Wikidata

Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2015/02

< Wikidata:Project chat‎ | Archive‎ | 2015
This page is an archive. Please do not modify it. Use the current page, even to continue an old discussion.

Wikipedia Watchlist

It seems that without regard of having selected the option in the preferences, the edits in the Wikidata element of a wikipedia page in the watchlist are shown in the RSS watchlist. And it is annoying. If not fixed, at least the link should points on Wikidata history and not Wikipedia one. Louperivois (talk) 21:01, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #143

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Uitnodiging Wikimedia Belgium Project Days

Wikimedia Belgium wants to work on a better Free Knowledge and wants to support all efforts in this regard. Wikimedia Belgium cannot do this on their own and needs your help. We can assist you with your plans and projects. Please talk to us during the Wikimedia Belgium Project Days, organized every three to six months. The first Project Day is scheduled for Wednesday 4 February 2015. Lotje (talk) 16:18, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

help with qualifiers

Apparently, Chile changed its time zone system as of today (see time in Chile (Q335396)). An anonymous user apparently attempted to update Chile's item (Chile (Q298)) but erased the data for the previous system and Easter Island's time zone. I think in this situation, you add "end time" or something, but I'm not familiar with the system of qualifiers to correctly update it myself, so could someone do that please? Chile thanks you --Haplology (talk) 01:59, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

I added some qualifiers but it's not an easy case as we don't have qualifiers on qualifiers. --Pasleim (talk) 13:30, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
The way it has been done now is the way Wikidata is meant to work - multiple values with qualifiers to indicate the start time or end time that applies to each value and with the current values marked as preferred so that basic queries only get those. Filceolaire (talk) 21:34, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Vandalism

If anyone's interested, there has been an awful lot of vandalism across the board recently. I'd be very grateful if you could all have a quick look when you can over at Special:RecentChanges. Jared Preston (talk) 20:26, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

I already went through them today, we need more vandalism fighters. --AmaryllisGardener talk 20:28, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Some years ago I was quite active in ca:Wikipedia and people seemed very reluctant to force people to create an account if they wanted to edit, I guess it's the same now in Wikidata, but I think that people who really want to contribute to Wikidata will not have any inconvenience in creating an account, and I'm convinced that this would reduce the number of vandals.--Quico (talk) 20:36, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I'll be watching #cvn-wikidataconnect ;) George Edward C – Talk – Contributions 20:38, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I am afraid it is hopeless, we just do not have enough capacity to patrol recent changes (note that only looking at unpatrolled edits is usually sufficient)‎. The direction we should take is identifying specific problems (for example, a new editor completely changing item description)‎ and catching them b filters, same wa as we are doing now e.g. with new editors removing sitelinks.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:35, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Well it is probably time for a bot... I will see what I can knock up this year (if no-one beats me to it) ·addshore· talk to me! 00:26, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
As I said before, it is possible to patrol every day's unpatrolled IP edits, which I know because I actually did it. Let's please not say it's impossible. It just gets very hard with a lack of support. There are 88 admins, and if every one caught 3 unhelpful edits per day, that would be 264 total, which is more than enough. If every active user were involved, it would be one a day or less. --Haplology (talk) 01:57, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
In my opinion it would be best to create a semi-automated patrolling tool, like Huggle or STiki. The problem with the "new editor removing a sitelink" is that it picks up users that are manually merging items together, I hardly ever see any vandalism with that tag. I will regardless work through the filter logs etc. to find vandalism to revert. George Edward C – Talk – Contributions 07:29, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
Of those 88 admins, how many are actually active? (yes, that figure probably does not include me, I know...) --Rschen7754 23:30, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

What's your workflow for dealing with vandalism? I tried Recent Changes, Hide patrolled edits, but how do I then patrol edits quickly from there? Do I have to open an edit, mark it patrolled, and then go back to RC? How do I know that an unpatrolled edit has not been undone by then? (I know how to do it, but I don't know how to do it really fast) --Denny (talk) 16:13, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm wondering the same. --Quico (talk) 16:20, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
For fast patrolling you can use the script User:Petr Matas/Mark as patrolled.js. --Pasleim (talk) 16:25, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
I was thinking about modifying huggle to work with wikidata. The process of identifying and dealing with vandalism on Wikidata is slightly different though as identifying a single edit as vandalism is actually quite hard, instead you need to mainly look at the past edits of the user, as well as pulling in lots of other information! ·addshore· talk to me! 16:54, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

  Info Have a look at meta:Grants:IEG/Revision scoring as a service and meta:Research:Revision scoring as a service. Maybe interesting for tools against description vandalism? --Atlasowa (talk) 12:36, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Another thing that can be done to some pages, protecting. When I revert vandalism, I try to look at the revision history, where I sometimes see six cases of IP/new editor vandalism, and nothing good coming from IPs. Those can be protected. --AmaryllisGardener talk 15:22, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
AmaryllisGardener, do you know how many pages are protected at wikidata (full protection + semiprotection)? I mean total. And how do get these numbers for enWP, ruWP, etc? (Maybe quarry?) There is Wikidata:Page protection policy and Special:ProtectedPages.
Page protection is a very blunt tool, the whole item is protected, not just the "wikidata description field" or only the property "population" for example. And page protection makes all updates and additions impossible or very difficult. That is why this doesn't really help.
Why is it possible to give statements a Wikidata:Glossary#Rank Deprecated / Normal / Preferred, but it is impossible to give a statement a "protected" level/rank (full or semiprotected)? --Atlasowa (talk) 20:23, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Eh, you'd have to talk to the devs about that. That sounds difficult. --AmaryllisGardener talk 21:25, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
What your talking about is some sort of granular / fine grained protection system. There have been discussions about this in the past (can't find any links right now) ·addshore· talk to me! 22:16, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

I installed User:Petr Matas/Mark as patrolled.js, and it really improves the situation, but I am still not convinced that this is the most effective way. Does anyone want to work on a mobile app that makes this a really smooth experience? --Denny (talk) 19:07, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

diplomat and ambassador

Hoi, at this time ambassador is used as a profession. It is however a position held by a diplomat. I want to do several things:

  • add diplomat for any and all ambassadors that are now a profession
  • add ambassador as a position for any and all ambassadors that are now a profession
  • finally when this is done remove all ambassadors where it is a profession.

Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:34, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

First of all, you are referring to the property occupation (P106) not profession. As I told you before, ambassador (Q121998) is a government occupation (just take a look at the item), and a specific type of diplomat (Q193391). Thus, it is more precise to use ambassador than diplomatic as an occupation. Regarding the property position held (P39), ambassador is too generic if you can use, for instance, list of ambassadors of the United States to France (Q950262). Finally, please stop doing mass edits before reaching a consensus. Andreasm háblame / just talk to me 17:33, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
I agree with GerardM, ambassadors should have occupation (P106): diplomat (Q193391) and position held (P39): ambassador (Q121998) or a more specific one such as list of ambassadors of the United States to France (Q950262). — Ayack (talk) 18:15, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
I agree, but the example brings up a practical issue: if somebody added position held (P39) : list of ambassadors of the United States to France (Q950262), it would show up at Constraint violations/P39, because currently list of ambassadors of the United States to France (Q950262) is not an instance of position (Q4164871) (it is a list, Wikimedia list article (Q13406463).) Not that it would be the first: there are currently 4499 lists used as positions. How should we approach this situation? --Haplology (talk) 07:52, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
"List of United States Ambassadors to France" and "United States Ambassador to France" should have their own separate items, with Wikimedia list article (Q13406463) and position (Q4164871) respectively as values of instance of (P31). —Wylve (talk) 22:14, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
Wylve I disagree. "United States Ambassador to France" is a class item and each of the US ambassadors to France are instances of that class. A "List of United States Ambassadors to France" covers the same ground. There is no reason to have two separate items. Haplology The item with a sitelink to "List of United States Ambassadors to France" should have the label "United States Ambassadors to France" and should have a "subclass of:ambassador" statement (and ambassador should be a subclass of:position) and should be the target of the 'position' property. Similarly for lists of mayors, bishops, senators, members of parliament etc. Remember that the wikipedia article may be labelled a "list" in some languages but a list is a special wikipedia concept. The corresponding wikidata concept is a class and the label should reflect this. Doing it this way means that the Property statement links to an item which has useful sitelinks and at some time in the future the "list of" can be replaced by a Wikidata query. Most "list of articles" correspond to wikidata classes - anything else means bringing in a bunch of pointless extra wikidata items.Filceolaire (talk) 21:20, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
@Filceolaire: I don't agree with this method's ontological rationale since "United States Ambassador to France" describes a class of diplomats, while "List of United States Ambassadors to France" describes a Wikipedia list of the instances of that class of diplomats. They are therefore two different entities. If a class and a Wikipedia list of that class should share an item, then when is it ever appropriate to use instance of (P31)Wikimedia list article (Q13406463) and is a list of (P360) on an item? Also, the suggested way of organization would create inconsistency. For example, President of the United States (Q11696) and list of presidents of the United States (Q35073) can't share an item because of the two distinct set of sitelinks from various Wikipedias. In the future having list of presidents of the United States (Q35073) as an item may be redundant, but we are not there yet and it might not be prudent to merge the two concepts together at this moment. —Wylve (talk) 21:49, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
In the case of "President of the US" our peculiar requirement to have a separate WDitem for each WParticle means we need to have 2 separate WD items. In those peculiar cases it makes sense to use is a list of (P360) to link these two items together. That hardly justifies doing the same for the WDitems for mayors of small towns, members of parliament for every constituency everywhere, bishops for each bishopric. We can either link to the item that already exists linked to the "list of" these or we can have a generic position like "bishop" with qualifier "of" to indicate the bishopric. We already link each item to very different things to the same item by linking to the wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource etc. pages. It is no great stretch to link "list of" articles to WikiData classes. Filceolaire (talk) 22:08, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm concerned about creating items about WMF project pages that don't link to any WMF project page and which require additional sets of labels and descriptions. If the wikis have separate pages for positions and respective lists, like Q11696 and Q35073, great, but if not, it's better to avoid creating new items. Every such empty item is a divergence from other WMF projects and requires a massive, additional effort to be well-connected and multilingual--ranging from one editor who knows 300 languages to 300 editors who know one, plus ontology experts. I don't know what "should" be done, but it should be compatible with other projects. --Haplology (talk) 01:21, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Repository content as reference

