requests for deletion?

There is only "Read" and "View History" links, with no edit links in items.

I am a Wikipedian who also contributes to Wikidata by the way.HYH.124 (talk) 05:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

You can't do that with items or properties, but you can do that with other pages.--Jasper Deng (talk) 05:49, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
...which is the reason why items have to be deleted through Wikidata:Requests for deletion instead of {{Delete}}. The Anonymouse (talk) 06:09, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
Because users cannot edit source of item? There is some gadget for marking tto delete. JAn Dudík (talk) 07:14, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
RequestDeletion, which sends the request to RfD, does display a message at the top right side of the page of an item (is that what you mean?). The Anonymouse (talk) 14:51, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Adding language link fails

I try to link the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_wandering_spider to the http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_v%C3%A1ndorp%C3%B3k set of pages but I get the following error: Site link Brazilian wandering spider is already used by item Q312038. Perhaps the items should be merged and one of them deleted? Feel free to ask at Project chat if you are unsure. What should be done? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.159.77.165 (talk)

Because enwiki's one is in Phoneutria (Q312038) and huwiki's one is on Phoneutria nigriventer (Q7179416). --by ReviTCMG at 09:58, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
Can they be merged? Or what should be done? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.159.77.165 (talk)
No they can not merged. Phoneutria (Q312038) is about a genus and Phoneutria nigriventer (Q7179416) about a species of this genus. --Succu (talk) 10:33, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
But I feel like the species should somehow be related to the genus, doesn't it? I'm not a Wikipedia editor and have no clue what should be done in this case but I'd love to see that the Hungarian species description is linked to all other languages. The content should be somehow transformed to make this possible. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.159.77.165 (talk)
I added parent taxon (P171). --Succu (talk) 11:17, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

missing dialog

I can not add german sitelink for Wikipedia to Stalag VIII-A (Q3968052). I filled in de, but small part for the article name does not appear. This is the second time I have this problem. Using here Opera Version 12.16 Build 1860 Plattform Win32 Betriebssystem Windows 7. Thank you, Conny (talk) 08:32, 5 November 2013 (UTC).

  Added by Pasleim. The Anonymouse (talk) 14:57, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for adding, what about some informations about the problem itself? Thank you, Conny (talk) 07:28, 6 November 2013 (UTC).

Merge proposal

Yes, I read the top text for requesting mergers elsewhere, but I'd rather not learn (yet) how to merge myself. These two should be merged: (Q7377402) with (Q9429256) Crispulop (talk) 19:24, 5 November 2013 (UTC) @Crispulop:

  Done --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 20:15, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Introducting Beta Features

(Apologies for writing in English. Please translate if necessary)

We would like to let you know about Beta Features, a new program from the Wikimedia Foundation that lets you try out new features before they are released for everyone.

Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview upcoming software and give feedback to help improve them. This special preference page lets designers and engineers experiment with new features on a broad scale, but in a way that's not disruptive.

Beta Features is now ready for testing on MediaWiki.org. It will also be released on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki this Thursday, 7 November. Based on test results, the plan is to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.

Here are the first features you can test this week:

Would you like to try out Beta Features now? After you log in on MediaWiki.org, a small 'Beta' link will appear next to your 'Preferences'. Click on it to see features you can test, check the ones you want, then click 'Save'. Learn more on the Beta Features page.

After you've tested Beta Features, please let the developers know what you think on this discussion page -- or report any bugs here on Bugzilla. You're also welcome to join this IRC office hours chat on Friday, 8 November at 18:30 UTC.

Beta Features was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Design, Multimedia and VisualEditor teams. Along with other developers, they will be adding new features to this experimental program every few weeks. They are very grateful to all the community members who helped create this project — and look forward to many more productive collaborations in the future.

Enjoy, and don't forget to let developers know what you think! Keegan (WMF) (talk) 20:51, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Distributed via Global message delivery (wrong page? Correct it here), 20:51, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Section break

    Umm how do you  find the author and editor on this page ??? :) !!! 
  • i need the author
  • author
  • translator


     thanks for reading this and i need an answer QUICK !!! so hurry up and answer me :) :0  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by 2601:e:9680:3f2:18b5:3baa:c80:23c1 (talk • contribs).
You can find the authors of any page by clicking the view history tab at the top of any page. --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 02:12, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

information channel needed?

Is there allready a possiblity to inform native speakers or have a projectpage, that when I found talkpage entries in a for me not readable language, that I an inform speakers of that? [3] How would you handle? Thx, Conny (talk) 07:26, 6 November 2013 (UTC).

re: property qualifier source

Hi! While fixing "Format" violations at Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P244 for Library of Congress authority ID (P244) I noticed that

a) during a changes as [4], [5] etc. the qualifier source is not deleted automatically even when values are changed.
b) in the log after the deletion of property P244 there is no indication what happens with the associated qualifier(s). Are these deleted or are they still ghost entries in the database?

Regards לערי ריינהארט (talk) 00:59, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

The constraint checks are generated by bot most frequently once a day. It would be nice to have rechecked constraints on each change of an item. This could be done in the job queue. For this a special database is needed and a special page to display the content. --Fomafix (talk) 11:42, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the comment! לערי ריינהארט (talk) 11:58, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

wd:slow

Wikidata seems slow in saving Projectpages etc. That makes no fun - what are the reasons? Greetings, Conny (talk) 07:29, 6 November 2013 (UTC).

As slow/fast as before. Mostly it depends of the size of the page. --Stryn (talk) 08:46, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
There is a bug to track efforts to improve item loading times; I presume this is much the same issue. Feel free to go vote for it, although it's already classed as high priority and major severity. --Avenue (talk) 10:01, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
I don't think that item loading times are related to project chat's saving times. --Stryn (talk) 10:06, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
Maybe I misinterpreted what was meant by "Projectpages etc". I agree that the saving time for this page (Wikidata:Project chat) should be unrelated to item loading times. --Avenue (talk) 12:08, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Snak type for the Commons media datatype

I am trying to use the API to add a claim with the Commons media datatype. I assumed (from wbgetclaims) that the media datatype takes a string like a normal string property. Example:

Add a image (P18) claim with File:Information.svg to Wikidata Sandbox (Q4115189):

/w/api.php?action=wbcreateclaim&format=json&entity=Q4115189&snaktype=value&property=P18&value=Information.svg&summary=summary&token=token&baserevid=baserevid

However, I keep getting:

"error": {
        "code": "invalid-snak",
        "info": "Could not decode snak value"
    }

Examples of string, item, time, and coordinate are given at mw:API:Wikidata#wbcreateclaim, but Commons media is not. What is the proper way to do this? The Anonymouse (talk) 18:05, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

image (P18) is simply a string value. --Succu (talk) 18:28, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
I guess I was forgetting to add quotation marks ("") around the string. Now it is working, thanks! The Anonymouse (talk) 18:41, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Imported from WIkipedia vs no source

To me "imported from Wikipedia" means "mass-imported from Wikipedia with possibly inadequate supervision" while no source means that it was added by a human, presumably knowing what he was doing. I would say that no source is normally more reliable than "imported from Wikipedia". Practically, would it be good practice to remove "imported from Wikipedia" once the data has been checked ? I would think it is. --Zolo (talk) 09:30, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

If it is a kind of information, we normally do not require a source for, yes, I agree. One of the tasks I am doing now, is to replace "imported from", with a "real" source. -- Lavallen (talk) 09:43, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
Should imported from Wikimedia project (P143) be deprecated? --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 12:21http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
No, but it's not a property that show that the source (or the transfer-method to Wikidata) is fully reliable/trusted. -- Lavallen (talk) 12:59, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
it's not a property that show that the source (or the transfer-method to Wikidata) is fully reliable/trusted or not :) it's a property who make able to juge the reliability. TomT0m (talk) 13:10, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
Sound reasonable, but unfortunately the opposite is happening. Some bots are in large scale adding "imported from wikipedia" even to claims, that they not imported ([6]), just when they found empty source claim in WD and same info in some WP. Also these "references" are added to claims like Property:P18 or Property:P856, where they make only a little sense (and in case images from Commons are truly misleading). --Jklamo (talk) 13:26, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
That is _really_ bad. wikipedians are going to judge Wikidata based on these statistics when it comes to being a good source: http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php This really is hurting us. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:55, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
Using a reference like "imported from" in P856, does make sense, when we find statements that are wrong. And yes, Lydia is right. Adding bad sources to Wikipedia, would add a lot of badwill. -- Lavallen (talk) 17:14, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
I think Lydia is correct: these stats are horrible and it will be very hard to convince local Wikipedias to use Wikidata if its sourcing is incompatible with the local policies about verifiability. But that point of view didn't quite gather a consensus at Wikidata:Requests for comment/Sourcing requirements for bots. On the other hand, the stats look a lot worse than they truly are because the vast majority of statements that have been added so far do not require a source. If one considers User:Byrial/Property statistics, it's easy to see that the most used properties are simple, indisputable facts including the top seven properties P107 (P107), country (P17), sex or gender (P21), located in the administrative territorial entity (P131), instance of (P31), Commons category (P373), contains the administrative territorial entity (P150), locator map image (P242). One can add to that the properties that point to other databases such VIAF, IMDb, MusicBrainz and so on. To get meaningful stats on how good Wikidata is doing in terms of sources, we need to first differentiate between properties that require a source (or typically don't require a source) and properties that can (typically) be used without a source. 70.49.203.238 20:07, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
But I still often find wrong data in located in the administrative territorial entity (P131), because Wikipedia has been used instead of real sources. -- Lavallen (talk) 20:26, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

There is an open bot request removing imported from Wikimedia project (P143). --Succu (talk) 21:30, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

instance of for mythological figure pages

Hi! I wonder what the property instance of for mythological figure pages should be.
short list:

Regards לערי ריינהארט (talk) 12:46, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Magnus edited and used fictional character as value for instance of. Thanks! לערי ריינהארט (talk) 18:45, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
I think you should use 'Part of':'Romanian mythology' or 'Slav mythology' as well. 86.6.107.229 20:27, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Need help with merging

Hi all, I tried to add an interwiki link between en:Church of Our Lady and pl:Kościół Najświętszej Marii Panny (add Q11745414 to Q347442). While they are not literal word-for-word translations, they refer to the very same thing. Both are disambiguation pages linking to various Churches of Our Lady worldwide (that happen to be called "Churches of Holies Mary the Virgin" in Polish, hence it's not a literal translation). Most of the links on both pages link to the same articles in both languages and so on.

Yet, when trying to add the interwiki link, an error pops up: Site link Kościół Najświętszej Marii Panny is already used by item Q11745414. Perhaps the items should be merged and one of them deleted? Feel free to ask at Project chat if you are unsure. Could anyone help me with merging the two? Halibutt (talk) 02:27, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

  Merged See Help:Merge for more info. The Anonymouse (talk) 03:16, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Next sister project: Wikisource

Hey everyone,

The next sister project to get language links via Wikidata is Wikisource. We're currently planning this for January 13. The coordination is happening at Wikidata:Wikisource. On this page we're also looking for ambassadors to help spread the messages to the different language editions of Wikisource. Please help if you can. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:31, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Any idea when will be Wikidata used by other projects? quote, news, (meta, mediawiki), books, versity and wikitionary? JAn Dudík (talk) 20:53, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
No concrete plan yet as I am planning this as we go along taking into account how things are going with the deployments that we're making. One thing is pretty clear though: Wiktionary will come very late compared to the other projects because it requires a lot of development effort. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 23:12, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
I think Wikiquote should be next as it is fairly similar to Wikipedia from a technical standpoint. --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 02:58, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Overview of connected stations

I shared this on the Wikidata talk:Railways task force, but other people might be interested too. I made a kml dump of all the stations that are connected. You can view it in Google maps. Multichill (talk) 22:30, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Wonderful! Thanks for sharing!--Micru (talk) 23:31, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

New option for Commons links - feedback needed

I've left a new option for Commmons links: VI. Make use of "topic's main category (P910)". Some feedback would be very much appreciated. Thanks!--Micru (talk) 23:29, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

I've advertised this on the (English) Commons Village Pump as well. --Avenue (talk) 01:26, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

search of Ö

Why does the search not display Öffi (Q2606214)? Thx, Conny (talk) 07:38, 6 November 2013 (UTC).

It's the problem I reported in Wikidata:Paper cuts#Missing search results, and Jeblad previously did so in bugzilla:42234. On test.wikidata.org, a new search backend has been installed a while ago that should solve the problem, looks like it has not arrived here yet. --YMS (talk) 08:56, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
It is now live here for testing. I'll post a separate message about this with details in a bit. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:13, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
Doesn't work: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=%C3%B6ffi&button=&title=Special%3ASearch&srbackend=CirrusSearch --тнояsтеn 13:53, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
Seems to be fine now! --тнояsтеn 12:58, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Disambig page link

Should we only link a disambig page to other language when their title is the same (case insensitive and ignore language varieties, such as color/colour) ? Currently, some disambig page link are literally, such as cs link of Q226663. Shall we remove all literally meaning links and link all disambig page of same title in different languages? For example,

  1. Relink de:Courant, fr:Courant, it:Courant (disambigua) and nl:Courant to en:Courant, and cs:Proud to en:Proud. these link all link to en:Current (Q226663) currently. Current and courant are not same thing: The German translate of en:Electric_current is de:Elektrischer Strom, not Elektrischer Courant; and Current can be a given name (see en:Jeff Current), and its Czech translate is not Proud of course.
  2. Spilt Q5690299 to several items (At least zh and ja links should be spilted, because it is only one of "endorsement"'s meanings).
  3. zh:域 can mean en:Domain_(biology) and en:Domain of a function; However, It can also mean en:Field_(mathematics), en:Field_(physics), and so on. Should we spilt zh link Q200975 to one new item?

The linking method of disambig pages is a mass, and hard to deal with.--GZWDer (talk) 13:58, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata:Disambiguation pages task force/guidelines helps a little. The most important rule is: "The item should only contain links to Wikipedia disambiguation pages with the exact same spelling". --Stryn (talk) 14:32, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
But I really don't know what to do with pages which contains Chinese/Arabian/Russian etc. letters, I try to skip this kind of pages, because I dont understand them. --Stryn (talk) 14:39, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure that rule make "common sense". Disambig-pages are de facto pages in ns-0, that are not considered a part of the project-content, but are there to guide users to find correct pages. If it is of any help for users to link "xx:color" to "yy:colour", then let them stay in the same item. In Swedish "C" and "K" are often in the same part of the phonebook, same thing with "Ph" relative "F", since they often can be replaced with each other. -- Lavallen (talk) 20:20, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
See also Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Disambiguation_pages_guidelines: mostly no consensus. --Zuphilip (talk) 20:45, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
My suggestion is:
  1. If there're both upper case and lower case disambig pages in one language, then link uppercase only to uppercase, lowercase only to lowercase.
  2. If there're only one of upper case and lower case disambig page sin one language, link them together.
  3. punctuation differences can be linked like 1 and 2, such as if there're AAABB and AAA-BB in enwiki, than link AAABB only to AAABB and AAA-BB only to AAA-BB; If there're only AAABB in enwiki, we can link it with AAA-BB in dewiki.
  4. various forms can be linked like 1 and 2, such as if there're Indosament and Indossament in one wiki, link Indosament with Indosament and Indosament with Indossament; If There're not both Indosament and Indossament in any wiki, we can link Indosament with Indossament.
  5. If there're both disambig page about same spelling and same literally meaning, link the same spelling page. Such as link de:Courant, fr:Courant, it:Courant (disambigua) and nl:Courant to en:Courant, not en:Current.--GZWDer (talk) 05:52, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
see testwikidata:Q210, testwikidata:Q211, testwikidata:Q212 and compare Q347048 and Q344964 for example. Note that dawiki link of Q210 should be da:Ark and jawiki link of Q211 should be ja:ARK, This is probably a bug in Wikibase software.--GZWDer (talk) 05:59, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
see testwikidata:Q213, testwikidata:Q214, testwikidata:Q215, testwikidata:Q216, testwikidata:Q217, testwikidata:Q218, testwikidata:Q219, testwikidata:Q220, testwikidata:Q221, testwikidata:Q222 for another example. This is a link reorder of a mass item Q13219783.--GZWDer (talk) 10:59, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

The muppets (Catalan)

Dear all,

I enter 

I realised when loking for information about the Muppets in Catalan that if I google (or search in wikipedia) for "muppet" I will end up in the "The Muppets" page, in English. This page is not linked to a Catalan page, so I was going to create one. However, there is a page in Catalan that kind of gives all the information, it would be the one about The Muppet Show:"the Muppets"

http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muppet_Show

This one is in Catalan and has all the relevant information, but I can not link it to 'cause it's already linked to "The Muppet Show".

I would really appreciate it if someone could find the time to look into this and fix it, since I have not been able to.

Thanks in advance.

  Done Draft started for w:ca:The Muppets. Now you can add more info.--Micru (talk) 11:11, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

New search backend - testing needed

Progress! We now have the long awaited new search backend here for testing. It will still need some tweaking but please do try it and give feedback. It is running in parallel to the old one. You will need to visit a special page to use it: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=athens&button=&title=Special%3ASearch&srbackend=CirrusSearch Please let me know about any issues you can still find with it so this so we can soon make it the default. Thanks to Chad and Katie for working on this.

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:17, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I am searching for "Gemeinde in Österreich" which should give at least municipality of Austria (Q667509). If I use the link directly (with the spaces), i.e. https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=gemeinde%20in%20%C3%B6sterreich&button=&title=Special%3ASearch&srbackend=CirrusSearch I received 11 results, which are all containing "Gemeinde" and "Österreich" in the German label. If I use the link directly (with underscores), i.e. https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=gemeinde_in_%C3%B6sterreich&button=&title=Special%3ASearch&srbackend=CirrusSearch less results are shown (looks like the order of the words is then important). The same is true if "+" is used as a deliminator. If I type in "Gemeinde in Österreich" in the search box, then no results are found. On the other hand, if I type in "municipality in Austria" I will find a lot of objects. --Zuphilip (talk) 12:39, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. I think we need to add more normalization to better handle underscores. Cheers. Katie Filbert (WMDE) (talk) 15:14, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for the answer. One observation was also that the German description (with Umlaut?) is not searchable. I added "Gemeinde in Österreich" as German description for more 1.000 entries, which I couldn't find. Is this a feature or bug? --Zuphilip (talk) 22:38, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
The search is supposed to search through stuff in the language you set your interface to. So if you're using Wikidata in English the search should return results which have a hit in the English label and description and aliases. We should probably expand this to fallback languages in the future. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:02, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
Please double check that you are appending the "&srbackend=CirrusSearch" parameter to the search url. For me, search for Россия (Russia) works with Cirrus. (e.g. [7]) If you still have problems, can you give us a link to try? Cheers Katie Filbert (WMDE) (talk) 15:14, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
FYI, Cirrus search is temporarily disabled due to technical reasons ("Databases were getting overloaded, and Cirrus's search updates for wikidatawiki looked suspicious." says the search team), probably due to rate of edits being a bit more than expected and changes needed in the search backend. Aude (talk) 21:49, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Grace Metalious' Peyton Place

No mention here of Peyton Place, the 1964 TV series that launched the careers of Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neil? Surely that series had some impact on Grace Metalious' estate. Metalious died after it was in production. Even selling the rights to a TV series she was $200,000 in debt and had only $41,000 in the bank? Does not compute! How was she cheated out of the rights and royalties for that TV show? This article is severely incomplete.

I assume that this is about Peyton Place (Q1247551) and probably on a corresponding Wikipedia article. If it is about a Wikipedia article, please post the comments on the article's talk page. --Glaisher [talk] 06:57, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Lua enhancements - needs your input

We're going to spend some time on improving Lua around Wikidata. Please help us collect wishes and prioritize at Wikidata:Lua enhancements. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:57, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Debridement

I am trying to modify the wikilink for the italian wikipedia page https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablazione_del_tartaro so that it correctly links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debridement_(dental) instead of Dental Hygenist - I deleted one of the links but it then says I cannot add the new link as it is already in use. Any clues? --Itemirus (talk) 09:17, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

I have moved the Italian link "Ablazione del tartaro" from Q1079856 to Q5248564. I've moved quite a few links from dental assistant to dental hygenist. I have also created a new item for English link "Scaling and rootplaning" at Q15139949 and populated it. Has this fixed the issue? Delsion23 (talk) 09:29, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
Yes, thank you - well done :) --Itemirus (talk) 19:26, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

After the decision to leave P107 (P107), I opened a discussion here to reorganize the pages of List of properties. --Paperoastro (talk) 22:50, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Numbers datatype

Any idea when the numbers datatype will be available? Last time I asked, I heard it was supposed to happen in September, but September has come and gone. --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 03:00, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

The initial version is in the last stages now. Hopefully with the next code-deployment we'll be able to get it live on the test system and then shortly after here. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:02, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
Will that be numbers only? Or numbers + physical unit? --Tobias1984 (talk) 20:46, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
The initial version will be without units. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:04, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
I did a quick check of Wikidata:Property_proposal/Pending/1 (Dimensionless number properties). Maximum sustained winds looks like it doesn't belong there. The infobox says that the wind speed is entered in knots. Probably better to wait for number + physical unit. Total Debt is also in that list. Did we decide to input the currency in a qualifier? --Tobias1984 (talk) 14:03, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Instead of having numbers with units, wouldn't it be simpler to just have dimensionless numbers and add a unit qualifier if necessary? --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 14:11, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
I think, the advantage of entering the unit would be that it limits the allowed inputs (as is the case for dates and coordinates). If we have to enter a qualifier for "unit = meters per second", we have to create items for a lot of SI-prefixes (e.g. nm/s, ng/g, µl/l). It would be nice if the UI would have a switch similar to the language selector in the top right line. People would able to select for each numerical property in which unit they want to view it. E.g. Somebody wants general speed in km/h, wind speed in knots, distances im km and crystal lattice distances in Ångström. I think the UI should be able to make these conversions. I am just not sure if that would work with the usual input + qualifier approach. --Tobias1984 (talk) 14:29, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

administrative units joining and separating

How should we show administrative divisions (countries, sub-sovereign-states, cities) that merge or separate? So far I've been doing this by putting multiple values in "preceded by" and "succeeded by", but I don't think that's quite right; those two properties seem to be for concrete lists, like a list of Presidents of the United States. Do we need to create four properties: (1) merged into, (2) created from merger of, (3) separated into, and (4) separated from? We already have separated from (P807), but on the description page for that property it says not to use it for geography items. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 18:57, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

The problem with having lots of different properties with very similar meanings is that a query has to gues which property has been used in which case. I think it is better to use 'preceded by' and 'succeeded by' in all these cases. These properties can have two or more values so they can cope with merges and splits.
We will eventually have a property for boundary maps so we will be able to be completely precise about these changes. Filceolaire (talk) 10:46, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
I have this far used "preceeded by" and "succeeded by", even if I often find it hard to describe everything. Sometimes is the split/merge only regarding administrative tasks and not regarding geographic boundaries, like the split of Gothenburg Municipality (Q52502) in 1998. Healthcare-issues and some other things were then suceeded to Västra Götaland Regional Council (Q3233447), but the geographic boundaries were not changed at all. -- Lavallen (talk) 12:01, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Database rights

User:LVilla (WMF) of WMF Legal has just posted a page on Database Rights on meta, in response to our query to them some months ago. Any more questions should go on the talk page over there. Filceolaire (talk) 09:53, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

The most important bit is probably the last sentence:
"For EU databases, bots or other automated ways of extracting data should also be avoided
because of the Directive’s prohibition on “repeated and systematic extraction” of even
insubstantial amounts of data."
Filceolaire (talk) 10:38, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Fixing a constraint report

The constraint report Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P20 now has a component that relies on a property that has been deprecated, and in some places deleted from the Q-item. Would someone who knows how to fix the query please do so, and it would be useful if we can add some instruction how to progress issues with reports, even if there was instruction/link at Wikidata:Database reports. Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:03, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Like this? -- Lavallen (talk) 06:13, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
okay, thanks  — billinghurst sDrewth 06:57, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Please note that now there is no constraint for the target to be some place. Moreover, we may want to have the constraints for place of birth (P19) and place of death (P20) equally? I don't know which constraints for locations are optimal. --Zuphilip (talk) 10:29, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Merging Lipohypertrophie

de:Lipohypertrophie (Q1827374) should be merged with en:Lipohypertrophy (Q6556713).90.238.12.218 20:22, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Someone has done it.  — billinghurst sDrewth 07:01, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
  Merged by Izno --Ricordisamoa 00:35, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

conflict : merging or deleting

Hi, I try to link the french article "Confiscation d'œuvres d’art sous le troisième Reich" (that is already linked to the english article Nazi plunder) to the german corresponding article "Raubkunst" instead of "Beutekunst (Zweiter Weltkrieg)". It is a close but different subject. Wikimedia makes it difficult ; do you have a solution ? There is seemingly an item under number Q328376 that doesn't allow it. Thanks for your advice. --Franz53sda (talk) 18:02, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

I've merged Q2133014 into Q328376 which has moved the German and Swedish links into Q328376. I've put the other German link in a new item at Q15144437. Delsion23 (talk) 20:34, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Many thanks for your help. But the current french article still have a link to the german article Beutekunst (Zweiter Weltkrieg) and not to Raubkunst that is mentionned here. Or are there some changes necessary to make it ok? --Franz53sda (talk) 00:15, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
  Resolved --Ricordisamoa 00:47, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Mneomotechnique

Those two linked page lists should be merged!!! https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q191062 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q13461032

Requests for merging should go to WD:RFD, not here. --Rschen7754 08:58, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
RSchen7754: That is not true, it is recommended everyone to ask here in doubt, see MediaWiki:Wikibase-error-sitelink-already-used. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:38, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
Well, it shouldn't be that way, and I will be changing that interface message. --Rschen7754 20:43, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

How do I search for itens to merge?

Hello everybody! I searched for this question in the FAQ but it wasn't useful so I came here in a broader area hoping that someone could help me. The situation is: in the past, when a newbie started translating a page from other wiki they usually copied the interwiki area so, a bot could add the interwiki area after some time. Nowadays, when newbies do that we can't know from what wiki the translation come from and few people remember to add (or even know how to) interwikis here. So, how do I know if an article I just created already exists in other language in order to merge then since I don't know all languages?OTAVIO1981 (talk) 13:17, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

This is how I do it:
  • Search the term in Wikidata (hopefully the term is similar in another language)
  • Websearch the term in English (its the biggest Wikipedia)
  • Websearch the term in the original language (e.g. French for movies from France or a person of France)
If it doesn't turn up after those 3 steps there is a 99% chance that the item doesn't exist on Wikidata yet. --Tobias1984 (talk) 15:56, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
There is also a new script created by Magnus which may help. Helder 19:41, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
You ca use also the new Wdsearch of Magnus --ValterVB (talk) 19:50, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Transliteration gadget

 
Transliteration gadget

I've written and added a gadget for transliterating site links titles. Hope to be useful for resolving conflicts. –ebraminiotalk 16:28, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! I activated it on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and looks good. --Zuphilip (talk) 17:13, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
Not so helpful at Google (Q95) ;) but I took it to use also. --Stryn (talk) 21:10, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
When I want to edit row with transliteration, transliterated text is addes to text-field.
e.g. BArack Obama (in picture) - I want to edit kkwiki, click to [edit] and now I have [Барак ОбамаBarak Obama].
And for me its strange to see transliteration of latin-alphabet letters with diacriticst (Šablona:! Sablona:!)...
JAn Dudík (talk) 22:19, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
I moved transliteration after [edit] link to solve that bug. The transliteration code originally was written for pywikibot to show unicode strings on Windows console so it will convert Latin-alphabet letters with diacritic because they are not supported in Windows console. –ebraminiotalk 23:12, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Can we have a transliteration gadget into other scripts? Because latin is not native for everyone. Particularly I would like to have all arabic/hebrew/hindi/... transliterated into cyrillic. And of course it is inconvinient to have my native cyrillic words transliterated outside (can it be optional?) Infovarius (talk) 17:42, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
Great tool! Would it be possible to use it for labels list as well? --Jklamo (talk) 10:50, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Interwiki tootips

On en-wiki, I'm told the English names for foreign languages, used in the interwikis' tooltips, come from WikiData. Could someone enlighten me as to where I would go to find the language names as they would affect those tooltips -- for instance, in case I wanted to add an English name for a language that doesn't seem to have one yet? Equazcion (talk) 06:03, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Disregard this, apparently WikiData doesn't handle these. Equazcion (talk)
If you know the language code of the language you are looking for, then you could use the magic word #language. I suspect that the deployment of bugzilla:5231 will help you aswell. Adding the name of an language that doesn't have one is done on http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool. --Snaevar (talk) 16:36, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata IRC channel

On behalf of the IRC op team for the Wikidata channel, we need to announce that the channel name will be changing soon, from #wikimedia-wikidataconnect to #wikidataconnect. This will happen within the next few days, but you can join the new channel now. --Rschen7754 09:55, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Yay! --Izno (talk) 00:24, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

New RFC on dimensions and units for the quantity datatype

After the office hour today and knowing that quantities are coming, I have started this: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Dimensions and units for the quantity datatype. Hopefully it will help to gather feedback on the dimensions and units that we need. The page still needs formatting. Any help is very much appreciated!--Micru (talk) 18:55, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Greek

Hello. When you want to add an article name from to in a page on wikidata, it says "site" and "page" in the white boxes. I want to translate this two words to greek (i am using wikidata in greek). I can't find it. I know how to use translatewiki.net. Xaris333 (talk) 01:25, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, it seems that you have a working account there already. (translatewiki:User:Xaris333 is you, yeah?) The relevant Wikibase messages can be translated here. If something breaks when you try to translate them, you should probably ask for help on the TranslateWiki support page. --Yair rand (talk) 02:02, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Freebase-Wikidata mappings