I’d like to use a software project’s source code repository as a reference for certain statements – for instance, the LICENSE or COPYING file for copyright license (P275). Do we have guidelines for that so far? In particular:

  1. Link to master (or the repository’s equivalent) or current revision at retrieval time (i. e. whatever master points at)?
  2. Statements besides reference URL (P854)? retrieved (P813)? software version identifier (P348) with the specific revision?

—DSGalaktos (talk) 18:54, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Currency Exchange Rates

At Wikivoyage we are looking at potentially adding functionality that would display the daily currency conversion of major currencies on appropriate article pages.

In order to to that, we would run a bot to get these exchange rates everyday from an appropriate open source, place them somewhere in Wikivoyage and then refer to that from a simple wiki template.

My question to Wikidata is whether such data (and the daily update of such data) can be stored on Wikidata? Or perhaps you are already doing it?

Many thanks in advance --Andrewssi2 (talk) 22:02, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Not at this moment, that would cause flooding in watchlists and recent changes. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 09:02, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Wouldn't such account have a bot flag anyway? --Pajn (talk) 22:21, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
My bot updates rates in ruwiki and ruwikinews currently. Current solution is bad, we has two copies of data. Wikivoyage`s copy will be the third. I think Wikidata was created for tasks like this. Watchlist flooding is bad side effect, but it is not so bad to keep multiple data copies. Also this data has demand from external users. Some time ago site http://openexchangerates.org was open. Now it is commercial. So Wikidata can take its function. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 19:17, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Ivan's right, this is exactly what Wikidata is for. Jared Preston (talk) 21:11, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Andrewssi2, Ivan A. Krestinin, Jared Preston This is part of the "numbers with units" datatype which is not available yet, Though I think Lydia has stated that currency would not be available when this datatype is initially delivered but would come later. Filceolaire (talk) 21:45, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Unit for every currency...? I am not sure that it is good idea. Anyway we can start from quantity datatype and switch to another then it will be available. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 23:04, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
This is a very complex thing. It is not like calendar where you can set some rules to express each date in different calenders. The first thing needed is numbers with units. As soon as we want to have an automatic conversion of currencies, we really get into troubles, because we also must have some history function. It meens we can not use today´s exchange rates to express the value of something in the past in todays currencies. And what about currencies that no longer exist? Alaska was sold for 7,2 million $US, how much is it in todays Renminbi? However once we have mumbers with units, there might be somebody out there, who will develop an external tool that can express every currency in another currency by automatic conversion. The best way to do this would be a browser plugin, may be there is allready something like this out in the wild.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 13:14, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

property gives url for source

How to handle Michael Ballack (Q11948), date of birth (P569): I added stated in (P248) and retrieved (P813). Now I want to add there too, that down is the property Munzinger Sport number (P1285) linking to the source. Something like URL: down linked. Or should I add the URL at date of birth (P569) too? Or can I add ID for Munzinger Sport number (P1285) in any senseful way at date of birth (P569)? Thx, Conny (talk) 18:10, 1 February 2015 (UTC).

@Conny: Not sure I understand your question. You may refer to publisher (P123) or reference URL (P854). See help at Help:Sources#Web_page. -- LaddΩ chat ;) 23:58, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
@Laddo: You find at the end of the Michael Ballack (Q11948) item Munzinger Sport number (P1285) with an ID. On this page linked via ID is the source of the birthday. How to use this source (via ID) correctly? Thank you, Conny (talk) 12:12, 3 February 2015 (UTC).
@Conny: I corrected your reference, reference URL (P854) AND publisher (P123). For web references, stated in (P248) is only used IF the specific URL page has its own Wikidata item (thus not in your case). It is not appropriate to use Munzinger Sport number (P1285) in references. -- LaddΩ chat ;) 12:45, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
@Laddo: It seems you are following the rules of Help:Sources#Web_page. However, Munzinger Sport can also be considered as a database. In that case, adding Munzinger Sport number (P1285) in references is recommended according to Help:Sources#Databases --Pasleim (talk) 13:26, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
@Laddo: I changed and used the property.@all What do you think? Thank you, Conny (talk) 18:33, 4 February 2015 (UTC). @Laddo:

Abuse filter proposals

There are some proposals for the abuse filter on this page. Please leave your opinion there. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 07:59, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

German Integrated Authority File

I keep coming across discrepancies in birth/death dates where a date is referenced "German Integrated Authority File". For example Q10559449 has a birth date of 30 January 1871 (GIAF) and a second date of 29 January 1871 referenced by the English and Romanian Wikipedias. My first problem is that biography Wikipedia articles rarely reference the date of birth so I am unable to decide which is correct. My second problem is that I know nothing about GIAF. I tried but was unable to find a date of birth from GIAF to at least check it was giving 30 Jan 1871. My question for here is, how reliable is GIAF as a source of data? Should I edit the Wikipedias to match GIAF? or should I delete the GIAF date from the database? or the middle ground, leave Wikidata as it is, and request better sources on Wikipedia? Periglio (talk) 22:07, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