Denny has sent a message to the Wikidata mailing list stating that at Google they have created a mapping of Wikidata Qids to Freebase Mids, and that they are publishing it under CC0, so that anyone can use it in any way they want. Here at Wikidata we have already Freebase ID (P646) but this property was created without proper discussion, so maybe it is time for discussing what to do.--Micru (talk) 20:15, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

What do you mean by "without proper discussion"? The property went through the normal proposals process: Wikidata:Property_proposal/Archive/8#Freebase_identifier. --Yair rand (talk) 21:09, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
There are comments on the discussion of this property asking for a community-wide discussion, which never happened. That's what I meant. If there are concerns, they should be addressed.--Micru (talk) 21:18, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
Although I don't mind the interlinking I wonder if it is even worth the work. Freebase is a barren wasteland where even the most common subjects have no more than an entry with the first paragraph of the English Wikipedia copied into it. Today I have learned that Quartz(Freebase) has no social media presence, and is notable for "material in fiction". So what exactly are we linking to? --Tobias1984 (talk) 22:13, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
Citing Byrial: „There should certainly be no loop. Just imagine Wikidata using Freebase as reference and Freebase using Wikidata. We cannot use data from from Freebase“. And thats true. We gain nothing from this property. --Succu (talk) 22:25, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
it is clear that Google has hired Denny for use Wikidata for his business so we have to be careful not to be exploited --Rippitippi (talk) 00:11, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
Using Freebase as reference is one thing, linking to them is another. Pikolas (talk) 00:15, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
The suggestion is about linking to Freebase, just as we link to IMDB, VIAF, OSM, or MusicBrainz. Bots and tools then have the possibility to integrate data from several sources. This is not about copying data from Freebase or sourcing data to Freebase, but merely about having more identifiers. Personally I think the possibility to be an authority and identity hub for the whole Web is one of the great use cases Wikidata can be, and at the same time available to anyone and free to use.
I am surprised that it is assumed that Google would have a particular benefit from having these links in Wikidata. Google has published these links, so obviously they already have them. This is about adding more keys and identifiers to Wikidata, making it a stronger hub for identity and entity reconciliation throughout the Web.
Before I saw this discussion, I made a proposal on the Bot requests page. Should we continue the discussion here or there? --Denny (talk) 02:00, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
  Support. Thanks for the clarification (and the mapping work). This sort of property has ample precedent in Wikidata. It's simply supplying data for Freebase ID (P646), a property that's already been approved. Emw (talk) 05:48, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
  Support after following the ML discussion. I find particularly funny the idea that Google might be going to exploit us - isn't it our main idea to be used as a source of reliable data by everyone? Moreover, it's just an identifier, nothing more. For me, full support. --Sannita - not just another it.wiki sysop 19:45, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
The point is for everyone not for google and in this case only one who earns is google --Rippitippi (talk) 02:27, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Recent changes to sex or gender (P21)

Recent changes to sex or gender (P21) should be reviewed by the community. Although the editor has a WMF tag he is new to Wikidata and probably made the changes without reviewing the talk page and the previous discussions. It is not ideal that people just come here and make these changes without discussion. Especially with p21 it seems like any change should be discussed at this point in time. --Tobias1984 (talk) 10:59, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Forgot the link: p21 talk page. --Tobias1984 (talk) 11:01, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Property%3AP21&diff=86103907&oldid=85899842 Currently gender is gone again as an alias, but its a marginal vote. I think it is time for an RfC. Anybody up for drafting it? A lot of the arguments are already on the sex or gender (P21) talk page. Although it seems like an English-only problem I think input from other languages would is essential. People in other languages are also assigning the property and might not agree with the way their contributions are translated. Its all about nuance. --Tobias1984 (talk) 21:56, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

External, multi-language, C.C., wiki, knowledge-generative projects beginning to develop in, and/or collaborating with, Wikidata?

In what ways might external, multi-language, Creative Commons' licensed, wiki, knowledge-generative projects begin to develop in, and/or collaborate with, Wikidata / MediaWiki / SemanticWiki, if possible, please? Is there a Wikidata / Wikimedia web page or site for this? Who is best, or what's the best forum, to communicate further with about this? Thanks and cheers, Scott.

External sites do not, in general, have pages on Wikimedia projects. Meta is the place to discuss possible new Wikimedia foundation projects. See the list of previously proposed projects there. Many projects start on wikia.com but I have no idea how much support they have for structured data over there. Hope this helps. Filceolaire (talk) 19:00, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Clean up of search summary required

MediaWiki:Search-summary and its language forms (Special:PrefixIndex/MediaWiki:Search-summary) refer to a bugzilla and make it specific to a time (in the English language version). It seems to me that a bug resolution has been implemented and the message should look to be removed.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:41, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

  Done. --Yair rand (talk) 20:27, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

BBC open licences voice samples from radio programmes: London 'Speakerthon' event invitation

I'm working with the BBC to help them to open licence a selection of audio "snippets" of notable people talking, from certain of their radio programmes. See the BBC blog post launching the project - note the references to how the BBC will use Wikidata in conjunction with the project. The first three files are already in Commons:Category:BBC voice samples and linked to from Wikidata using P990. We're holding an event in London on 18 January 2014, to select and upload more (booking essential). Details are at Commons:Commons:BBC voice project. It would be good to meet some of you there. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:58, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Hans and Johann are the same person

Dear whom it may concern,

Why can't I merge these two wikis: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%281825-1911%29 and https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_av_Gl%C3%BCcksburg

Kind regards,

Orf3us (talk) 22:22, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

  Merged --Pasleim (talk) 22:26, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Thank you. Regards, Orf3us (talk) 22:31, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikinews

On English Wikinews, I have started a discussion on the Water cooler about the possible ways Wikidata might be integrated with Wikinews as it currently is with Commons and Wikivoyage. Wikidata users are welcome to drop in and chat. —Tom Morris (talk) 22:27, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

URL format (dumb technical question)

Silly question but does anyone know how to convert http://208.80.153.172/wdq/?q=claim[31:(tree[3305213][][279])] into an external link ? It seems that the bracket create a bug. -Zolo (talk) 10:54, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

http://208.80.153.172/wdq/?q=claim%5B31:(tree%5B3305213%5D%5B%5D%5B279%5D)%5D
? -- Lavallen (talk) 11:46, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, that seems to be something like that but not quite (your link gives me all items that use p31 (more than 3 millions) rather than the 2000 that are instances of paintings. --Zolo (talk) 12:00, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
Better? Observe how I use the magic word "urlencode". -- Lavallen (talk) 12:13, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, it works, though I do not get why we cannot simply wrap the whole link in "urlencode". I have created {{Instance list}} so that I do not need to ask for help every time ;). --Zolo (talk) 12:42, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
I think it might be because URI components are encoded in a specific way. {{urlencode:https://wikipedia.org}} -> https%3A%2F%2Fwikipedia.org. This is similar to JS encodeURIComponent vs. encodeURI. Maybe the characters allowed in domain names are different from those allowed in parameters of query strings (?foo=bar&baz=qux&quux=garply). πr2 (tc) 03:39, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Request for assistance

I have an old Windows XP PC and I'm editing chemical formulas. Unicode subscripts aren't showing up: U+2093 "x", U+208A "+", U+208B "-". Any ideas? Do I need to enable a specific chart set? Which one? Thanks --Chris.urs-o (talk) 05:50, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
I need a font with U+2093 "x" :/ --Chris.urs-o (talk) 04:40, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Instances of human

I've raised a Request for Comment for the issue involving the items Q14896454, Q14914342 and Q14870023. All three items were nominated for deletion twice now, but they cannot simply be deleted. Feel free to comment. -Cycn (talk) 14:18, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Association of mess

voluntary association (Q48204) is linked in french to an article about Swiss assocations, but it seems it's also the word in german and that this page is otherwise an homonimy page; it's too much for me, could community give a hand to sort that out ? Big conflict, hands and knowledge needed ... TomT0m (talk) 17:19, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

I deleted enwiki link and created Verein (Q15177627), and frwiki link which is now in association (Q15177651). I also removed everything associated with disambiguation (descriptions and a claim). The next task will be to decide whether all connected articles are about the same thing, and to find missing links for en- and frwiki (if they exist). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 20:45, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Are titles held by people instances or subclasses?

For a specific title held by a person, such as Prime Minister of Canada (Q839078), I can't figure out when to use instance of (P31) and when to use subclass of (P279). I want to link Prime Minister of Canada to position (Q4164871), prime minister (Q14212), and head of government (Q2285706), but I'm not sure which property goes with which item.

While I'm here, I may as well also ask, if Prime Minister of Canada has the property applies to jurisdiction (P1001)=>Canada (Q16), does it also need country (P17)=>Canada (Q16)? Thanks. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 03:03, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Prime Minister of Canada (Q839078) is an instance of prime minister (Q14212), which is a subclass of position (Q4164871) (since, ultimately, Q839078 is an instance of Q4164871). It is an instance since it is a specific position, in other words there aren't any other more specific instances that would be categorised under that subclass (not people, as they are instances of "human"). As for country (P17), afaik, it is much broader than applies to jurisdiction (P1001) and is useful/used regardless of its relation to P1001. SPQRobin (talk) 04:02, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
Hmm, browsing through the various items, the situation with regards to instance/subclass is less clear than I thought. SPQRobin (talk) 04:05, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
No, Premier misnistre du Canada is an occupation of a person, which. If we show this as a class, regroups all the primer ministers of the canada. If we think this as the set of all persons who have been prime ministers, then it is a subset of all the person who have prime ministers in the world. But I admit it's not the only way to see things. TomT0m (talk) 13:04, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
The other view is as a <political mandate>. Then we have a choice : technically, a political mandate is an absract thing, that is instanciated every time somebody becomes a prime minister. Then the couple <peron, time interval> is a (concrete) instance of that political mandate. The other possible view is to see this abstract thing as a member of the set of all the virtual political mandates in the world ( { ... <French prime minister>, <New York mayor>, ... } ). Then Primer minister of Canada is in this set, and this post have been created legally in the Canada. But we would have to name that class and find the properties that its instances shares. I think each of these abstract mandates are associated to an administrative division, are accessible to eligible people according to the local law, are created by a law text, have specific purposes. In that sence, I think it make sence to consider them as instances of the class of legally defined virtual mandates. TomT0m (talk) 16:35, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
I think Tom T0m's analysis is spot on. In general the difference between 'instance of' and 'subclass of' is that an 'instance of' is a single thing which has a lot of specific statements you can make related to that instance - a start date for instance. A class represents a group of instances so there won't be many statements you can make that apply to all the instances in that class.
This gives the clue to the answer. 'Prime Minister of Canada (Q839078)' is the office of Prime minister of Canada and is an 'instance'. 'list of prime ministers of Canada (Q927338)' is the class of Prime ministers of Canada and is a 'subclass of'. Rename Q927338 to 'Prime Ministers of Canada' to match the name in other language wikipedias. Filceolaire (talk) 12:13, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
I guess "political mandate" can be difficult to apply to all chiefs of goverment in the world. If I have understood correctly, in Israel, the chief of goverment is directly elected by the people. In Sweden (s)he is choosen by the chairman of the parlament, and the parlament has the option to reject his/her choise, but they do not have to confirm it. The Swedish statsminister is a "juridical mandate" but I doubt it can be described as a political mandate under those circumstances. -- Lavallen (talk) 13:01, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
It was not meant to be totally exact but to clarify the notions of classes and instances. So political mandate might not be the right name for that class; but what's for sure is that class has a lot of subclasses potential, we can have subclasses to regroup those mandates by state or juridictions, by analoguous functions, and so on. (on a side note as there is a lot of ways to classify, there probably will be uses for classes classification, this is another example). TomT0m (talk) 13:45, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Finding pages to add to a Wikipedia

Is there a tool that will tell me what the Interwiki datasets that don't have a specific language page included are largest? So for example, I could enter 'en' and '15' and get the 15 largest interwiki datasets that don't have an 'en'. I'm asking because I just added a page to the english language wikipedia that already had 5 entries in the dataset before I added english and I'm pretty sure that's not even close to largest. I know that there are other reasons than missing articles for a language not to be in a particular set.Naraht (talk) 19:16, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Have a look at Terminator --Pasleim (talk) 19:24, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
Thank You *very* much. I've done some linking.Naraht (talk) 22:18, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Politics infoboxs task force

Hello,

Come to partcipate the Politics infoboxs task force --Dom (talk) 05:55, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Should these two items be merged?--GZWDer (talk) 06:03, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

No, they are in different namespaces. --Robot Monk (talk) 14:14, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
But they describe exactly the same object. Ideally it is like the category versus articles with the exact same subject : we should be able to add the category and the WIkipedia article in the same item. Maybe we should do the same : create a property tp link the items in the main and the wikipedia namespace explicitely. TomT0m (talk) 14:33, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
I would say that those should be merged. I'm normally against merging items with different namespaces, but also e.g. in Finnish Wikipedia (Q175482) you can see two different namespaces (personally I can't understand how language versions of Wikipedia are notable enough on many Wikipedia versions). --Stryn (talk) 14:53, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
The problem is that we can put only one link per language, whatever the namespace, so we would have to choose and to use another intewiki system, this is a Wikidata desing problem, that's why I proposed the property solution. For the notability of laguages versions, this is easily achieved because researchers and press publish articles about that, let's not be more strict on criterium than necessary, this is more than enough for eligibility. TomT0m (talk) 15:11, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Q44441

Hello. I think someone have made vandalism in [8] (Naderyan9). Can someone check it and undo the problems conistributions? (I am afraid maybe I will make something wrong and i am not sure i am right) Xaris333 (talk) 02:49, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Al-Ahli Saudi FC (Q44441) should be OK now. The Anonymouse (talk) 06:13, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Interwiki conflicts page is too big

I believe that the page at Wikidata:Interwiki conflicts is getting way too large and unnavigable. Should we not consider splitting it into a page for each month? It will only keep on getting bigger as time goes by. Delsion23 (talk) 11:09, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

  Support --Tobias1984 (talk) 12:25, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
I propose to discuss particular conflicts at talk pages through {{Interwiki conflict}} and to keep only a list of them on Wikidata:Interwiki conflicts. It also helps to classify conflicts into solved/not resolved/in doubt. Infovarius (talk) 18:54, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
Sounds like a good proposal to solve the problem. Would an RfC need to be started to get consensus? Delsion23 (talk) 10:46, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Any language allowed in wikidata

Just saw blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/06/any-language-allowed-in-wikidata

If any language is allowed on wikidata then maybe we need to make this more useful for languages that don't yet have a wikipedia. The obvious step is to develop and test infobox templates here - ready to deploy when their wikipedia gets created. Filceolaire (talk) 21:03, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

This test environment for new wikis is also called Wikimedia Incubator. We just need to wait until phase 2 gets deployed there. Regards, Vogone talk 21:07, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Is phase I even deployed there? Ajraddatz (Talk) 19:06, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
No, and as far as I've heard it probably also won't be in the near future. For phase 2 on Incubator things look better, though (as data can be accessed arbitrarily soon (see Bug 47930)). Vogone talk 19:18, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
The problem with incubator, as I understand it, is that it is in 10 different languages (as of today). If any two of these languages have the same topic then only one of the languages can have a sitelink to that topic. It likely makes more sense to work on infoboxes for a new language here on wikidata than trying to do it on Incubator. Unless of course the software gets changed so ten pages on incubator can all have sitelinks on the same wikidata item - can't see why this wouldn't work; we could still have a limit of one sitelink per topic in each namespace. Filceolaire (talk) 22:44, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
Allowing one sitelink per topic per namespace would also go a long way towards properly supporting Commons interwiki links. However this will apparently not be enabled in the "foreseeable future", due to other development priorities.[9] --Avenue (talk) 23:22, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
It probably wouldn't be too disruptive to allow more than one sitelink (for Incubator only), but I'm sure there are some technical hurdles there. But yeah, not a priority for the moment. Pikolas (talk) 00:07, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
What do you mean by "it is in 10 different languages (as of today)"? incubator:Incubator:Wikis lists far more than only 10. Regarding "If any two of these languages have the same topic then only one of the languages can have a sitelink to that topic.": That is why phase 1 is harder to deploy to Incubator than phase 2 will be (as phase 2 does not require linked items anymore after bug 47930 is fixed). These technical difficulties are resolvable, but the Wikidata development team set its priorities to other things for now. So we will have to wait. Vogone talk 13:11, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

When a new language is enabled in Wikidata, it becomes useful really quickly as more labels are added. It is also not intended as something that is associated with incubator as incubator does not support Wikidata. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 14:36, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

General questions about scope of country items

Consider the item Germany (Q183). Is this only supposed to be about post-reunification Germany? It has a date in 1949 in a qualifier, so I am confused. Should be it be follows (P155) West Germany and East Germany? These questions apply to other country/region articles. πr2 (tc) 19:58, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

I am not an expert but believe that East Germany (German Democratic Republic) was "dissolved" or "merged" into West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany), which still exists today but covers all of Germany. For other countries, don't know and maybe it's case-by-case. Aude (talk) 22:18, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Even if Germany is legally a continuation of West Germany (Q713750), I would be inclined to keep them as separate items and remove the pre-1990 items from the Germany page. This is mostly to help people who want to compare data from the two Germanys without getting post-unification data mixed in. Note that we have separate items for "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" (Q174193) and the post-1927 "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (Q145) even though that change was probably less drastic than the unification of Germany. However, if we have West Germany and Germany as separate items, we'll have to carefully use country (P17) and applies to jurisdiction (P1001) on items that span both countries. For example, the German legislature is a continuation of the West German legislature, so German Bundestag (Q154797) should have the property applies to jurisdiction (P1001) as West Germany=>end_date=>1990 and Germany=>start_date=>1990. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 00:09, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
I definitely agree that West Germany should have its own item, even if it is legally continued as the Germany of today. Ajraddatz (Talk) 00:17, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
First Wikidata follows what the various language wikipedias do. This probably means that Wikidata needs separate items for The german empire, Weimar germany, Nazi Germany, East Germany, West Germany, Post unification germany and an item for Germany which covers all of these. Each wikipedia article, on each of the various language wikipedias then needs to be looked at and assigned to one or other of these items.
Second Wikidata follows the data. Can you use date qualifiers to encode all the facts into one Wikidata item. If you cannot bend the properties to encode all the info in one item then consider if you could do so if you had two or more separate items. You could probably just about manage Germany with two items, one for Germany in general - treating West Germany as the successor to Nazi Germany and having a separate item for East Germany - but it would probably be better to have a bunch of separate items connected together with 'preceded by' and 'succeeded by' properties. Filceolaire (talk) 00:42, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
When the reunification happened, did Germany become an EU member while West Germany ended EU membership? Do all references to international membership, individual citizenship, country associations of cities and organizations and so on, all need to change at the point in time of unification? I'm leaning towards yes (actually, changed my mind --Yair rand (talk) 04:00, 20 November 2013 (UTC)) no, but I think it's quite a complicated issue. --Yair rand (talk) 00:00, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
It's been the same country, the Federal Republic of Germany, since 1949. "West Germany" was just a name used in other countries to differentiate between the GDR ("East Germany") and the FRG ("West Germany"). But "West Germany" didn't cease to exist, the former GDR states just joined the FDR. So memberships, citzenships, country associations, etc.. stayed exactly the same after the reunification. --Kam Solusar (talk) 17:43, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Hm, so nothing really changed except some territory? That greatly supports keeping it as the same item for data purposes. (We wouldn't want to use separate items for the US for each number of states it's historically had.) I think we should be consistent about this, both for individual countries and for how we deal with countries in general. If West Germany and post-reunification Germany are considered the same entity, then similar issues (Republic of China, for instance) should be handled similarly. Also, all statements currently referencing West Germany (such as the European Union (Q458)founded by (P112)West Germany (Q713750)) should be changed. Also, it might make sense to relabel Q713750 as "Federal Republic of Germany", to reduce confusion regarding statements on pre-reunification topics. --Yair rand (talk) 04:00, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I am dealing with simlair things in the administrative division of Sweden. An example: I try to describe that Motala Municipality (Q508108) was founded 1971, preceeded by Motala City two rural municipalities and parts of a third rural municipality. 1974 three other municipalities were merged into Motala. 1980, Motala was split into Motala and Vadstena municipality. Smaller changes, like when one or a few real estates are transferred between municipalities, are not described.
One of my problems here is that only svwp are describing pre-Internet municipalities. And not even svwp have separate articles for entities that existed for only a few years. -- Lavallen (talk) 09:50, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
Again look at the statements you want to make. Where it is pretty much the same item with a minor boundary change you can use one item with multiple values for areas and border maps with start date/end date qualifiers. Where things are being split and merged you probably need separate items. There is a big grey area between these options where either strategy (one item or 2 items) would work. In those cases follow the wikipedia articles - 2 items if there are 2 articles; one item if there is only one article - in my opinion. Filceolaire (talk) 16:52, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
"Vadstena kommun" 1971-73 and "Vadstena kommun" 1980- have the name in common. Therefor are they in the same article on svwp. They have the same P132 (P132)/instance of (P31), but their borders are not the same.
"Aska kommun" 1971-73 and "Aska landskommun" 1952-70 have partly the same name. The borders are identical. The P132/P31 are not the same in this case. "Aska kommun" 1971-73 only existed for three years and the only element of information we have, is the result of the local election, not much to create an article on. - Lavallen (talk) 17:56, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
I am not familiar with the details of these but in principle:
For 'Vadstena kommun' the fact that there is a time from '74 to '80 when this didn't exist makes it more difficult to justify having one item cover both of these unless the administrative area continued to exist under a different name during this time. Use the 'official name' property (awaiting creation of monolingual datatype) to list the changing names with date qualifiers. Otherwise separate items are needed.
For 'Aska (lands)kommun' I think you can cover this in one item. Use the 'official name' property (awaiting monolingual datatype) to list the various names and the 'borders' property (awaiting geoshape datatype) to list the various borders and the 'area' property (awaiting number with dimension datatype) to list the area, all with date qualifiers for when various values applied.
Does that make sense? Filceolaire (talk) 00:27, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
Yes. 'Vadstena kommun' did not exist at all as an administrative unit 1974-79.
Area can be found in recent data, and sooner or later (by the help of OHM) also the borders. One problem here is that in older history, I am not sure that any area can be found. It was the (taxpaying) people inside a geographic area who set up a municipality in the 19th century, not the dust they walked on. And when an area can be found, only area who was a base for taxation was measured. 'Worthless' (untaxed) land was not measured. The "dust" belonged to other entities until the 1970's.
I guess we really have to find a good definition of what an "administrative unit" is. Defining them as geographic areas sometimes doesn't make sense. -- Lavallen (talk) 18:30, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
Administrative units are legelly defined by a state or juridiction, probably by a law ... so an administrative unit is exactly that. I guess we can link these units to the law that created or modified them and their boundaries. TomT0m (talk) 19:21, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
I doubt there is any definition of an administrative unit. I guess we could imagine some more or less reasonable-sounding criteria (What are the unit's attibutions ? are its boundaries well defined ? Is all the territory subdivided ? Is there a clear hierachy of levels ? ...), but I do not think that would really work. The thing is do we absolutely need a definition for anything else than for choosing the value of P132 (P132) ?
@TomT0m, things are much more complicated like that. Texts define areas for some specific purposes, but afaik, nothing in France is officially called an "admnistrative unit". Should arrondissements, cantons, communautés de communes or zones franches urbaines be considered admnistrative units ? I suppose that among these four only the first one should, but if I tried to formalize that, I would easily fall into contradictions. --Zolo (talk) 20:26, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
And what are we going to do with administrative units who do not fit into a simple hierarchy? Is a Swedish County located in a Province or is a Province located in a County. The simple answer to that is "YES!", but that may cause serious problems to our robots and templates. Blekinge County "is in" Blekinge Province who "is in" Blekinge County who "is in" Blekinge Province  
We may cause a loop that our templates fails to handle.
And how are we going to define administrative units who do not have well-defined boundaries? Kiruna Municipality (Q499474) "is in" Lapland (Q2714126), but who defines Sápmi? Sápmi is the area in four states where one people have their origin, but it's borders are disputed. Not even this people is a well-defined entity. -- Lavallen (talk) 09:00, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Follow the law, if for the law it does not make sense that a unit is inside another one, or is composed of other ones, then we should not use "is in". The same arise for other type of administrative units : sometimes what is important is not their geographical boundaries but their legal responsabilities. TomT0m (talk) 17:28, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Major clean-up done on property proposals - some tasks pending

Today I have moved over 60 closed property proposals to the archive, plus I have created 10 new properties. I would need some help filling up the talk pages of the new properties with their corresponding infotable/constraints, notifying the people who proposed/participated in the discussions and listing the new properties on wd:p. Too much work for me alone... The new properties are:

Plus comments on the property proposal pages are very welcome to decide which properties are needed. Now there are "a few" less properties to comment on :) --Micru (talk) 18:57, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Great job! The proposal pages never looked so clean before! Now we are all ready for numeric-datatype property discussions. --Tobias1984 (talk) 23:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikiproject:Books from public domain

Hello, it would be interesting to take old dictionaries and encyclopedias, and try to systematically convert its content to Wikidata. As a bonus, it may give us some ideas on how reliable these sources are. As an example, I tried just the first entry in a volume of Biographie universelle by Feller (1839 edition) (Q15211155). The entry is Pieter van Laer (Q576907) and the birth and death dates are more than a decade off compared to what more recent sources state (I am sure it is the same person, as the description of the person, and the title of his works match). --Zolo (talk) 16:04, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps as a good place to start could be the Mix'n'match tool, it has already a similar example: Catholic Encyclopedia (1913). Then you would need to define a mark-up for the information that you want to extract from the Wikisource text. Once that is done, then it should be easy not only to import the data but also to reference the right page.--Micru (talk) 20:53, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Sounds similar to the ADB in Wikisource and more information https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allgemeine_Deutsche_Biographie#Online-Ausgaben . --Zuphilip (talk) 22:15, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Artistics groups

Hi, I just labelled in french Castellano and Pipolo (Q3662243). It's kind of a pair of artist, so it's file to used "composed of", but I'm not sure of the use of "P31: pair" with the "of" qualifier to state a set of which nature it is. Any thought ? TomT0m (talk) 22:10, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

PS: I discovered them while I was trying to label the item on a movie, so aditionnal question, is it fine to use this pair in something like writer or should we use their individual items and make two statements ? TomT0m (talk) 22:13, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Alternately consider simply using duo (Q14073645) or double act (Q1141470) instead. Such sets are very common, re Category:Art duos (Q8265116). LaddΩ chat ;) 03:31, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Dumb question about subclasses

Hi, I'm just getting my head round WikiData and want to make the best use of it as a GLAM Wikipedian in Residence in York. I'm trying to understand the categorisation of museums in various subclasses and wondered whether there was a way of seeing an entitie's subclasses? For example art museum and natural history museum link up to museum but I can see no obvious way to get a list of all the subclasses below a class? Am I being stupid? I also went to look for archaeology museum and noticed that Archaeological Museum is confusingly actually for a specific museum in Milan. I'm sorry if I've put my question in the wrong place! Thanks! PatHadley (talk) 16:35, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