First: Why is this authority file, IMHO best known by its German abbreviation GND, called German Integrated Authority File here at all? English Wikipedia calls it the Integrated Authority File, another common translation is Universal Authority File, but German Integrated Authority File and especially the abbreviation "GIAF" seems highly uncommon. It's also misleading to call it that, as it is an international authority file. Its language is German, but "German" is ambiguous (could also be read as "of Germany"). - Well, to the question: I perceive the GND as basically pretty reliable. They don't display exact dates of birth and death in the German National Library's portal where you probably looked - link for your example - but if you use VIAF, you can access the full authority data, here's the example link - and there it says "30.01.1871-15.03.1949" (in the second field numbered 548). However, I think they often haven't stored exact dates. And of course - the GND contains errors, as any database. But if you have a date referenced at least by the GND, that's of course better than unreferenced Wikipedia data. In this case, I would edit Wikipedias to match the GND, and if then someone shows up giving a better source and proving the GND wrong, that would be a good result, too. German-language Wikipedia has a dedicated page to report errors in the GND, by the way de:Wikipedia:PND/Fehlermeldung (it has "PND" in the name because that was a predecessor of the GND). Gestumblindi (talk) 23:37, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for that excellent answer, I now know where to look. I have removed the second entry on Wikidata on the basis that it is no longer referenced on Wikipedia (I changed those too). Periglio (talk) 07:41, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
Fine - and I changed the label of Q36578 from "German Integrated Authority File" to "Integrated Authority File" as that's apparently the name most widely used in English. Gestumblindi (talk) 19:53, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
IMHO we shouldn't use the GND as a source for statements. The authority records are meant to help clearly identify the record's subject, but AFAIK it's not really meant to be an authoritative source of information. I've often come across records that gave Wikipedia, IMDb or similar sites as their sources, which aren't considered reliable enough per Wikipedia guidelines. The individual records often state the source of the information, IMO that's what we should use in these cases. --Kam Solusar (talk) 00:45, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
Well, but if we have the choice between an unsourced date in Wikipedia and a different GND date, I'd still prefer the GND date - you're right, their sources aren't always particularly reliable, and they also use Wikipedia (which then leads to a circle effect), but let's continue with the current example: They give three sources for the Brăescu entry: LCAuth (Library of Congress Authorities), Wikipedia, and "Südosteuropäisches Biogr. Archiv (WBIS)". Obviously, as it was different, they haven't used Wikipedia for the date of birth. That leaves LCAuth and the "Südosteuropäisches Biogr. Archiv (WBIS)" as possible sources for the date. None of them are first-class in their reliability: LCAuth has the same issues as any authority database (not that different from GND) and WBIS is a collection of scanned biographical works of varying quality. But still: it's at least something a bit more tangible than a date out of thin air. So, a better source than the GND is always desirable, but GND is often better than just Wikipedia. Gestumblindi (talk) 02:11, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
I will also add that my final edit was after studying the history of the articles (all languages),checking to see who added the date and trying to find an alternative source. In this particular case, the only external reference was the GND. I also make a request on the talk page asking if there is a source for the alternative address. I am not using GND as a reliable source, only as a guide if nothing else is available. Periglio (talk) 23:18, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
I don't think "better a weak source than no source at all" is the best solution. If there's no source, people at least can easily see that and search for a reliable source. But if there's already a weak source such as the GND, fewer people will bother searching for a better one, especially when they don't know much about how the GND works.
Personally, I'd rather we simply remove all dates and other statements that don't have reliable sources and only allow them to be added if such a source is provided. --Kam Solusar (talk) 19:06, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

'In other languages' editor should allow editing without listing in Babel box

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T62369

The languages selected in the 'In other languages' editor are based on one's stated Babel box. New users to Wikidata should be able to easily add labels, descriptions and aliases without having to setup a Babel box. Also, one's Babel box may be a formal statement of the languages which one speaks, but one may know the labels for things even if one wouldn't even state that one has a level one ("can understand written material or simple questions") understanding of that language. I know a whole bunch of German and Italian words but I couldn't honestly say I know German or Italian. The current Babel box reliance of the editing tools is frustrating for some users. —Tom Morris (talk) 20:03, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

There are some tickets on this. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 20:11, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, Matěj Suchánek. My Phabricator search-fu was failing me. —Tom Morris (talk) 20:39, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

You can also add a language and state 0 level knowledge, check out my babelboxes. (And yes, it would be nice if we were able to show more languages somehow without switching the whole interface. My fault) --Denny (talk) 00:06, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

capitalization

Correct capitalization is probably near the bottom of the relative scale of importance of things, but it really bothers me and it makes the site look bad. Native speakers learn it when they are little kids, so bad caps gives the description below a primary school level of English. It's by far the most common spelling error.

The most common of these errors (according to my count from a recent dump) is in 11,800 descriptions. 11,800! I'm going to have an aneurysm.

Top five:

  1. czech (11,800) (!)
  2. czechoslovakia (4264)
  3. slovak (3215)
  4. austrian (925)
  5. german (366)

Could we please remember to capitalize names of countries, languages, and their respective adjectives? Those are never right. Ever. Could a bot please fix these? I'm sure bots created this mess. A human would have noticed after the first ten thousand. --Haplology (talk) 07:08, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you thank you thank you!!! Someone who gives a shit! It busts my brain too, because whenever I see this, I think how sloppy this is. As with "Czech", I think this is because the adjective "český/česká" (m/f) is written in lower case. But that doesn't mean it should be in English, too!!! Bad translations. And the same thing goes in other languages, when certain words should be written in lower case, but are capitalised. The rules and guidelines are quite clear, it would be nice if we could all stick to them! Jared Preston (talk) 07:38, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm glad someone else cares. I was a little embarrassed for posting something that emotional. It's just frustrating because I've spent many hours over the course of many days correcting spelling errors by hand, including several hundred of careless bad caps, and one bot spews out tens of thousands of them. Actually a lot of the most common (what proportion I don't know), are due to one single bot, whose operator continued making the same errors days after I contacted him/her directly. Still waiting for a reply three (closer to two) months later. It's enough of a Sisyphean task to correct mistakes made by humans.
The good news is that it's not as widespread a problem as I thought. Sorry everyone for throwing a fit. But still. Please. --Haplology (talk) 12:09, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
Surely this is exactly what we have a bot policy for? - Brya (talk) 12:15, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
@Frettie: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:21, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Related to this: Please note what I wrote in section #Wikipedia app and Wikidata vandalism just some days ago: While our descriptions used to be just some internal little helper texts to be able to distinguish different items with the same label here on Wikidata, they are now displayed in the official Wikipedia app (and the upcoming mobile browser version of Wikipedia) just below every article title. This increases their visibility enormously, and by this correct spelling gets much more important, too, especially as the users of the app don't even have the chance to correct the descriptions theirselves. (Though the capitalization problem is not that bad there, as the first letter seems to be always capitalized there.) --YMS (talk) 14:44, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

I would like to point out that it is English that always capitalizes these. There are other languages that do not even appear to have the concept of capital letters, and others that do not capitalize as many things as English does. But not capitalizing them in English is unacceptable. Just be careful if you go through with a bot capitalizing things that you are not capitalizing things in a language that does not capitalize them. Wixty (talk) 22:57, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

ːCould anyone produce a query output with of the items with the wrong capitalized labels? I would fix the labels with quick statements tool but I need the item-wronglabel pairs. --Wesalius (talk) 13:50, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

The way of archive

Hello,

Please only archive discussions by only moving pages to a sub page instead of removing sections and copying them into subpages. In this case, history of revisions of a page won't increase and contribution will stay on archive pages and they're easy to track using Special:Contribution. Mjbmr (talk) 19:34, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't agree with you. Then we'll lose the creating day of the original page. --Stryn (talk) 21:11, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Also this wont be needed when we eventually get Flow! :) ·addshore· talk to me! 11:43, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Administative divisions and populated places

Long ago I opened a rfc for Administative divisions and populated places [1] maybe it's time to make a decision for millions of items and write a definitive guideline --Rippitippi (talk) 15:58, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Description for Category Item

Reported from my Talk.

«I notice ValterVBot going around changing descriptions of Wikipedia category items to "Wikimedia category page". Which is inaccurate since those items do not correspond to categories on all projects. Wikinews topic categories correspond instead to the same items as Wikipedia articles. --Pi zero (talk) 23:59, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

@Pi zero: I haven't thinked about this. I must restore wrong description if site link are only from Wikinews, is correct? --ValterVB (talk) 19:10, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
Have you some example? I don't found wrong item :( --ValterVB (talk) 19:37, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
It seems to me that the old description ("Wikipedia category") is more honest about being Wikipedia-centered, while the new description ("Wikimedia category page") kind of makes it seem as if other projects don't even exist (as if Wikimedia = Wikipedia). Maybe there is a description that is better than either one, but I'm not sure what that would be.
Here's a specific example. Item Category:Nepal (Q7085149) corresponds to Wikipedia Category:Nepal. It also corresponds to Category:Nepal in Wikiquote, Wikisource, and Wikivoyage. But Wikinews Category:Nepal corresponds to Nepal (Q837), whose description is "Country in Asia" and corresponds to Wikipedia article Nepal. Nothing on Wikinews corresponds to Category:Nepal (Q7085149).
The primary name of Category:Nepal (Q7085149) is "Category:Nepal". It seems to me that was chosen because the item corresponds to Wikipedia Category:Nepal, and the other sisters organize themselves around that. So, as I said, at least the description "Wikipedia category" is honest about being Wikipedia-centered. Of the two choices (old and new), I would favor the old name ("Wikipedia category"). --Pi zero (talk) 20:06, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
@Pi zero: Now I understand better what you mean. For Wikimedia instead Wikipedia I used autoedit gadget descriptions, I have also checked more used descriptions:
  • Lang - Descriptions - n° of item
  • en - Wikimedia category page - 458097
  • en - Wikimedia category - 142774
  • en - Wikipedia category - 29346
  • en - wikipedia category - 149
  • en - Wikipedia category page - 136
  • en - wiki category page - 61
  • en - Wikimedia disambiguation page - 32
  • en - Wikimedia Commons Category - 15
  • en - Wikipedia Category - 11

and checked description of Wikimedia category (Q4167836). At the beginning, descriptions was Wikipedia... but when were added other projects, it was decided to change in Wikimedia, (commons, wikivoyage, wikisource are all Wikimedia project). So I'm not sure that is more correct the old description. Maybe before to change all the descriptions, is better to ask some other opinion? --ValterVB (talk) 20:51, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps someone else can think of an alternative that we haven't thought of. As I say, of those two options I would prefer "Wikipedia category" to "Wikimedia category page"; they seem to me to both be Wikipedia-centered, but "Wikipedia category" is honest about it; also, "Wikipedia category" seems at worst incomplete, while "Wikimedia category page" is claiming more for the item than is actually true. --Pi zero (talk) 21:13, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