No you are not dumb, there is ATM no way to do that inside Wikidata itself, as there is no query engine yet and no workarounds, but there is a Wikimedian tool : http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tree.html . TomT0m (talk) 17:48, 12 November 2013 (UTC) PS: maybe you are dumb, I don't know you, but not because of that. I'm beeing dumb. /o\
By the way, note that labels do not need to be unique. Q604908 is called "Archaeological Museum" because it is the name of this museum, but Q3329412 is now called "archaeological museum" too :). --Zolo (talk) 18:08, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the speedy reply guys! Good to know that there's a tool. Be great to see it integrated. Apparently I am dumb :P because I can't work out what I need to do the 'rp' number to make queries work? Whoops! PatHadley (talk) 19:45, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
But I guess for museum subclasses one can propose a property?--Ymblanter (talk) 19:57, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
There is need for a specialized property as subclass of (P279) is the same for any class. Here is the tree : http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tree.html?q=33506&rp=279 Not very clean, some work to be done it looks like :) TomT0m (talk) 20:21, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
The tree looks indeed a bit messy ("hair museum", "open-air museum", "musée de la ville de Paris"), but all of these seem to be valid subclasses of "museum". If do not see how we can make things more tidy in a tree that uses only subclass of (P279). --Zolo (talk) 20:36, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
By defining the class a little more precisely, which we currently do not do at all. In semantic web standards, we can define classes wrt. a definition, for example a science museum is a museum who is about a subclass of science, this could make some of the classes in this hierarchy attached to some of the direct subclasses of science museum, which is a class with one subclass as of now, but could be a class with a lot of subclasses. Museum of Paris might or might not be useful, the question is whever or not we need to make this class explicit or if it can just be defined implicitely by a query or a predicate. It should imply that all this instances have a location property with Paris as value (or we can make a bot set this). TomT0m (talk) 20:53, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
We could use a Museum of a capital or Museum of a big city to be the superclass of the mParis Museum one. TomT0m (talk) 20:56, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
So how do we get a tree showing all "thematic" subclasses of museum (hair, sex, archaeology...), but not other subclasses like "university museum"(=museum operated by a university) ? Should we have a subproperty of subclass of (P279) for that ?
"Musée de la ville de Paris" is actually a legal status (I think all museums operated by the city of Paris have it, but most museum in Paris are not operated by the city of Paris). --Zolo (talk) 21:19, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
Sounds a job for class classification, we can type classes :) We would need an item thematic museum class and another locality museum class, and science museum item would be an item of the former. We can then filter the class showed in the tree. TomT0m (talk) 21:43, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
I see that the Arts and Architecutre thesaurus uses a class structure like material -> materials by origin .. -> poplar wood it'ev_page=1&subjectid=300012363. Maybe we should try something like this ? I guess it would require a more systematic investigation. --Zolo (talk) 07:53, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
I am pretty sure that we should only use create items for concept record type (cf. also the longer description) records of AAT on Wikidata – and the same for other classification systems. I would like to state this at Property talk:P1014 and hope you consent? --Marsupium (talk) 12:54, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
That seems to be a broader question than just Art & Architecture Thesaurus ID (P1014). Do we want items whose sole purpose is to make the subclass tree cleaner ("guide terms" as the AAT seems to call them). I am unsure about that. --Zolo (talk) 16:53, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Item is ubiquitous in Wikidata, your question is like "do we want a property whose sole purpose is to make the subclass tree cleaner",. Some of those items are closely related to some potention Wikipedia articles : articles about classification system. For example in biology, I'm pretty sure there is (or could be) articles about some classification, such as articles about a specific phylogenetic tree. There is several ways to class things, and as Wikidata can potentially use several of them for the same objects, in each field, we need a generic mechanism to be able to do that. Without creating new properties for each of them. TomT0m (talk) 17:36, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
I do not think that you are right. I know what you mean. Nevertheless, I want to claim a difference we can (and should perhaps) make: In the idea and current use of Wikidata's classes, they are a bundle of properties. Every subclass inherits the properties of its superclass and of the superclasses of the superclass and every instance inherits the properties of its class and of the superclasses of its class. The difference between "proper classes" (AAT's concept type records) and guide classes (AAT's guide term type records) is that the "proper classes" have additional properties compared to each of their superclasses, guide classes do not have any properties apart from subclass of (P279) <[superclass]>. That works fine for the AAT as a thesaurus. I think for Wikidata as a database this system is not that good. It will probably be more confusing for editors with guide classes than without. Admitting them, we are forced to care that nobody states something like instance of (P31) <[guide class]>. At least for the moment I propose to avoid their use. I have been ever critical of classes anyway – at least more than you, TomT0m. I think they are a technical way to keep things simpler – in natural language as in databases. And I support the use of classes and perhaps even a "strong Vrandečić-classification" and the use of AAT for that at Wikidata. But with all that we should keep in mind that they are not more than an auxiliary. "Proper classes" help to give a bundle of properties to an instance, guide classes do not have a use for that. So a cleaner class tree does not justify the creation of guide class items and the possible confusion in my eyes. Best, --Marsupium (talk) 12:41, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
I gave at least one usecase for them : allow the coexistence on Wikidata of several classification systems, as there is no universal ubiquitous one. As Wikidata as a Wikimedia project has (or should have) a NPOV principle, It is indeed very important. otherwise I'm not sure of what your point is. TomT0m (talk) 16:13, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
Returning to the special question above: I do not see a big problem in the fact that hair museum (Q5639512), open-air museum (Q756102) and musée de la Ville de Parismuseums of the city of Paris (Q3330843) are direct(!) suclasses of museum (Q33506). And I do not think that this is an example for a "POV-classification", merely an acceptable lack of classification. If we need a class like "thematic museum class" (better: "museums by thema") or "materials by origin" to guarantee NPOV it shall be ok, but ATM I do not manage to imagine such a case. --Marsupium (talk) 16:34, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
Of course I have no objection that Wikidata builds its own classification, but one - there already is several others, so the universality principle should make us take this into account, and second, it is not totally unique as we already not have a tree of classes and several ways to classify. We should be able which one we want to use. TomT0m (talk) 17:33, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── I agree that Wikidata should support more than one way of classifying information. Qualifiers can easily distinguish between different trees even within the same property. --Tobias1984 (talk) 17:52, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

By a qualifier on what ? On a class item (which does not make sense, it would be a statement), or on all the instance of statements that uses this classification ? This would be a massive loss of ressources and a potential big mess as we can state on which classification this refers to on the class item. TomT0m (talk) 09:48, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

missing and or broken language codes

Hi! Two weeks ago I met an admin from roa-rup.Wikipedia at the Esperanto irc chat.There are some odd issues with the GUI.

  1. In the vector skin I have a language selector at the right to the user icon. There it is not possible to select "roa-rup" as interface language. Please confirm and fix this issue. It might relate to detection of the NINUS character in Babel template / modul / MediaWiki extension. The langueage code should be the string starting after the pipe character and end before the last (not the first) MINUS character.
  2. Last year I met an Aramaic / Syriac friend in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. Today I added / tried to add arc:ܥܘܕܪܢܐ:ܚܒܝܫܬ̈ܐ to Help:Contents (Q914807) . Search for "arcwiki" on that page. This is according to the relevant value of arc:MediaWiki:Sidebar. The "in other languages" did not show up after the first reload but now the links are there. This might be expected behavior and may vary from case to case.

לערי ריינהארט (talk) 21:21, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

You should consider moving your feedback to WD:Contact the development team. --Izno (talk) 00:52, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
Just file a bug report on bugzilla: under "Universal Language Selector". Roa-tara is already in [10], so roa-rup should be too (other nonstandard codes like bat-smg need to be added as well). (BTW, in the meantime, just use "rup") πr2 (tc) 03:00, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
Any use of new non standard use of language codes is NOT acceptable ... So no "just use rup". GerardM (talk) 05:28, 19 November 2013 (UTC)


Maybe, this also belongs here. Feel free to move it, if not so. I get several languages displayed but when entering data for then, I get error messages of the kind "An error occurred during a save operation. The task could not be completed." This is regularly so for gmh, sxu, swg, wep, gos, and few more, for which I had entered hundreds of labels meanwhile if it had been possible. --Purodha Blissenbach Discussion  18:26, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Proposal for encouraging open source principles for bots

Today I was in a meeting with Catalan editors and it was proposed to build a "bot library" by asking bot operators to publish their code (and if necessary the data to be imported) in a public repository before running the task as part of the approval process. The idea behind is that some tasks are very similar to others, so the more bot operators can reuse code the better for the community (more efficiency and more examples for learners). What do you think of doing something similar here on Wikidata? --Micru (talk) 23:48, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

I would agree that we should ask them, but we shouldn't force them. --Izno (talk) 00:43, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Why shouldn't we ask for open source practices in the case of bots?--Micru (talk) 08:48, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Some of the code I have used, am I not the original Author of. -- Lavallen (talk) 09:41, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Lavallen: Did the original code had a free license that allowed forking and redistribution?--Micru (talk) 09:49, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
I'm not an expert in license, but as far as I understand: I can use it, but not publish it. Neither on a wmf-wiki or somewhere else. -- Lavallen (talk) 09:56, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Well, in case that happens, then we could leave it as: "if you are basing your bot on a free software project, publish your code". I think we should encourage open source principles.--Micru (talk) 12:14, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
I support this, but I'm a bit wary of coercing them to do it. Pikolas (talk) 13:27, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
I will ask in the bot discussion page.--Micru (talk) 14:30, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
I would love to see more code being contributed and shared in pywikibot. Multichill (talk) 22:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Not all bots are based on Python (Q28865). --Succu (talk) 22:39, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

  Done I have added a line to the bot request form for code with the remark "optional but highly encouraged".--Micru (talk) 15:04, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Report and questions on migrating away from P107

Hello all, fortunately almost all of P107 usages of term (Q1969448) have been removed except things that I myself can't remove it! check these links and helping out on this issue would be fantastic beside helping on the issue, I've got several questions:

Number of usage of P107 is less than 3M now and I call it progress! Best Amir (talk) 15:19, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

I have seen the use of P31: City / Town in places that look strange to me. These terms do not look persistent in time and space, so I'd like to see some sort of clarification on how they should be used. -- Lavallen (talk) 15:29, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
The problem can be in the following: some languages don't differ between city/town, for example in Russian both translated as "город". Infovarius (talk) 17:22, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
In the United States, the usage of city and town varies widely. Cities are generally larger than towns, but that is not always the case (I know cities with a population less than 500 and towns with more than 50,000). See w:Town#United States for more details. However, a settlement should always have an official designation (settlement_type parameter of w:Template:Infobox settlement on the English Wikipedia indicates this). The Anonymouse (talk) 17:32, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
The Swedish corresponding to both city and town is stad, but stad have several meanings, some formal and some informal. I'm afraid we need to create one item for each of these definitions, and create relations between them. -- Lavallen (talk) 20:17, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Well, my question is always, should the statement P107=geographical feature (Q618123) be simply removed or should it be replaced by some other general statement. I couldn't find an answer which is consensus. (Maybe more reliable for starting are these 125.000 geographical objects.) --Zuphilip (talk) 19:27, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
If the item is an instance of a mountain, lake, river, etc. we should simply remove P107. More difficult is the question about populated places. I suggest if the item has the property located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) or P132 (P132) with a proper value (no constraint violation) we should remove P107 without adding an extra P31 claim. --Pasleim (talk) 20:39, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
I would expect to see instance of (P31) added to these pages, as we now have WikidataQuery. While WDQ isn't practical for the wikis at this time, it does finally allow us to query conveniently, and it can be externally reused by third parties also. This will also enable us to migrate quicker, later. --Izno (talk) 01:06, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
We should absolutely start with the results of that query, but see reply to Pasleim also. --Izno (talk) 01:06, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
Some responses:
  • For P107="name (disambiguation)" with P31="Wikimedia list article", please remove P107 and replace P31 with P31="Wikimedia disambiguation page".
  • When we have any P31 or P279 value, delete P107.
  • When there are any of the following, create a P31 claim of the same value and delete the P107 value:
The rest, we can talk about after? --Izno (talk) 01:06, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Maybe create new item for "both town and city"? In czech language is only one word město which is applied both to Prague with more than milion inhabitants and for Přebuz with ~60 inhabitants (had town rights in history). JAn Dudík (talk) 21:46, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

How about "City/Town in Czech Republic"? -- Lavallen (talk) 08:03, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
But why Czech republic only? the same situation is minimally on Slovakia; and there ism ore language with one word for this. JAn Dudík (talk) 08:21, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
The word city and its translations can have various meanings. We should generally try to use official administrative status like municipality of Slovakia (Q6784672) in Wikidata.
We will need to be able to identify cities if we want to make lists like "list of largest cities" in the World. That seems far from trivial as there is no single criterion to indentify what counts as a city. Actually, the definition we want to use may depend on what we are trying to do, so directly adding city (Q515) to items would not really help. In any case, trying to make an international list of cities always gives some arbitrary, dubious or funny results (a typical example is "Chongqing is the biggest city in the World" just because what is called the "city" of Chongqing is mostly a rural area). --Zolo (talk) 09:03, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
Officially Sweden do not have any City at all since 1970. And the largest City as of 1970 was then the "largest city in the world" (Kiruna). Half of it is uninhabited protected area, since they are launching satellites there. But that does not mean that we do not name locations Stad anymore. But you will not find any official recognition to such claims. In fact, I think we need several items only to describe "City in Sweden", some of them already exist. -- Lavallen (talk) 11:03, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
For cities which have the privilege to name themselves "city" (independent of their size) there is also place with town rights and privileges (Q13539802). --Zuphilip (talk) 11:44, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
It's even worse than that. Not only do we not have any agreed definition of what is a city; even where everyone agrees that a place is a city we don't even have agreed definitions for what is the extent of that city! Which suburbs are separate towns and at what point do they become a part of the city? We could create an item for 'New York Metropolitan area' and declare that 'Newark' is 'part of:'New York Metropolitan area' but where is the source for that? I suspect that if you ask Wikidata for the 20 largest cities by population it will ask you what you mean by city. Filceolaire (talk) 12:47, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

My bot started on doing this task Special:Contributions/Dexbot Amir (talk) 11:22, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Help combining two items

Q2388569 and Q5372048 are the same person. Can someone help me combine them please, I don't really know how. Thank you so much! Keraunoscopia (talk) 21:39, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

  Done, here you can found instruction to make a merge. --ValterVB (talk) 21:55, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
Oh, nice! Thanks. This is the second time I've seen this happen, so if I come across it again in the future, I'll attempt the merge. I really appreciate it! Keraunoscopia (talk) 08:05, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

+621 on a small description addition?

The wiki seems to consider this as a +621 change. That makes no sense, as those words clearly don't make up 621 characters. What happened here? -- t numbermaniac c 12:01, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

This is due to a change in the internet data structure stored in the database. This is not visible on wikidata but the change size shows this. ·addshore· talk to me! 12:11, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
I think I get it. Thanks. :) -- t numbermaniac c 12:15, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Since this question comes up frequently, I added it to the FAQ. The Anonymouse (talk) 18:08, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that - I was honestly about to do it myself. On a side note, that page needs cleaning up a bit... some of those questions are pretty silly. (Do we have bureaucrats - who cares :D!) Ajraddatz (Talk) 18:13, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Call for comments on draft trademark policy

Adding timestamp for archive. --by ReviTalkCMG at 13:02, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Instance of: Portal?

What instance of (P31) are portal page items, e.g. Portal:Current events (Q4597488)? --Magnus Manske (talk) 15:43, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Given that we use Wikimedia category (Q4167836), Wikimedia portal (Q4663903) would sound like a consistent solution. --Zolo (talk) 16:04, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks! --Magnus Manske (talk) 16:13, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons page linked to this item(1 entry)

Did I make a mistake adding Category:Franciacorta in the section Wikimedia Commons page linked to this item of item Q1248668? Thanks and excuse me if I have made a mistake. --Lkcl it (talk) 20:04, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

I think it is o.k.--Oursana (talk) 21:48, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Per notability, this IP edit is correct in regards to this. John F. Lewis (talk) 23:34, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
It has nothing to do with notability, but the IP edit was correct nonetheless. The recent closure of the Commons links RfC means that cross-namespace Commons sitelinks like this one shouldn't be made, at least not until multiple links per project are supported (which isn't expected to happen for the foreseeable future). In the meantime, Commons categories should be linked to an item for the corresponding Wikimedia category (if we have one). --Avenue (talk) 11:50, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. (I didn't know that categories don't have to be linked, sorry) --Lkcl it (talk) 18:35, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
Ideally Commons categories should be linked somewhere, but just to a category item, not to the topic's main item at this stage. --Avenue (talk) 22:18, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Common Interwiki links

Hello guys! Sorry about my poor English. Pls, just let me know if there is anything just like this page on Meta. Is it possible to create anything related here on Wikidata? Sturm (talk) 19:11, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Moved from this now deleted page. John F. Lewis (talk) 23:14, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons page linked to this item(1 entry)

Did I make a mistake adding Category:Franciacorta in the section Wikimedia Commons page linked to this item of item Q1248668? Thanks and excuse me if I have made a mistake. --Lkcl it (talk) 20:04, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

I think it is o.k.--Oursana (talk) 21:48, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Per notability, this IP edit is correct in regards to this. John F. Lewis (talk) 23:34, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
It has nothing to do with notability, but the IP edit was correct nonetheless. The recent closure of the Commons links RfC means that cross-namespace Commons sitelinks like this one shouldn't be made, at least not until multiple links per project are supported (which isn't expected to happen for the foreseeable future). In the meantime, Commons categories should be linked to an item for the corresponding Wikimedia category (if we have one). --Avenue (talk) 11:50, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. (I didn't know that categories don't have to be linked, sorry) --Lkcl it (talk) 18:35, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
Ideally Commons categories should be linked somewhere, but just to a category item, not to the topic's main item at this stage. --Avenue (talk) 22:18, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Common Interwiki links

Hello guys! Sorry about my poor English. Pls, just let me know if there is anything just like this page on Meta. Is it possible to create anything related here on Wikidata? Sturm (talk) 19:11, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Moved from this now deleted page. John F. Lewis (talk) 23:14, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Property builds per type — available and findable listings

As I wander around manually doing violation fixes, I often will come across a cluster of records that need a similar fix, and when doing them, there is usually a series of other components that could be readily added without a lot of research. What I find difficult is a ready reference list of properties per thingy type, and the qualifiers that can be added. I wondered what was being done to build these examples and where they could be located to be easily findable (so if it currently exists, it is hard to find).

What I am envisaging is lists for some of the more common components, eg. buildings, naval ships, movies, albums. I know some of these sort of exist, however, they seem tucked away part of a specialty area and generally hard to find, rather than somewhere bold and obvious and up top in hierarchy and clearly available. Until we do these things, coverage in depth is going to be so spotty unless a knowledge expert visits an article, rather than allowing all to better populate items. This is also beyond gadgets and gadgets should really reflect the lists of items anyway. (Just an opinion.)  — billinghurst sDrewth 23:36, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

The idea at the current time is that task forces define these list of properties and give some examples. Snipre (talk) 09:19, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I am sure that it is, however, there is nothing much to show to the general punter. Seems to me to be a focus on the trees and lost of attention to the forest. The conversation is also about the coherent location of these pages so that they can be easily found. At the moment the pages seem to be designed for the function of the taskgroups, and not looking to the end client of the punter to assist them get the most of their data entry efforts.  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:21, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
Hey billinghurst! I started this page: Help:Statement_Manual_of_Style. If you think a page in this form would be useful then we could try to get people to create more guidelines. --Tobias1984 (talk) 12:18, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
Hi, Zolo started something like that, associate a list of properties to each class, something that I think very promising. I also started Help:Modeling a while back (somewhat similar to Tobias link) to make an index of domains, which was supposed to index the main classes of some domain and give some example items. What is really good whith what Zolo started is that we will be able to develop a property suggester gadget based on this. TomT0m (talk) 17:07, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I didn't know about those two pages. Very helpful. If we get some feedback what people are having trouble with it would also be easier to know how descriptive one has to be, to be helpful to the new users. --Tobias1984 (talk) 18:03, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I was thinking maybe the Task Force pages would be the place to put these, or the links to these at the very least. Filceolaire (talk) 18:22, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
The task force pages are more for the people heavily involved in one of the item categories. A lot of new users are probably just looking for some basic hints on how to fill out items. We have to keep an open ear to those asking questions. Especially the merge-tool is not visible enough an generates about 3 inquiries in the project chat a week. --Tobias1984 (talk) 21:34, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Definitely agree with the TaskForce pages are tooooo detailed and butt ugly to read through, it just needs to be examples and possibly link to task forces so people can ask their questions and participate. Needs something simple probably something like claim back Help:Properties and base it on the prime instances, then build Help:Properties/Human Help:Properties/Film ... We also want to be able to demonstrate the qualifiers in action.  — billinghurst sDrewth 02:23, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

What is StreamDeletion?

I was wondering if someone could provide some documentation for User:Ricordisamoa/StreamDelete. Last time this came up here, there were some TODOs. I was wondering what the current status is. What exactly does it do? Is it just the page calling Lua-assisted templates, or is there some kind of bot component too? How does it differ from the regular merge tool? Superm401 - Talk 03:45, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

@Superm401: It was an experimental and unofficial alternative to WD:RFD, providing some Lua-based tools to ease the admins' work; an apposite JavaScript gadget should have been designed to refresh the page dynamically. StreamDelete is used by the merge.js gadget, but it is currently unmantained, so it's better to use the official RFD system: maybe less smart, but safe. And now we have some cool gadgets for it, too :-) --Ricordisamoa 00:00, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Anyone know if redirects are happening? They would seem to be a necessity once we get out of beta if we are to have stable Qids. Filceolaire (talk) 14:28, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Search by Property

Hello, is there a tool to find items with a specific value in a property? For example to get the item with the IMDb ID (P345) "tt0120737".--CENNOXX (talk) 22:23, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

WikidataQuery can do such things. Your query: [11] --Pasleim (talk) 22:45, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Even better, with the AutoLists UI : [12] --LBE (talk) 08:33, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, that's what I've searched.--CENNOXX (talk) 19:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Lookahead presentations are not character set agnostic

I finding issues with the lookahead/search functionality due to the variations in characters with accents and such, to the point that many choices don't show as the appropriate grave/acute/cedilla/... is not being typed, and as it is a foreign language the minutiæ of the accent escapes my knowledge to know to type it. Example Brasília didn't show for Brasilia, and my keyboard is not set to type acutes over an i, let alone know that there is one. For example, is there a means that for an i that it shows any of the combination of iíìîïĩǐĭıį and similarly when they are typed it shows the other combos? [To note that I add the Anglicised version when I can, however, that is after I know and have the Q-code.]  — billinghurst sDrewth 05:51, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Are we using CirrusSearch here? -- Lavallen (talk) 10:23, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
Not at this point. It was in testing but had to be turned off because the machine couldn't handle the amount of edits from Wikidata. The Foundation is working on migrating it to a different one and then we will turn it back on. This should happen soon but I don't have an exact date. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:06, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
Are we then using "accent folding" or not? -- Lavallen (talk) 13:12, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
I don't know to be honest. Let's figure this out when it is turned on again and then tweak as needed. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:20, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
One problem when we discussed CirrusSearch on svwp, is that it does not look at as it is adapted to any language other than English. In Swedish it should be set to separate a from å and ä, but it is then also separating a from á, but that does not make sense. The problem Billinghurst tell us about is not solved by CirrusSearch. -- Lavallen (talk) 13:52, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
In the meantime I have been adding an alias without accents, whenever I come across an English label with accents, so it will show in the results if you spell it without accents. Filceolaire (talk) 14:18, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
Thx to all, if this will not be solved by search engine (and we should ask Nik what else is possible), is there the capacity for a bot solution where it basically runs through the title field to add a background/subsidiary alternate spelling based on no accents? While it may work, is it wise? as any addition would seem to be language specific, as what I envisage would be best as language agnostic. In the meanwhile, as per Filceolaire, it is the discipline of adding character agnostic to the alternate spellings, and is this something that we should add to editing guidance for that field?  — billinghurst sDrewth 23:14, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Showcase items - take 2

Hey everyone :)

Not too long ago I restarted the discussion about having showcase items. It seems to me that we agree to have them. Based on this discussion here's what I think will work:

  • We create a page Wikidata:Showcase items with 3 areas (upcoming showcase items, proposal for new showcase items, past showcase items).
  • A showcase item is displayed on Wikidata:Main Page for 1 week including a picture.
  • A showcase item needs to have:
    • sources for non-trivial statements (not accepting sourcing to other Wikimedia projects)
    • qualifiers where useful
    • correct language links to all sister projects that have a page for the topic
    • complete translation in at least 4 languages
    • descriptions that comply with the description guidelines
    • a complete list of aliases
    • at least 10 statements
    • an image associated with it
  • Anyone can propose a showcase item on the above page and help bring the current one to showcase item status.

Do you think this will work? Comments on the guidelines? I'd like to keep this as lightweight as possible so they are so far intentionally broad.

Cheers --LydiaPintscher (talk) 16:54, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

+1. Good idea. --Kolja21 (talk) 17:07, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
This is a good start. People may also be interested in [https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Project_chat&oldid=78400482#Some_guidelines this set of showcase (featured) items guidelines that I proposed in October. I'd suggest requiring a label in several languages. I'm not sure why we would insist on an image - some topics are hard to illustrate. Otherwise the criteria seem good. But who approves showcase items? An elected group of people (like enwiki's FAC)? Any uninvolved user (like enwiki's GAN)? The entire community? --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 17:25, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
Label in several languages is included for me in the complete translation to 4 languages. Or do you propose we add an additional requirement to have labels in more than those 4? I am unsure about how to decide on an item. I'd rather have us not spent energy and time on an election of a committee and things like that for this process. Is there something more lightweight we can do? As for requiring an image: It should be something to look at on the front page imho and that needs an image. --LydiaPintscher (talk) 17:30, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
+1. I like it! If Wikidata contributors are interested in "showcase item", it will be simple found people from the entire community that approve them. --Paperoastro (talk) 21:33, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Previous discussions were not as supported as this: April 2013, May 2013, October 2013. --Ricordisamoa 22:55, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

  Comment This is aligned with the above discussion where I was wishing to have generic examples of the same matters. We need to do something as the guidance is sorely needed.  — billinghurst sDrewth 23:17, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
It's a wiki. If some contributors want to create this page, they can. It's just an help page. There are too many unnecessary discussions, votes, RFC on Wikidata. Pyb (talk) 23:45, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
I'm going to echo Pyb and Nike: Just Do It (Q10854602). We'll get the details sorted out later. --Izno (talk) 00:52, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Not really sure that a showcase is enough: better a description of a class of items with mandatory properties and explanations of special cases. 129.132.210.189 01:45, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Commons: category redirects and local addition of the interwiki

I have noticed that when adding commons categories to the interwiki section that the search functionality displays both the category and the false category (not unsurprisingly, and this behaviour is the same as the HotCat gadget). There is an issue that the false category can be added as the interwiki, cf. with HotCat that will add the target redirected category. Is this something that the selection process for the interwiki can resolve or detect so that the actual target can be added? Should I be adding this as a bugzilla?  — billinghurst sDrewth 00:02, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Quantities datatype available for testing

Hey everyone!

We have a first version of the quantities datatype available for testing now on test.wikidata.org. It still has a few rough edges that we need to fix before we can enable it on Wikidata but I wanted to give you a chance to test it now already and help find issues early.

Here's a test property using the quantities datatype: https://test.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P63

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 23:04, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

One bit of initial feedback - we should have the ability to specify a restricted domain for a particular property (like integers only (might be different data types), and more importantly positive/negative or a particular range).--Jasper Deng (talk) 23:10, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Restricting the world again? ;) --Denny (talk) 23:36, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
It could be editable afterwards (although Lydia said on IRC that this won't happen) - it'll just enforce guidelines on the proper usage of the property.--Jasper Deng (talk) 23:39, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Two questions: should the enter key save the value like it does in the other properties? Also, what are the rules on commas versus periods - is this determined by the language? --Rschen7754 00:45, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Yes it should save on enter. Localisation isn't done yet. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:14, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
We have bugzilla:56685 for localisation. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:53, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Exciting! Is the explicit signing of positive numbers intended to be consistently applied, or is that one of the "rough edges" you're referring to? For example, since a population can never be negative, to have it listed as "+5,000,000" just makes pages harder to read without any obvious benefit. I'm guessing it's a known issue but wanted to check. :-) --Eloquence (talk) 07:49, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Jep. That's one of the rough edges ;-) The plus will go away. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:14, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Lydia: sometimes the plus sign is wanted, example: w:Oxidation state.--Micru (talk) 19:03, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
We have bugzilla:57589 for that now. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:57, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
<value amount="+300000000" unit="1" upperBound="+300000001" lowerBound="+299999999">
1. How will the unit look like when we deal with length/area etc?
2. How soon will we be able to modify the precision through the UI? I have a census-report with +/-50 in the numbers, ready to type in here. -- Lavallen (talk) 08:43, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Two problems:

  1. Scientific notation is not supported.
  2. "+" should be omitted.

--GZWDer (talk) 10:16, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

The largest number one can enter seems to be 10^{126}-1, which seems to be reasonable large. I found only that the number of positions for V-Cube 7 (Q1788746) is larger (besides some mathematical constructions). --Zuphilip (talk) 12:25, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Prefixes

Good to see the progress! It would be interesting if simple prefixes like ±, <, >, ≈, etc were also supported. Is this perhaps planned?--Micru (talk) 13:21, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Not planned for the initial version. I'll have to see how to solve this later. No concrete plans yet. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:56, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Work on disambiguations

I have discovered a way to find some items to merge – many disambiguations. Some items between Q9,000,000 and Q15,000,000 are disambiguations having only one link. Many of these can be merged with another lower-Qid-item.

The way to find duplicates:

  1. Open Special:Search and have only ticked main namespace.
  2. Enter an affix which usually identifies a disambiguation page.
    • I don't recommend entering "disambiguation", "Begriffsklärung" etc., because they are used very often. Use some less used like "olika betydelser" or "discretiva".
    • If there is a punctuation within the affix, the part starting with the letter must be replaced by an asterisk (due to issues with the search engine) – "rozcestník" must be replaced by "rozcestn*".
    • You should see something like this. If not, add -disamb* to the searched string.
  3. If you are fortunate, you will see result containing items having only one disambiguation link. Now you can find pages to merge using search (while searching, add dhomon* to the key word because thanks to a bot all disambiguations have "d'homonymie" within French label).

I hope it is interesting and someone joins in.

Maybe a bot can be made for this because this is much work for few humans. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:55, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

"Instance of" as qualifier?