»

Is preferable Wikimedia category page or Wikipedia category page or another description? @Pi zero: --ValterVB (talk) 18:11, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

  • I'm okay with the change. In examples like the Nepal one above categories that do not correspond are not even on the category item. Perhaps people would go with "project category page" but I'm not sure it's necessary. In fact, Wikidata items for cats don't seem to be hugely WP-centric so the change makes sense imo. Blood Red Sandman (talk) 19:12, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
More used description: --ValterVB (talk) 20:05, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
  • Lang - Desc - n° of item
  • it - categoria di un progetto Wikimedia - 2351380
  • de - Wikimedia-Kategorie - 2235491
  • pt - categoria de um projeto da Wikimedia - 2151476
  • fr - page de catégorie d'un projet Wikimedia - 2090495
  • pt-br - categoria de um projeto da Wikimedia - 1952809
  • es - categoría de Wikimedia - 1702458
  • da - Wikimedia-kategori - 1693898
  • fi - Wikimedia-luokka - 1693806
  • nb - Wikimedia-kategori - 1692070
  • nn - Wikimedia-kategori - 1692066
  • sv - Wikimedia-kategori - 1686871
  • ru - категория в проекте Викимедиa - 1619073
  • nl - Wikimedia-categorie - 1595389
  • fa - ردهٔ ویکی‌مدیا - 1584517
  • cs - kategorie Wikimedie - 1581670
  • et - Wikimedia kategooria - 1581644
  • ru - категория в проекте Викимедиа - 513190
  • en - Wikimedia category page - 504424
Based on actual use and on more used descriptions, I continue the standardization. If for some language is necessary change, I can do it without problem --ValterVB (talk) 09:40, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

wiki table to wikidata

Hi. Is there a tool allowing me to edit items from a wiki table? I'm specifically looking for a method to add statements about German MoPs as mentioned in Liste der Mitglieder des Deutschen Bundestages. Most of these MoPs have Wikipedia entries and corresponding Wikidata entries. My idea was to add the respective parliamentary term as a statement. I know that Autolist2 allows you make statements based on categories, which isn't an option in this case. Regards, Christoph Braun (talk) 16:39, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

@Christoph Braun: TABernacle may help you. But you can only edit one value at a time. You can not do multiple entity-changes in one request.--GZWDer (talk) 05:09, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
@Christoph Braun: Copy the table to a spreadsheet, reformat, export as tab-separated text, and use Quick statements. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:49, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikibooks is coming!

Hey folks :)

It's time to welcome another sister projects into our rounds. It'll be Wikibooks. They'll get access to the interwiki links on Wikidata on February 24th. Depending on how that goes I'll set a date for data access. The page for all things Wikibooks is at Wikidata:Wikibooks. Please help by giving them a warm welcome in 2 weeks.

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 19:39, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

So where are we as the community in getting ready for this? I'm looking at Wikidata:Sister projects/Planning checklist, but I don't know if progress has been made on this. --Rschen7754 05:14, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Links to Commons

What is the difference between Commons gallery (P935) and the section other sites at the end of item, where I can add any link to commons (gallery seems prefered)? Thank you, Conny (talk) 11:06, 7 February 2015 (UTC).

It is same as with Commons category (P373). You can make more than one link from an item and more than one link to a gallery. A link in the "Other sites" section is "real link" a data can be trasferred to Commons only by this link. I am sure that migrating to link-only Commons will start soon. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:09, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

URL formatter problems?

Sometimes URL get not formated, f. e. GND Numbers clickable to extern sites. Reload help often. What about used propertys in references as IPNI author ID (P586) via botanist author abbreviation (P428) in Edmond Boissier (Q34430). Will this ID number also sometimes get clickable? Thank you, Conny (talk) 11:18, 7 February 2015 (UTC).

This should be reported at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-AuthorityControl.js. I think it's because of different rendering of such snaks (phab:T88426). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:40, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
Moved here, thank you. Conny (talk) 12:53, 7 February 2015 (UTC).

Merge: Who can help ?

  • 1. Category:New Democracy (Greece) politicians (Q9059512) and Kategorie:ND-Mitglied (Q17262678)
  • 2. Category:Progressive Party of Working People politicians (Q8795578) and Kategorie:AKEL-Mitglied (Q8874407)
  • 3. Category:Democratic Party (Cyprus) politicians (Q8372409) and Kategorie:ED-Mitglied (Q8936819)

Who can merge ? For me to difficult to do. 188.96.176.110 15:29, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

As an anonymous user you can use this special page. As a registered user, you can use a gadget. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:57, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
The requested merges   Done Lymantria (talk) 16:49, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

I am new here

I want to start editing on wiki data, can anyone help me in a simple language as a newbie on wikidata--Kwameghana (talk) 15:42, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Welcome! I would suggest you to begin with the introduction to Wikidata. --Quico (talk) 17:01, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
What kind of help do you need? If you just want to start usefull work look at the game at https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/# --FischX (talk) 17:14, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #144

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Events/Blogs/Press
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Did you know?
  • Development
    • Did more work on Capiunto to get it into a state where it can be deployed to Wikimedia sites.
    • Mourned Titan (phabricator:T88550) as its developers were bought up. Began evaluation for which graph database to use instead for a Wikidata query service (mw:Wikibase/Indexing)
    • Further work on header section redesign
    • Tweaks to the sitelink section
    • Worked on making monolingual text datatype accept more languages
    • Finished showing the language when a language fallback is used
    • Started looking into fixing the existing Guided Tours after Guided Tours extension API changes
    • Worked on implementing Lua convenience functions for rendering arbitrary Snaks. This is useful for displaying references or qualifiers. (phabricator:T76213)
  • Monthly Tasks
    • Hack on one of these.
    • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
    • Help develop the next summary here!
    • Contribute to a Showcase item
    • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Sitelinks GUI redesign

What is wrong with item pages? After statements, the page split to two columns. On the first is the list with Wikipedia pages which are related to the item, and on the second are wikinews, wikiquote etc. Why this happen? I prefer to have a unique page like yesterday, not columns. Xaris333 (talk) 20:19, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

It was announced in Wikidata:Status updates/2015 01 10 and it is a step forward in redesigning the inteface, nothing wrong. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 20:23, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
Ok. Thanks. I found it more difficult... Xaris333 (talk) 20:32, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
It will take some time getting used to, that's for sure! What I'm missing are the property suggestions which seem to have gone awry. Jared Preston (talk) 20:39, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
Yeah we're currently fixing the suggestions and the edit summaries. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 20:45, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
Edit summaries and suggester are fixed. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 00:31, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE): Where can I find these suggestions and edit summaries? Petr Matas 08:11, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
It was just the normal edit summaries that show up in recen changes for example. They were broken shortly. The suggester is what pops up in the property field when you add a new statement. That shortly did not show up. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:29, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Its more difficult because I use more often the section about wikipedia links. The others are not useful (for me) but they get more than the half of the page. I would like to have the option to return to previous version, as well. Xaris333 (talk) 20:49, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
We'll add a feature where you can collapse the ones you don't want. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 20:50, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
I've filed phabricator:70903 and phabricator:T87024 now. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:36, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
Is there option to return back previous version? New interface is looked as cramped, disproportional font size, spanning elements, unaligned links... — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 20:46, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
Let's improve it. Alignment is noted. Font size is noted. Spacing is noted. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 20:49, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
The new lay-out is not an improvement. The most important links, to various wikipedia's, are at the side of my monitor screen, not somewhere in the middle where they should be. Lymantria (talk) 06:52, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
I am not sure, but I think I like it. The second column is mostly off screen, but that is fine (not using those). - Brya (talk) 07:00, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps the point is that I have a wide screen, where there would be enough space for a third column. But to add something positive: I like the more compact presentation. Lymantria (talk) 07:49, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
well, I kinda like the new interface... but there is one major problem : no more preview button (gadget) on each wikipedia link, which was so useful to look inside a page without opening it. Can't see where it could be located either, considering the size of the new block attributed to wikipedia. :(
could this be fixed, please ? it's really necessary to allow quick easy editing of new items, and merging... --Hsarrazin (talk) 07:59, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Ok we'll have a look. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:00, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
I created phabricator:T86755 for it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:22, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
I'll prepare a fix for Move - another broken gadget. Petr Matas 08:20, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:31, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Done, edit request issued. Petr Matas 10:50, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
... and applied. May I advertise my second request for adminship here? Petr Matas 12:12, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Structure of headings

I think that a heading <h2>Pages linked to this item</h2> should be added, and Wikipedia, Wikinews, etc. should be changed to <h3>. Petr Matas 08:11, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

You mean as a heading above all the sitelink boxes? We'll try how it looks here. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:32, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Exactly. :) PS: I like the new design. Petr Matas 08:35, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:36, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
And that is what the "Preferences" link is for. My guess is whoever created this abomination also likes it - not a given - though. Wixty (talk) 01:19, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Displayed language code is missing for Wikidata

It seems there is some function, which simplifies the displayed site ids e.g. from enwiki or enwikisource to just the displayed en. However, for wikidatawiki, nothing is displayed. Petr Matas 11:01, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Looking into it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:15, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Created phabricator:T86754 for it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:17, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Sortability

Hallo Lydia, there's a neat & useful function that is now missing: The ability to sort the links alphabetically either by the interwiki code or article title.

Although sitelinks are now list-based instead of wikitable-like, so there are no longer any header rows to click on in order to sort the columns; nevertheless, maybe your team could please add a button or link such as "Sort by: Site/Title" above the the list to replace the lost function? Please don't sacrifice functionality during renovations. Danke, keep up the good work. Appreciated, --Menchi (talk) 11:23, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

I've opened phabricator:T86757 to see if we can/want to bring this functionality back. Can you give one or two cases where this is useful for you? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:20, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
I know one. Take Q573538#sitelinks-wikipedia. I want to see quickly, which titles are similar to "Regul...". Petr Matas 12:38, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Ok thanks! What do you take from this information? Are you looking for languages which are close to your own and which you likely can read then? Or something else? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:00, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
It is for sitelink cleanup, i.e. fixing the situation when not all sitelinks refer to the same concept. Then one needs to determine the majority concept. As languages borrow words from each other, the titles tend to be similar, which becomes obvious when you sort them. Then you infer the majority concept easily. Petr Matas 21:03, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
It is very useful also if is necessary split Disambiguation item. --ValterVB (talk) 21:22, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, folks. That makes sense to me now. Let's see what we can do. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 21:29, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
I agree that being able to sort each column (language, wiki, title) is useful, and I am pretty sure I have used it on occasion. Wixty (talk) 07:11, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

Alignment

To restore the alignment of sitelinks, please set the minimal width of the language code box to fit the widest two-letter code. Petr Matas 12:43, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

... and center the text inside the language code box. Petr Matas 12:54, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

... like this. Petr Matas 12:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks :) Will have one of the devs look at it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:01, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
Just talked this through. Can we get this into Commons.css here? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:41, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
@Petr Matas: Poke in case you missed this :) --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:52, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
Edit request issued. Petr Matas 15:22, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
Centering is fine with me. All I care about is three columns, tab separated, one for the language, one for the language code (e.g. enwiki), and one for the name of the article. But with nothing beside them, so that I can easily copy and paste them. It needs to say "enwiki" though, not "en". Wixty (talk) 21:34, 15 January 2015 (UTC)
Your usecase is really better served by a separate tool. Maybe someone here can help you code something up that fits much better with what you want to do. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:41, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
I sure hope that was not directed to me. I am not sure what a "usecase" is, but being able to make a list of all the articles in every language that we have articles on is a pretty basic function, and something that we need to provide - with the wikiname they are in, enwiki Book, eswiki Libro, frwiki Livre (document), with a delimiter that is usable, like a tab, and not a comma, or space, which could occur within a title. It should not be a surprise that people are interested in using Wikidata... It is also somewhat comical to see developers respond to complaints that you have to do a lot of scrolling by putting side by side items that you would never have to scroll past anyway (Q30 has a bazillion lines, 264 articles, 27 news pages, but you never have to scroll past the news pages, only the 264 articles - but no please do not put the articles into multiple columns - that would be an even worse disaster). Wixty (talk) 23:36, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Number of columns and their positioning

Look at the source code of the layout below. The number of columns is not fixed, but the minimum column width is set instead. I think that it should lead to a nicer result for positioning of sitelink groups.

Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
is longer
Group 5

Petr Matas 14:10, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Will have one of the devs look at it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:12, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
It is extremely important to not put items into side by side columns, but only one above the other. Wixty (talk) 19:20, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Links in the edit mode

When editing sitelinks it should be clearer that the existing links are editable. Now when you click [edit] the links looks like a plain text and I can guess that it's not easy for everyone to edit those links. Maybe a white background or a text box under the links or a different color for the links or something else. --Stryn (talk) 21:44, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Good point. Will look into that. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 21:46, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
This is really badly done. Please correct it as soon as possible. Something so easy as adding an interwiki has become secret knowledge all of a sudden. --Ecelan (talk) 11:19, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Main language first

Another issue with gadgets - there is no moving babel-languages upwards now... --Infovarius (talk) 03:29, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

I think phabricator:T87025 is the way to go there. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:42, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

merging

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T87524

Used to be that it was not possible to merge items that had sitelinks to the same project, but now apparently it is possible: this just leaves the relevant sitelink behind in the emptied page? - Brya (talk) 12:04, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

@Brya: This is surely not good. Which merging method did you use? The Merge gadget, or Special:MergeItems, or something else? You may also be interested in phab:T85347. Petr Matas 05:50, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
I did not use anything, but I found an item that had been merged so. - Brya (talk) 05:55, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for your report. Petr Matas 06:08, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
You're welcome. - Brya (talk) 10:37, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Optional previous version

Hello Lydia, you suggest to wait for new interface improvements two weeks ago. Now I see only minor changes, the most issues was not fixed. Is it possible to return back old interface (at all or using option)? — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 11:50, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Hey Ivan. We have fixed several things that were problematic. Others are still on the todo list. Maintaining both versions isn't possible. The code of the previous one was thrown away as it was highly problematic and some of the oldest code in Wikibase. Further improvements to the current one are the way to go. I am tracking remaining issues at phabricator:T70903. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 23:52, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
I do not find many issues in phabricator:T70903, especially design-related. Some screenshots:
  •  
    Overlapped drop-downs
  •  
    System identifiers instead of human-readable names
  •  
    Slow view/edit mode switching (8 sec for Q7144547)
  •  
    Unaligned links in edit mode
  •  
    Unaligned links in view mode
  •  
    Unaligned right border
  •  
    Incompatible add behavior
  •  
    Incompatible headers design (outside/inside frame)
  •  
    Incompatible names design
Are these 9 issues tracked somewhere? — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 20:53, 2 February 2015 (UTC)
1: I have filed phabricator:70903 for it now.
2: We have been asked for this. Longer IDs would be problematic. Are there cases where it is actually causing issues for people?
3: I will look into this more.
4+5: Since the site ids are of varying length there is bound to be at least some misalignment. We're looking into further tweaking it though.
6+7+8+9: Those will all be fixed as we redesign the header and statement section. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:46, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
2: I can not remember that "bar" or "af" is mean. "az" is similar to "arz", what is Azerbaijan? Two-tree char identifiers are badly recognized by human eye. Its require additional efforts when you try to find some language. Original variant with multilingual captions was not ideal too, but current variant is much worse. More better variant is language names on current user language, but I am not sure that full language names matrix can be easily created.
4+5: Unaligned names are looked very ugly, especially if links has similar prefixes like "Category:". I can not look the list from up to down, I need search with gaze word start on every line.
6+7+8+9: I very hope that claims section redesign will be made much more better than new sitelinks section. Author of original Wikidata design had good taste, not ideal, but good. New sitelinks section has low usability and is looked ugly. I thing it is better to complete sitelinks section first. Current sitelink editor is needed to be redesigned much more than current claims section. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 00:03, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