Whenever we needed a general property that can be customized, we used the pattern "general property=>item" with qualifier "type of general property=>item that describes the type". An example of this can be seen in relative (P1038) // kinship to subject (P1039). Recently I'm seeing instance of (P31) used as a qualifier of the general property instead of using a specific qualifier. I'm not sure that "instance of" should be used as qualifier because to me it only makes sense as a membership property. However, this kind of use of p31 reflects the need of a property that can be used that way. Are you fine using p31 as qualifier or should we have a dedicated property for such cases? --Micru (talk) 23:27, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't appreciate that use myself, but I have seen it. Can you provide an example that you've seen recently of it, so that we might describe the use case more exactly? --Izno (talk) 00:53, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
Don't remember which item, but on the property proposal for "upper stage" there was the suggestion to use "instance of" as qualifier. Maybe Tobias1984 can present his thoughts on the subject?--Micru (talk) 10:16, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
At this point in time I really don't know if using instance of (P31) in a qualifier is a good idea or not. We just know too little about how the query system will work. The most important thing is probably that we stay consistent in as many items as possible. Maybe a developer, or semantic-web expert can weigh in, or even start an RfC about the correct usage of qualifiers. --Tobias1984 (talk) 11:00, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
I have started the qualifier proposal "specifically" to cover these kind of cases.--Micru (talk) 09:44, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Deleting P107 (P107) and Constraint violations

Please, you, who are massively removing P107 (P107) from items, chhange it in property talk pages, because this property is widely used as Constraint violations, see e. g. [13]. JAn Dudík (talk) 07:36, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

people who are writing systems of constraint, should rewrite their systems not people who are removing P107. Amir (talk) 07:53, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
In other words: We destroy, the other should do the clean up ;( Imho it's no improvement to remove P107 and leave thousands of items without any info. --88.130.163.18 08:14, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
People who are removing make usually some instance of (P31) = Q1234 instead. So is no problem to replace it or to delete it. JAn Dudík (talk) 08:31, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
A GND main type usually can't be replaced by exactly one "instance of" in the constraints lists (and of course, if I replace one property in one item, I'm not going to check a thousand properties if I can update them accordingly). Is there a list compiled somewhere what possible replacements there are for the GND main types? Like:
  • person (Q215627) -> human, fictional character, deity, ...
  • organization (Q43229) -> company, band, ...
  • event (Q1656682) -> ...
  • creative work (Q386724) -> book, film, painting, ...
  • term (Q1969448) -> ...
  • place, geographical feature (Q618123) -> ...
  • disambiguation page (Q11651459) -> disambiguation page
Is this even possible in a meaningful way without the constraint system knowing about subclasses and hierarchies? --YMS (talk) 08:46, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
The constraint system knows about subclasses and hierarchies, so you may as well use it and replace {{Constraint:Item|property=P107|item=QXX}} with {{Constraint:Type|class=QXX|relation=instance}}. Of course, more specific constraints are often better. --Zolo (talk) 08:57, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Attributing museum directors II

In Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2013/11#Attributing_museum_directors I asked for a solution on attributing museum directors. Thanks to the effort of The Anonymouse we now have director / manager (P1037). After having a closer look at w:Corporate title I think that manager/director is too ambiguous. A manager is a middle management title while a director is a senior management title, therefore it wouldn't be possible to run meaningful queries, once people start populating items with this property. I'd propose to separate these properties into two distinct ones. Some people thought about creating a more general property such as "corporate title". Note that having atomic and unique properties allow us to add meaningful qualifiers. property:manager -> item:john doe -> qualifier:start date -> item:2013 would be a good approach my opinion. I'd love to hear your opinions, thanks. Regards, Christoph Braun (talk) 12:53, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

This kind of property seems too specific, but you can use a qualifier for the same effect, either P794 (P794) or the recently suggested "specifically". Then you would have property:manager/director -> item:john doe // qualifier1:specifically/as -> item:curator // qualifier2:start date -> item:2013.--Micru (talk) 17:49, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
In that case all position titles should be obsolete as properties. An inverted "position held" property might be helpful (currently we can state: John Doe -> position held -> director. But we can't state: museum -> available position -> director -> position held by -> john doe). I'm not sure about the proper wording ('available position' doesn't sound right). Regards, Christoph Braun (talk) 00:29, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Other-language descriptions

My preferred (and only) language is English, Occasionally, though I have sufficient knowledge to apply a non-English description to an object. How may I do so? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:14, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

You can add descriptions and labels in other languages by adding babel to your user page. Other way is to use labellister gadget. --Stryn (talk) 18:24, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
E.g. I have {{#babel:fi|en-2|sv-1|et-0|nb-0}}, so I can add labels and descriptions on those languages without labellister gadget. --Stryn (talk) 18:26, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:37, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
For people who don't want to mess with templates or gadgets or are not logged in - On the top of the page you will see your current set language. Near that are a couple of mysterious symbols which bring you to a menu which lets you change your set language and see the page in a different language. Filceolaire (talk) 12:21, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Coordinate data and Nearby Pages

Hi all! Is there any plan to put all the geographic coordinate data right here, into the Wikidata, and then make the new "Nearby Pages" just access these information here and bring it to the articles on the many Wikipedia or, even better, into OSM maps also! Once in the Wikidata, projects like OSM could easily access them also! (migrated from here)Sturm (talk) 23:42, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

  1. Yes. The plan is to put all the geographic data in wikidata and then make it available to all the WMF projects.
  2. No one can really make anyone else do anything round here. By having the data in one place, where it will (we hope ) be checked and maintained and machine readable, we hope that the other WMF projects will choose to use the data from wikidata. This of course includes the 'Nearby' function. Using data from Wikidata 'Nearby' should get extra cool features like being able to filter which articles get shown - just certain languages or just train stations etc.
  3. As well as making the geodata available to WMF projects we also want it to be easily usable by external projects such as OSM and Google maps and everybody else. Wikidata is certainly (we hope) designed to make this possible.
Hope this helps. Filceolaire (talk) 12:06, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Some problems with numbers

I was looking into some old census-reports of Digerberget (Q15240713), when I discovered something I do not know how to handle correctly here.

The 1960-report tells me that it had 1130 inhabitants. The following report from 1965, tells me that the numbers from 1960 has been revised to 883. The problem is that I do not know if this revision comes from that the method of counting has been revised or if there were something wrong in the counting 1960.

I have seen this several times, more often in more modern reports, but then it is always because the method has been revised. I know I can add both numbers here, and I will, but I do not know which one to prefer when that becomes possible. -- Lavallen (talk) 10:47, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Usually statistical revisions are due to better data becoming available, better methods being used, or errors being corrected. I'd generally presume the most recently published figure should be preferred, unless there are specific grounds to think otherwise. --Avenue (talk) 11:41, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
The change in method from 2005 to 2010, was how many holiday homes were allowed in a locality. So the 2010 revision of of 2005-census is not necessarly better numbers, it's a new definition. But I guess I have to make the asumption that the 1960-numbers where wrong in this case. In the 1960-census the people who made the counting, could modify their definitions depending on circumstances. That is never done today. -- Lavallen (talk) 16:04, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Yes, statistical organisations have tightened up on such things over time. The UK now has an 11-page official protocol on revisions, for instance.[14] Ideally any revision of the size you saw in the 1960s figures would be well documented, but I imagine this would be less likely the further back in time one goes. There may also be greater problems locating any such documentation. --Avenue (talk) 21:07, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

RfD 2013 archives

The page Wikidata:Requests for deletions/Archive/2013 only lists archives up to the middle of August. Could someone please have a look? It is done by some templates which I did not manage to fix. Thanks in advance.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:16, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

  Done Though it really should be done automatically. Redirects such as this need to be created or it doesn't work properly. Delsion23 (talk) 21:01, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Thank you. I thought there was a bot doing it, but apparently smth did not work out.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:29, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Esperanto logo on site

Hi, as I have just mentioned in Esperant Project chat it would by nice to have Esperanto logo on site for Esperanto as user interface language, similar like is for Slovak. Thanks in advance! --KuboF (talk) 21:26, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Structure type conundrum

I was unable to find a way how instance of (P31), P168 (P168) and has use (P366) interrelate with each other, so decided to post a question here. Currently, description for P31 includes: "Use more specific properties when applicable, e.g. occupation (P106) instead of "is a <writer>" "; P168 is described as "structure type or intended primary function according to structural characteristics, e.g. bridge, tower"; and P366 is "main use of the subject". Further, P168 has following restrains: the object using it should be an instance of architectural structure (Q811979) or its subclass, and its value likewise. What do we have in reality:

So the questions are:

  1. Should various kinds of buildings be used via instance of (P31), or should it always equal architectural structure (Q811979)?
  2. Can or should the same value railway station (Q55488) be used in both instance of (P31) and in P168 (P168) at the same time?
  3. What traits of the building should be taken into account for P168 (P168) and has use (P366)? If some structural details are necessary for the building to be of some particular use, like office rooms, should it have P168 (P168) = office building (Q1021645) or has use (P366) = office building (Q1021645)? If there are rail tracks that can be used for either railway or metro (but are used only for metro), what property should it have and with what value?
  4. I have proposed to introduce a new property with a provisional name "Structural type" (suggestions on a better name are welcome), that would be used to define a particular kind of a building within a larger class basing on is structure, engineering details etc., like lattice tower (Q1440476) and cantilever bridge (Q1429218). The idea is that like "writer" a particular kind of "human" pertaining to his occupation, so a "lattice tower" is a kind of "tower" but pertaining to different aspects than its purpose, use, location etc. In this case, "lattice tower" is a subclass of "tower"; but for example, deep single-vault station (Q2630536) should not to be a subclass of metro station (Q928830), as underground railway stations can also have this structure. So, should P168 (P168) have a narrow value like "lattice tower" or a simple value like "tower"? Should metro stations have both "metro station" and "shallow column station" as values of P168 (P168), or should they be in different properties?

-- YLSS (talk) 13:09, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

IMHO, we should delete P168 (P168) and use only instance of (P31). — Ayack (talk) 14:20, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
(edit conflict)In my opinion:
And answering to your questions:
  1. use p31, delete p168
  2. delete p168, use p31 with "railway station". An "railway station" is a "sublclass of" "station", and a "station" is a "subclass of" "building" which in turn is a subclass of "architectural structure".
  3. property "use" is handy when the use is different than the original one (a station reconverted into a night club)
  4. you can do the same with "instance of", like "instance of": "metro station" and "vault station"
I also would recommend to document all this creating a Task force (see example: Wikidata:Physics task force)--Micru (talk) 14:30, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Well, I don't mind such an option: everything would be simpler. However, how in such a case would a Wikipedia infobox choose one of the values of P31? E.g. ru:Шаблон:Станция метро (Metro station) has a field for "type", i.e. a narrow subclass of underground station, like deep single-vault station (Q2630536). What algorithm to use? YLSS (talk) 16:02, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Actually you just need "instance of:vault station" since vault station is already a "subclass of:metro station".--Micru (talk) 17:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
As I said above, it's not correct to treat e.g. "single-vault station" as a subclass of "metro station": any underground railway station can be classified as such, not only metro. w:Gare de Châtelet – Les Halles, for example, seems to have a shallow column station. So both values should be present simultaneously. YLSS (talk) 19:43, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Alternatively, you could simply make it subclass of rail station. :) --Izno (talk) 22:27, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
In all probability it should be, and so a station of Moscow Metro could be simultaneously an instance of: metro station (Q928830), deep single-vault station (Q2630536), and possibly also cultural heritage site in Russia (Q8346700). How would an infobox choose only the second one? YLSS (talk) 08:24, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

  Comment The argument above does not seem to look at similar situations across the board and how factors are tied in with specific instances. I believe that the "architectural structure" allows for the simple violation check of "architect", whereas if you are going to promote every structural type to an "instance" status then you start to build the same check across many properties. The reason that it makes sense is that there are numbers of other types of structures that all have elements in common and allow for a reasonable presentation of the components and the violation checks that can be run.

Can I also reflect that the commentary around railway stations has not been made with any view to what is happening in that space where there are at least five different terms used to identify a station where a train stops to collect passengers.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:42, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Sports results

The inclusion of sports results has been raised a few times, such as Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2013/04#Election, Sport and other game results in Wikidata => Timetable? with Kahlores and Kompakt. I have started Wikidata:Sports results task_force to bring these discussions together. Ideally we would be using authoritative sources. I have access to Olympic Data Feed, which might be a legal mess, but I am sure we obtain well described metadata from other sports federations that have a more open data licensing mentality. I expect an RFC will be needed before any large scale implementation occurs, and we may need to wait for technology advances. Anyway, I have had a play with this area and noted my results at Wikidata_talk:Sport_results_task_force#Medals. I would appreciate some feedback on this general direction. John Vandenberg (talk) 14:25, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Items without a claim per language

I was wondering how many items still lack claims and if I could see a pattern or difference per language. The totals are at http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php -> Statements per item (no anchor so I can't link directly). I couldn't find it linked from Special:Statistics so I did the query myself. I also included the items per language which link to Wikimedia category (Q4167836).

wiki Total items Items without claims Percentage without claim Category items Percentage categories
enwiki 5345886 1437061 26,88% 1028734 19,24%
nlwiki 1787341 544923 30,49% 78669 4,40%
dewiki 1777860 373570 21,01% 181057 10,18%
svwiki 1688682 813612 48,18% 118712 7,03%
frwiki 1639157 456512 27,85% 190502 11,62%
itwiki 1295921 311384 24,03% 207374 16,00%
ruwiki 1272505 328650 25,83% 123963 9,74%
eswiki 1254818 329175 26,23% 206838 16,48%
plwiki 1108496 367814 33,18% 80162 7,23%
warwiki 1076622 608111 56,48% 29164 2,71%
cebwiki 996749 615066 61,71% 14019 1,41%
jawiki 989850 539723 54,53% 75283 7,61%
ptwiki 916022 257882 28,15% 112948 12,33%
zhwiki 778798 273453 35,11% 80724 10,37%
viwiki 696311 172985 24,84% 40395 5,80%
ukwiki 541649 165242 30,51% 47679 8,80%

Do you see anything interesting? Multichill (talk) 18:55, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Is a dewiki-item an item that only has a dewiki site link? --Tobias1984 (talk) 19:45, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
Nope, any item that has a link to dewiki. An item which has multiple language links shows up multiple times here. Multichill (talk) 20:15, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I see that sv/ceb/war-wiki who has high percentage of bot-created articles have a high percentage here. -- Lavallen (talk) 19:49, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I'm thinking the same. Other option is that not all categories have been tagged yet. Ceb has 113K categories, but only 14K here, War has 128K categories, but only 29K here, SV has 255K, but 128K here. Multichill (talk) 20:15, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
My bot is working on Category, but I am started from biggest wiki. --ValterVB (talk) 20:31, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I just compiled a list and my bot has been working on that for the last month. That covers most of the big wiki's so you wont get a lot of hits there. What's your approach? Multichill (talk) 20:46, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I use Special All pages (Category namespace) if exist on Wikidata Bot Add instance of (P31)=Wikimedia category (Q4167836) and descriptions for it,fr,de,pt,pt-br,ru,sv. (example) and delete P107 (P107). --ValterVB (talk) 20:57, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
Ah, I see. Could you run on ruwiki, eswiki, viwiki and ukwiki? I haven't touched those yet so you should get a lot of hits. Multichill (talk) 21:17, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
eswiki is done, when I have finished svwiki I can do ruwiki, viwiki, ukwiki, cebwiki and warwiki. --ValterVB (talk) 21:29, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
How can I find items without a claim in my language please? — Ayack (talk) 20:05, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
en, fr, de nl, sv, ceb & war. Multichill (talk) 20:40, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks! — Ayack (talk) 21:07, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Bot generated taxons

A quick look through the lists of items without claims reveals a lot of bot generated articles about taxons. Lot's and lot's of insects. I was wondering what to do with them. At first I thought about adding taxon rank (P105) and P74 (P74), so I looked at Wikidata:List of properties/Terms#Biology and ended up at Wikidata:Taxonomy task force. That task force page contains the statement that every item about a taxon should contain instance of (P31) taxon (Q16521) (or monotypic taxon (Q310890)). That's something a bot can do. That also makes it easier for that project to see what's in scope. We're talking about quite a few items here. Dutch Wikipedia will already give 830.000 items that are about taxons, Swedish Wikipedia even more than a million, War Wikipedia 840.000 (out of a total of 960.000 articles), Ceb Wikipedia 845.000 (out of total 892.000 articles). I fired up a bot for the Dutch Wikipedia (pwb.py claimit.py -family:wikipedia -lang:nl -transcludes:Taxobox -namespace:0 P31 Q16521). Would be nice to have three other operators for the other languages. Who wants to help? Multichill (talk) 17:44, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Tagging items that way is not really helpful. --Succu (talk) 18:45, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Why wouldn't that be helpful? With no claims you don't know what it is, now you know work on improving that subset, there is even a task force which has this in it's requirements. I leave adding other properties to the taxo experts, but now at least you have a good overview of what's in scope of the project. Multichill (talk) 18:54, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
I'm part of this taskforce. So I ask you again: stop this task and lets discuss first. --Succu (talk) 18:58, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Since it's the same bot-operator who has created articles in sv, ceb and war, you will end op with the same set of items.-- Lavallen (talk) 19:02, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Succu is not just part of the taskforce, he is the major part of the task force, putting in an incredible amount of work. Personally I don't like instance of (P31) taxon (Q16521); it just looks like clutter to me. What each item should really contain is taxon name (P225), taxon rank (P105) and parent taxon (P171) (the latter could be the genus for each species). In itself, I see no reason why these three could not be added by a bot, but as Succu is the one doing all the work, it is his opinion which weighs heaviest. - Brya (talk) 06:49, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
        P.S. The plural of "taxon" is "taxa" (only in French is it "taxons").
The problem with using simply claimit for P31 is that you do not distinguish between taxon and monotypic taxon. Also, the data quality of these bot-generated articles is quite low. Nonetheless, as we have the items, we need taxon name (P225), taxon rank (P105), and, if possible, parent taxon (P171) deployed to be able to identify the corresponding information in literature or taxonomic databases. Here, your help is very welcome! Once we have this done, we can choose to add instance of (P31) as monotypic or not based on sources and do not need to "repair" what is now naively deployed in masses.  — Felix Reimann (talk) 10:06, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Now we have a lot of items with no claims at all. If these items get one or two of the right claims, it brings them in scope and reach of a task force. I don't see adding instance of (P31) taxon (Q16521) instead of monotypic taxon (Q310890) as an error. monotypic taxon (Q310890) is a subclass of taxon (Q16521) so it's semantically correct. I see it as something that can be improved. An error would be if I added railway station (Q55488). This is the way how it's handled in other domains too. It's just like adding railway station (Q55488) to Uhlandstraße (Q568224) and later updating it to metro station (Q928830)
I want to get this straight, because I do not like it to get attacked, accused of making errors and have legitimate edits reverted. Multichill (talk) 18:00, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Multichill: If you want to get things straight and not have people telling you off then I suggest you listen to what people are telling you, even if it isn't what you want to hear. Go back and read all the response to your post above and then do what those responses are suggesting.
Succu: What is your idea for adding statements to these items? I have looked at a bunch of these and most of these are species with their latin binomial names as the wikipedia article title so in theory you can take the use the first half of the title for the 'parent taxon' (though many of these genus items are not created yet), the whole title for the 'taxon name' property and 'species' as the 'taxon rank'. Would that work? Filceolaire (talk) 22:02, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
Dear Multichill, at first, I want to thank you for dropping a note at the task force talk page. It would be great if all would inform the task forces before rearranging things where others already had lengthy discussions and perhaps even found working approaches. The active members of the taxonomy task force do a lot of manual work to fix all the errors which we have in the items. The bots which are already running in this field are specialized to create as less additional workload as possible by doing it the first time right. If you prefer to first import and then fix errors, this is also fine for me. But this means: You as the bot operator are also responsible for addressing the errors. And I guarantee that if using a plain claimit, you will get a lot of them. The problem in this field is manyfold: 1) In taxonomy you do not have a single reference source which defines what is correct. 2) Bigger Wikipedias have an extremely high data quality. If we ever (!) achieve to convince them to switch to use Wikidata, we need to prove that also our data has an acceptable level of quality. 3) Several other Wikipedias have bot created pages which, and this is the main problem, rely partially on databases which are of extremely bad quality or are hopelessly outdated. Thus, we definitely need your help. But importing junk data is not helpful.  — Felix Reimann (talk) 09:41, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Problems with Open Library ID

An identifier should identify a person. Property:P648 (Open Library ID) does not fulfill this demand:

  1. Abba Eban (Q305776): OL2686699A
  2. Dean Koontz (Q272076): OL7119293A

No. 1 (Abba Eban) is just one of six author pages with that name to be found in OL. No. 2 (Dean Koontz, b. 1945) is a person but the OL page only provides the reader with a copy of the Wikipedia article and "0 works". -- Tom, 28 November 2013

Regarding (1): you can either correct the id or correct the info on OL. Regarding (2): OL is like Wikipedia, that it lists 0 works doesn't mean that an author has 0 works, it means that there are 0 works recorded and you can add the missing ones.--Micru (talk) 12:10, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
I added this information. Search powered by Openlibrary. Site gave one identifier. In Freebase has links to several (up to 6) identifiers. It makes sense to add it?--Пробегающий (talk) 13:15, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
The main Open Library author page for Abba Eban (Q305776) is:
OL399071A: Abba Solomon Eban (1915-2002)
Other pages like OL2686699A, OL3417217A, or OL6185545A are what VIAF calls "undifferentiated" (see also: Property talk:P227#Usage note). About Freebase: I would only add well selected links. A page that is 100 % about the item (person) and provides valuable information. Freebase is an automated collection of data (harvesting) and does not provide authority files like GND or LCCN. --Kolja21 (talk) 16:57, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
For Dean Koontz (Q272076) in Freebase 2 ID from Open Library, in OpenLibrary 9 ID. All redirect to OL7119293A. Note: errors may be on any sources.--Пробегающий (talk) 19:14, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Property idea: "same as the compound property"

This is a slightly long question and I've mentioned the problem before, but bare with me because I think we still need to sort this out and I'm wondering if a new qualifier is the answer.

I keep wanting to give something a statement with the qualifier of (P642) alongside a compound statement that says the same thing. For example, under Barack Obama (Q76)=>position held (P39), we need to have both President of the United States (Q11696) and president (Q30461)=>of (P642)=>United States of America (Q30) so that he will be included when people gather data about presidents and when people gather data about presidents of the United States. But it seems inefficient to repeat all of the same qualifier information for both (like start date, end date, preceded by, succeeded by, and subject of). This is already being done on a number of pages, such as Rob Ford (Q169303). Under this system, the Obama entry would look like this:

Could there be a way to condense the general title and the compound title into one statement? One option would be to use "president=>of=>US" with statement is subject of (P805)=>President of the United States, but there are two problems with that. First, "subject of" is already being used for more specific entries, like "Presidency of Barack Obama". Second, if we removed "position held=>President of the United States" from Obama in favour of "position held=>president=>of=>United States", would that make it more difficult to sort the data?

I'm wondering if we should have a new parameter that links to compound titles, so in my Obama example we would have

Would that make sense? --Arctic.gnome (talk) 01:12, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Another approach : take the president of the united states item, and express the nature of this item <president> of <United states>. Then if someone searches the president of something he as to make is query in to steps (or a little more complex query) : first find the item for the united states, then the president associated. We then can use both of your approaches without to duplicate anything, just to create an item for each kind of presidents. TomT0m (talk) 15:21, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
That is in my opinion the only reasonable solution. A query for all presidents can then be performed by something like http://208.80.153.172/wdq/?q=claim[39:%28CLAIM[31:248577]%29]. But there seems to be some inconsistency with the statements:
Moreover, there is Q7241207. --Zuphilip (talk) 17:54, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
OK. Now they are all subclass of (P279) president (Q30461) except for one where the title was explicitly "President of the Republic" rather than "President". Filceolaire (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
  • I want to make sure I'm understanding User:TomT0m and User:Zuphilip's suggestion. On the person's page we would have position held => President of Foobar (or Mayor of Foobar, Emperor of Foobar) and on the President of Foobar page we would have subclass of => president => of => Foobar. Is that right? When I brought up a related issue, a couple editors strongly wanted us to use "president" with the "of" qualifier on the person's page, but Zuphilip's example shows that searches can be done either way. The one this that still confuses me is that earlier in the month we had a discussion where I thought you said "Prime Minister of Foobar" was an instance of "prime minister" rather than a subclass. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 17:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
There is a misunderstanding, I see nothing like "Prime Minister of Foobar" was an instance of "prime minister" anywhere in this conversation. How do you deduce that ? TomT0m (talk) 18:59, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
On the page President of the United States (Q11696) there is now the information that President of the United States (Q11696) subclass of (P279) president (Q30461) . --Zuphilip (talk) 11:42, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Shall We Use Wikidata to Handle Disambiguation

Currently the disambiguation information is only stored by the Wikipedia pages. But this structure will prohibit any automation on disambiguation processing. If Wikidata can store disambiguation information, we can:

  1. save all manual work to write something like {{otheruses|...}}
  2. reduce duplicated work to update disambiguation pages on each language with the same title (especially for alphabet abbreviations)
  3. generate automatic links from an ambiguous named page to the disambiguation page

I propose a structure like this:

  • Labels in any language of the same disambiguation page should all use the same/equivalent title
  • Original language as a property
  • May mean as a property, values are the relevant choices, quantifiers may include:
    • in language (without this quantifier means all linked language has this disambiguation choice, this help to handle special choices not shared while most choices are shared)
    • commonness (a mean to decide when and in what style to generate automatic links)
    • field/subject (many disambiguation group choices according to the related subjects)
  • All choices pages may include an automatic link to the disambiguation page, or an "otheruses" template when not more than 2 other choices
  • All Wikipedia with the language links will include a generated part, with:
    • links to the choices that the current language has a page for, each followed by the description of the target page, grouped by field/subject and "instance of" values
    • show the original language labels of the choices in brackets as translations when Original language is not the current language

金亦天 (talk) 03:48, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Interesting proposal for Phase 3 and deep idea! Can you provide some example of future item structure for that case? --Infovarius (talk) 06:50, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
There are 2 kinds of examples that support the automation of disambiguation pages:
  1. Widely shared disambiguation pages: an example is abbreviation like ABC(Q286874), it is linked to the disambiguation pages in different languages, but most of them are incomplete, users want to know more still need to refer to the English version. To make the update easy and instant for every language, a shared knowledge source like Wikidata that helps generating the language specific disambiguation pages is necessary.
  2. Disambiguation choice page: like w:en:Rapunzel, a choice page usually carry an "otheruses" template, they include some redundant description words when using the template. Automating this kind of disambiguation reminder can save effort and prevents user from forgetting to add "otheruses" in the default named page.
金亦天 (talk) 08:54, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
Seems I was not answering your question, but I am not clear what you are asking for. You want examples of items/pages being applied the new structure or you want more detail about the new structure?金亦天 (talk) 09:32, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Watchlists

Is it possible to make an item on wikidata about user watchlists so all the watchlists for all languages are linked. Since the links of the watchlists are not user dependend it would be possible to link the watchlist pages. So if you are on your English Wathclist page (en:Special:Watchlist) that you can click to your Dutch watchlist (nl:Speciaal:Volglijst) for instance . The thing is that the item Special:Watchlist now links straight to the watchlist on wikidata, so it's not possible to create that item. Sander.v.Ginkel (talk) 15:09, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

The current policy on Wikidata is to not make items for Wikimedians (though I personnaly see only good reasons to do so.) But maybe if we are engouh to think differently we can contest this :) Amongst the reasons : link the user pages, having item to site on commons for artwork authorship when a Wikimedian did it, ... Drawbacks : None. TomT0m (talk) 15:22, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
I can image that the userpage is a bit different from your contribution page and the wachtlist page. Besides that the link is username depended, you can create links on your pages yourself. This is not possible for for instance your watchlist page. I'm actually struggeling all the time finding the foreign watchlists. Sander.v.Ginkel (talk) 15:49, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Yes and no. It is possible to create an item for Special:Watchlist, however notability 'forbids' the creation of items for Special: pages. John F. Lewis (talk) 17:38, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Creating a dozen item is not really a big deal. TomT0m (talk) 18:25, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
I am really not sure how a list in the sidebar with hundreds of interwiki links for watchlists (as we do have hundreds of Wikipedias) would help us here … Vogone talk 18:59, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
It does not help Wikidata, but it helps in the crosswiki-work. -- Lavallen (talk) 19:40, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
I doubt this. It is far easier to write the iw prefix + "Special:Watchlist" in the search field than scrolling through a list with over 800 items, in my opinion. Vogone talk 19:51, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Pretty much what Vogone said. John F. Lewis (talk) 20:01, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
There is already one for Special:RecentChanges, but that is being used to replace iw links that already existed. --Rschen7754 02:52, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for that argument.   -- Lavallen (talk) 07:43, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
That item is Q6293548. There is one big difference to the watchlist: Any Wikimedia project actually has recent changes, while the vast majority of Wikimedia users will not have a meaningful watchlist in the vast majority of Wikimedia projects. --YMS (talk) 08:20, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
I am concerned though about if we did this. We might wind up with a list of links longer than the length of most peoples' watchlists; it would take a while to load, and be ugly. --Rschen7754 08:57, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
What about this gadget? JAn Dudík (talk) 21:53, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Well, it works in one project. -- Lavallen (talk) 07:06, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
See also bugzilla:28604. Helder 15:47, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Citations

Hi, just discovered this place, I like how it sparkles. ;) Can somebody point me towards information on what has been done so far on integrating bibliographical items, citations and quotations, and whatever is required to make it available to client wikis? Also, is there a way to query Wikidata from my local wiki? Paradoctor (talk) 16:27, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi Paradoctor, there is a Wikidata:Books task force. More about citations you will find at Help:Sources. --Kolja21 (talk) 17:27, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. Paradoctor (talk) 17:47, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
To your second question, mw:Extension:Wikibase_Client might be a good answer. πr2 (tc) 06:36, 29 November 2013 (UTC)
Sadly not. I wanted to access Wikidata from my personal wiki, just like you can do with Commons files, but that's not yet available. If you want it done right... ;) Thanks for the info, though. Paradoctor (talk) 00:56, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

wikidata coordinates database?

Is there regularly updated Wikidata coordinates database on toollabs? Something like ghel coordinate databases with wikipedia coordinates on toolserver. --WikedKentaur (talk) 07:38, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Maybe this and this will help. --LBE (talk) 08:34, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Handicap physique (fr) /Körperbehinderung (de)

Hi, I need some help : I try to link the french article Handicap physique to the german one Körperbehinderung, the subject is the same, but there is seemingly a problem because each article is linked to others (same subject) with different item numbers. Thanks for your advice and help. --Franz53sda (talk) 19:28, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree and have   Merged items Q3126720 and Q1179623. Littledogboy (talk) 23:09, 30 November 2013 (UTC)