All I care about, is can I copy and paste a list of wiki articles, producing the following three tab separated columns (whether the language is in user preference as shown or native is not important): 

Language	wiki	Article
Arabic	arwik i	الولايات المتحدة
English	enwiki	United States
French	frwiki	Estat Unis
Hebrew	hewiki	ארצות הברית
Russian	ruwiki	Соединённые Штаты Америки
Chinese	zhwiki	美国
Zulu	zuwiki	IMelika

Even if no one wants to dig up a copy of the old code from one of the many backups available and forgo the fixes made, it should be trivial to create whatever look and feel we like. Can we at least get a discussion of proposed functionality instead of springing it on us and pretending that the previous code was accidentally deleted? The main point is that we are getting about zero accountability from the WMF. Designing a GUI is not hard - but first you have to decide on the functionality that you want, and the old code had all the functionality that I needed, the new one, no. By the way, I thank the editor who created the spreadsheet for extracting the above data, but I have gone back to using the XML, as it is far easier to stay on one server than trying to use a third party. Can we get sortable columns as part of the new GUI design? And no side by side columns? Wixty (talk) 22:49, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Can't merge Kategorie:Schas-Mitglied (Q9111170) and Category:Shas politicians (Q7714731)

Data item Q9111170 should link to Category:Shas politicians (Q7714731) , but the automation cannot merge the target. 92.74.62.158 03:21, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

  Merged There was a conflicting English description; if you'd deleted it, then there would have been no problem. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:55, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Origin of the Moon

German Entstehung des Mondes

is linked with: Giant impact hypothesis (Q723219)

instead of: Origin of the Moon (Q7102486)

Greetings from Dresden (Germany) --Palitzsch250 (talk) 14:08, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

  Done --Quico (talk) 14:30, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry

Hello, I started to use this new tool in order to mark what items could be merged. I already review about 100 items relative to French and English languages. After the review, the articles are listed in a checklist. Do you know what happen after that? How the items are merged? Who perform the merging? Thank you in advance for your reply ; I did not find this information in the tool pages. Pamputt (talk) 16:30, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

I think Pasleim's bot. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:37, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, my bot is performing the merging as soon as two users mark an item. Probably, if I have time to write the code, I will allow direct merging as it is in The Game --Pasleim (talk) 17:21, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Centenarian and supercentenarians

We have Q2944360 centenarian and Q1200828 supercentenarian but from what I can tell, these each have only been used a couple of times. Even this varies between P31 instance of and P106 occupation. I am in favour of having a centenarian flag as it helps with data validation but not too sure what to do about it. What would be my next step in proposing a centenarian flag as a requirement for humans over 100? Plus, what should it be added as? instance of and occupation do not seem quite right. Periglio (talk) 17:34, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Earth

Hi all, I'm participating in the organization of WLE in Spain. We're working in gathering the complete list of sites of community importance and we have considered that an item for each of them should be created in wikidata. We'd do it in an automated way with a bot, from an existing database that contains the name, coordinates, existing articles and commons categories. However, we'd like to include alos the SCI code assigned by Natura2000. I assume it's a wikidata property similar to Property:P808, but we don't know whether new properties have to be approved or anybody can create a new property. Could you help us to sort this out? Best regards --Discasto (talk) 16:50, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Take a look at Wikidata:Property proposal. --Jklamo (talk) 17:05, 4 February 2015 (UTC)
@Discasto: Did you request the property yet? Is there a site where all these Natura 2000 sites can be viewed? --Tobias1984 (talk) 19:42, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Merge problems

I can't merge Category:bags (fashion) (Q8286031) with German Kategorie:Handtasche (Q13465879) . Who can help ? 92.74.62.158 05:09, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

  Done You may be interested in Wikidata:Project_chat#Merge: Who can help ? --Haplology (talk) 05:26, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Automatically mark all changes by a user as patrolled

Is there a tool to mark all changes made by a certain user as patrolled? I heard that users’ edits are supposed to be patrolled automatically after 50 edits, but that doesn’t seem to be happening (example: Zajio1am). —DSGalaktos (talk) 13:28, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

As far as I know there is no such tool. To become autopatroller, an account needs to age a time and needs a minimum number of edits. On Wikidata it is as far as I know 7 days and 50 edits. --Pasleim (talk) 17:52, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
Oh, I didn’t know about the 7 days… that would explain what I’ve seen. Thanks. —DSGalaktos (talk) 19:48, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
RTRC contains a option to mass patrol btw. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 21:56, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Q19000000

is here:) I did again.--DangSunM (talk) 01:48, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Nice! --Haplology (talk) 05:29, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
And another hundred thousand items have been created in the past three days. --Jakob (talk) 16:58, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Can't link to the Hindi Wikisource

Data item Q6366417 should link to s:hi:कपालकुण्डला, but the automation cannot recognize the target and so I cannot add the link. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:55, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

There's no Wikisource in Hindi (hi.wikisource.org) and thus you can't add it on Wikidata. --Stryn (talk) 21:04, 7 February 2015 (UTC)
Actually, Hindi texts are stored at the Multilingual Wikisource (aka oldwikisource, aka www.wikisource.org), which doesn't support Wikidata yet. I don't really understand what are the intentions of the Foundation and of the Wikidata dev team regarding that site. So far it has been left behind, and the WD team so far didn't provide any timeline for giving it Wikidata support. Candalua (talk) 17:13, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Move sitelinks

How is this meant to work? On which page should it look how? It seems that it works on some days, fails on others. Some days it's just a set of links, on others there are icons. --- Jura 05:39, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jura1: As the UI of sitelinks was changed, MediaWiki:Gadget-Move.js had to become more compact. If it fails, you should report it there. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:06, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Proposal - hide sections

I would like to propose that the "other languages" and "statements" sections by hidden.

Other languages
Like this
Statements
And like this

I waste countless hours scrolling past things that I have never used. Wixty (talk) 21:44, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Looking at phab:T88695, this will be done at least for the "other languages" section. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:49, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
@Wixty: the horizontal menu above "Other languages" can be used to directly jump to each section. You may also add importScript( 'User:FRacco/logoLinks.js' ); to your common.js to make these menu items look nicer. -- LaddΩ chat ;) 02:26, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
But often enough there would be no point in doing so (as pages are too small). And actually I have never used it for that: it is there only to be endured as yet another handicap of the GUI. - Brya (talk) 17:33, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
Hiding one will help, but I have never had any trouble scrolling past the three lines in that section, although it does waste time to do it. Normally I land directly on the Wikipedia section, from the link in the Wikipedia page, so scrolling down is not as big a problem - scrolling up is, to get back to the top of the page, which takes ages on an item like United States of America (Q30), with over 200 statements. Hint to anyone adding an item, scroll to the absolute bottom of the page before doing anything. The "edit" link is "sticky", and will follow you down there (if you are using javascript). Wixty (talk) 05:32, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Use of property: Height

How can I specify the height of an object, like a building? I tried to add a height to the item "Donauturm", but it wouldn't come up as a statement. Instead I had to add the statement "has quality" and added "height" as a value. But I want the height to be the statement and add a numeric value. thanks Jackson665 (talk) 09:35, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Hi! As far as I know is not possible at this moment. Properties requiring units (meters, kg, etc) haven't been implemented yet. Strakhov (talk) 09:42, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
And doesn't have much attention. According to the weekly updates every few weeks someone looks a little into something, but I don't remember to have seen any outcome. It's on the development plan, but focus seems to be on implementing a monolinguic datatype in multiple languages (sic) and redesigning UI. Poul G (talk) 10:35, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Automatic edits when deleting

I just noticed that I have several recent "edits" from when I deleted items on the English Wikipedia and, since I didn't edit here, I'm trying to figure out where they came from. Were they done by the software here? I was using en:User:Mr.Z-man/closeAFD.js at the time, and while I can't find a reference to Wikidata in the code, I suppose it could have come from there. Either way, they should probably be marked as automated/tool edits to reflect the fact that the person "performing" them may not be aware of that fact. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 02:46, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

@Philosopher: see phab:T51100.--GZWDer (talk) 02:56, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
I agree that those edits should be tagged in some way; I once removed ~10 sitelinks automatically while reverting pagemove vandalism on some wiki, but there was no indication that that was the reason for the removal. Actually, that's two bugs there, but I don't think the second could be fixed. Is there a ticket for this yet? Ajraddatz (talk) 02:59, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Would a simple tag on these edits do it for you? What should it be called? It'd be great if someone could open a ticket for this. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 07:10, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
@Philosopher, Lydia Pintscher (WMDE): AFAIK the tags management is being reworked right now and some new features came to Wikidata yesterday. Maybe Wikibase could profit from these changes (for more info see phab:T20670). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:23, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks a lot. I'll look into that. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 07:27, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

search for painter

I need some information about E.Ruced painter . he (or she) has worked at the end of 1800 Thanks  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Maurizio Marani (talk • contribs) at 09:12, 9 February 2015‎ (UTC).

@Maurizio Marani: Try en:Wikipedia:Reference desk. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:24, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Season and episode numbering

I've been trying to figure out how to properly express season and episode numberings for things such as television and web series, but I haven't found anything. Right now I'm using the series ordinal (P1545) property as a qualifier, but this seems like it would be problematic for more complex cases. Could anyone point me in the right direction? Dancter (talk) 20:12, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

I have used a lot follows (P155) and followed by (P156) ex, The Simpsons (Q886) - The Simpsons, season 24 (Q13131) - Moonshine River (Q218073) --ValterVB (talk) 20:34, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
Those are also good things to have, but trying to derive season and episode numbering using those statements would be too dependent on other statements and items. If episodes are missing from the chain, or aren't well-described using the right properties, the count would be thrown off. Is there a reason why there aren't domain-specific properties for this? Dancter (talk) 17:27, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

country (Q6256) vs. sovereign state (Q3624078)?

What is the difference between country (Q6256) and sovereign state (Q3624078)? Is one subclass of the other? Are they disjoint? country (Q6256) entry says "said to be the same as -> state" and Q3624078 is "instance of" state, but sovereign state (Q3624078) is not instance of country (Q6256). And some entities - such as Russia (Q159) were marked as sovereign state (Q3624078) but not country (Q6256).

Among other confusing things, having multiple categories inconsistently meaning the same thing makes searching/retrieving data - even as basic as "list of countries" - non-trivial.

There are more states that are non-countries - such as Venezuela (Q717), Libya (Q1016), Bolivia (Q750) and many others - I've found at least 73 instances. --Laboramus (talk) 07:09, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Property proposal closures: backlog

Could we have some admin attention at Wikidata:Property proposal/Unsorted (particulalry #YourPaintings venue/collection identifier), please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:21, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Why use descriptions in mobile applications ?

 
Screenshot Wikipedia App with wikidata vandalism

Descriptions are to be used in a mobile app. On the one hand it is great to learn that Wikidata is finally getting a presence in the WMF mobile apps, on the other hand it is seriously disappointing that descriptions are used. Descriptions are typically available only in a few languages and it is very hard to maintain them where they exist. They are very static and do not reflect changes.

In automated descriptions we have a great alternative. They are based on statements and labels and consequently you will find that in the majority of cases it takes not that much effort to provide adequate descriptions. Typically it is just a matter of adding statements. For many languages it is a matter of adding labels but once you add one label, it is reflected on all items where the statement is used. As a consequence automated descriptions provide much better functionality it helps with disambiguation and it makes it much more obvious what items are candidates for merging.

What I would like to know is why they are not used. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:11, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

What automated descriptions make painfully obvious is when Wikidata has it wrong.. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 07:08, 9 February 2015 (UTC)
"Why use wikidata descriptions in mobile applications ?" Good question. To make it easier to vandalise Wikipedia pages? Who even needs a wikidata descriptions between the Wikipedia article name and the Wikipedia article text?! I guess there are 2 answers:
1) "because we can": The WMF mobile team does whatever they want to do, no feedback, no RfCs, no turning back, nothing. Vandalism? That's a community problem. Which doesn't exist, because the mobile team never heard of that, because the WMF mobile team has no working feedback channel.
2) To force unwilling Wikipedians to patrol wikidata, just to keep their articles from being vandalised by WMF via wikidata. Go patrol wikidata, or else... That will surely make wikidata super popular at Wikipedia. Like on ruWP. --Atlasowa (talk) 17:50, 10 February 2015 (UTC)
You have the wrong end of the stick. It is a mobile app not a Wikipedia app. GerardM (talk) 07:40, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
No, it's the "Official Wikipedia App". And they are starting to add those vandalism-prone wikidata descriptions to mobile Wikipedia too. --Atlasowa (talk) 12:37, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Vandalism on Wikidata is not new. It's only becoming more visible. The article itself is more easy to vandalize. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 12:53, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
That's plain wrong. It's not easy to vandalize deWP because 1) there is flagged revisions/gesichtete Versionen, so IP vandalism is not shown to readers and 2) deWP has active community that reverts vandalism (FR + recent change patrols and watchlisting). Wikidata is a lot easier to vandalize, without being reverted. "Vandalism on Wikidata is not new." - True. "It's only becoming more visible." - Yes, because the vandalism is displayed on Wikipedia, for heavens sake! Do you know what happened to the russian Wikipedia integration of wikidata? (ruWP also uses flagged revisions) --Atlasowa (talk) 13:21, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
You still have it wrong because your approach is wrong. When you think that each Wikipedia is to verify data from Wikidata. You have 280 Wikipedias that are all equal and all intent to verify the same data. Right? VERY inefficient. It makes more sense to mark data at Wikidata as verified. NB I only care about statements in this. Descriptions are way more problematic. I have no clue how to have them in a way that makes sense. My point is very much that a subject that has NO Wikipedia article can have a description in any language and thereby provide some basic information. GerardM (talk) 18:26, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Maybe your stick is a dick? If a vandal replaces the english label for „taxon” with „motherfucker” a former autodescriptions „family and taxon” renders to „family and motherfucker” for more than 10,000 items. Nice? I don't think so. Of course there is a high chance that this is reverted quickly. But what happens when this is done in a more exotique language? --Succu (talk) 20:10, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
I wouldn´t see this as a serious problem, it is just a description of a picture. And maybe it is reason to develop some software to detect such replaces. --Molarus 13:13, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
No, it's not "a description of a picture". --Atlasowa (talk) 13:43, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

It's interesting that GerardM has posted this topic also to the mailinglist. There is a long discussion and even a bug T64695@phabricator and the vandalism problem isn't mentioned at all. Not even once. Obviously that is of no concern or interest. Magnus Manske writes a few times "for the vast majority of items, manual descriptions are a waste of volunteer time" and "a little developer time can save megahours (new unit!) of volunteers performing needless work" and "13M items x 287 languages = 4 billion descriptions to fill in manually". There is more concern by devs "that 3rd party consumers of wikidata should not have to think about whether descriptions have been written manually or were created automatically". --Atlasowa (talk) 17:04, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Be realistic. Wikidata is immature. Stupid things are done because a Wikipedia says so. We are at a stage where mass imports of data happen because Wikidata is lacking in essential data. Wikidata is lacking in descriptions in the first place and in general they are insufficient and often dated. With automated descriptions we fix the majority of instances where there is nothing at all.
For all I care you can whine about your Wikipedia but do that there and give Wikidata time to grow up. If you do not what its data ask yourself; where would Wikipedia be if your attitude, the one that was Nupedia, prevailed in the early days of Wikipedia ? In essence from my point of view, are you part of the solution or a whole new problem? GerardM (talk) 23:15, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

bahasa Indonesia merge?

Can somebody familiar with bahasa Indonesia look for the possibilities of a merge of id:367943 Duende with id:(367943) 2012 DA14 on idwiki? It's two different names of one asteroid. If the idwiki-community insist of having two articles in one subject, I will not try to change anybodys opinion, but my guess is that they are not aware of the situation. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 09:14, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

@Wagino 20100516:? -- Innocent bystander (talk) 12:53, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #145

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events/Blogs/Press
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Spiffy new project building on top of Wikidata: inventaire.io. Check out this example entry!
    • You will now see when a language fallback for a label is used on an item or property. The language name will be shown next to it.
    • Automatic descriptions for Wikidata items by Magnus
    • The templates for adding badges (good article, featured article, etc) to articles on Wikipedia in the sidebar are getting removed from articles rapidly in favor of getting that information from Wikidata \o/ German Wikipedia even deleted those templates already. English Wikipedia seems to be getting close.
  • Did you know?
  • Development
    • <3
    • We are hiring! Passionate about Wikidata and know your way around Java Script and co? Apply!
    • We'll spend the next week working with Nik and Stas from WMF to move queries forward in Berlin
    • Worked on implementing a Lua interface for arbitrary Snak rendering. This can be used to render eg. qualifiers or references in Wikipedia infoboxes.
    • Did groundwork for Lua convenience functions that render data in the user’s interface language, rather than the content language (for multilingual wikis, like Commons or Wikidata only)
    • Did further work on making the Lua interface code nicer and share code with the parser functions
    • Removed input method selector in the sitelink input as it was hiding the actual input and not very useful there
    • Fixed some issues in diff views showing new data instead of old data
    • Created a few scripts to make it easier for 3rd parties to install Wikibase
    • Fixed icinga notification that tests if dispatch lag gets high
    • Investigated several issues regarding storage of time values and started fixing them
    • Fixed editing of qualifiers
    • Fixed most browser tests after introduction of new header design
  • Monthly Tasks
    • Hack on one of these.
    • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
    • Help develop the next summary here!
    • Contribute to a Showcase item
    • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Art & Feminism challenge 7 & 8 March

Hi all, this is just to inform you that there is going to be an Art & Feminism contributions challenge in honor of International Women's Day. It will last from midnight fri/sat to midnight sun/mon and Wikidatans can also take part. The challenge page is here en:Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism/Challenge. Since this is part of a larger group of projects working to increase female participation in Wikimedia projects, of course women are urged to take part, but everyone is welcome to join in the fun. Prizes are to be determined, but the winner will in any case get a stroopwafel T-shirt. In order to have your contributions count, you must sign up and track your contributions on the page. New Wikidata items with at least 4 statements can be counted in the competition. I know some of you could probably outpace the quickest Wikipedians in racking up points, but we shall see who wins the points competition. Also, if you are at all interested in helping out let me know. I am interested in people who would like to join a marathon google hangout for newbies, donors of prizes and I am very interested in lists of artworks by women in all languages. I have been preparing myself by making lists of artworks by artists that I have in books about great women artists. So e.g. today I added items for artworks by Rachel Ruysch. I am always interested in paintings, but of course for Wikidata, any notable artwork (sculpture, building, film, song, poetry, play) by a woman is eligible, as are women artists of any sort. Also, any women in the arts (art historians, art collectors, museum founders, etc). Best, Jane023 (talk) 11:25, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Hi Jane, I've just put all the paintings of the Louvre Museum (around 40 artworks). Will do the same for the sculptures. Pyb (talk) 17:44, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
Pyb, that's wonderful - thanks! Jane023 (talk) 19:37, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Request for guidance on articles concerning Bible translations into English

I can use some help in figuring how to handle this. And I've been away for a while, and know that some procedures here have evolved a bit. So I can use a hand.

This starts with Q6888651, "Modern English Bible translations". It certainly correctly links articles on this subject in the English and Simple English Wikipedias. And I have not looked into other languages' wikis to see if similar articles appear. That said, as is common in simplewiki, this article covers a range of subjects that in enwiki are treated separately.

  1. The simplewiki article begins with the King James Version, which in enwiki is treated in the article w:en:Early Modern English Bible translations.
  2. Similarly, the article covers a variety of modern Jewish translations at approximately the same level of depth as it covers the Christian translations. But in enwiki, coverage of Jewish translations is handled separately at w:en:Jewish English Bible translations.
  3. Finally, there is no directly corresponding article in simplewiki to w:en:Bible translations into English (Q655192).

If I were reading any of those articles in enwiki and actually wanted to find a Simple English equivalent, this Simple English article would be appropriate in many ways. So my question is this: Can I/Should I place some links in Wikidata to handle this? Or should I stick with good, old-fashioned interwiki links in the enwiki articles themselves? Thanks for your thoughts. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:33, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Problems with wdq.wmflabs.org

Why doesn't this search find Q18913376? For other ids it works. --Jobu0101 (talk) 19:59, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

I do not know exact reason, but daily dump generator stopped its work today. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 20:13, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
Do we have to inform somebody or do those responsible already know? --Jobu0101 (talk) 23:18, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
There is a new dump now. All fine again? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 06:41, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Click the search link again. In the end you see "items":[] meaning the search didn't find any item. That's not good since Q18913376 should be found. So we still have just the same problem. --Jobu0101 (talk) 08:03, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Editing the item fixed it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:34, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Do we now have to reedit all those items which were edited lastly during down time? --Jobu0101 11:20, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

No I think it'll be picked up after while on its own. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:40, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Here is another search which doesn't work. Please don't edit that item that we can see when it works again. By the way, is there another API which answers such request which could be used instead? --Jobu0101 (talk) 16:11, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
I think this has something to do with the switch of wdq.wmflabs.org to two load balanced instances. If you run a query multiple times you get two different results. Try claim[405]. --Succu (talk) 16:35, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
How would claim[405] help me? --Jobu0101 (talk) 17:03, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
It was a general hint that wdq query results ar not reliable for some time. The results of claim[405] illustrate this. --Succu (talk) 17:09, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
Okay, I see. But in the 405 case I guess the reason is that there are too many items which match. So you don't get always the same items as answer. But if there are less items than the treshold I would suppose wdq.wmflabs.org to output always all matches. --Jobu0101 (talk) 18:42, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
There are two clearly distinct result sets. The difference is about 50 items. Worst of all: the query should give back zero items (or nearly so). --Succu (talk) 19:09, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
So is there any reliable API? And why aren't such bugs fixed? --Jobu0101 (talk) 22:16, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

@Magnus Manske: When could we get back WDQ? --JulesWinnfield-hu (talk) 12:31, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, it's back. Let's separate some of the issues here:

  • YuviPanda is a WMF admin who kindly set up the two VMs running WDQ. This was done so in case of trouble (WDQ instance dying), you would still get the other VM, until the first one restarted. In short, it improves uptime and thus reliability.
  • I do not know for certain why some edits are not updated. I suspect it is because the Special:EntityData JSON, which I use to get the current state of an item during update, not always presents the latest edit. I used Special:EntityData because it is apparently cached, thus reducing load on Wikidata and getting faster responses, but apparently that comes at a price. I have switched the code to use the API again, and it seems Yuvi has deployed it, but that would not magically fix previous missed updates.
  • For technical reasons, the two WDQ instances update separately, resulting in possibly two different result sets. This issue should be greatly reduced if the update bug is fixed now. Importing the next JSON dump should then take of the old missed edits; Yuvi will do that, but he is currently travelling, so no specific time frame there.
  • @Jobu0101: And why aren't such bugs not fixed? Despite your double negative, I try to fix them as I can. However, I am just a volunteer with a day-job, and WDQ is but one of several of my projects. WMF is working on a NoSQL database solution; WDQ should suffice until that is in production. --Magnus Manske (talk) 20:02, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

@Magnus Manske: First of all, sorry if I offended you. I didn't mean to. My double negative was of course wrong. I fixed it to simplify reading the discussion. Concerning the bugs in WDQ it seemed to me that there are many known bugs but nobody cares. Now I know that some people care but can't fixed them due to lack of time. --Jobu0101 (talk) 17:55, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE): Do you still think that it will be picked up after while on its own? --Jobu0101 (talk) 18:37, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

It should be if I understand it correctly by picking up the newest dump at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/wikidata/. If that isn't helping something is still borked. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 19:27, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
The problem is that wdq.wmflabs.org isn't aware of the changes of Wikidata which happened during downtime of wdq.wmflabs.org even though this is more than two weeks ago. --Jobu0101 (talk) 20:08, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
This has nothing to do with that. But the problems persists. Importing the last JSON dump seems not to taken place. Any progess Magnus? --Succu (talk) 20:27, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

There are even problems with more current changes. --Jobu0101 (talk) 08:25, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

The problems seem fixed now. What happend? --Jobu0101 (talk) 11:08, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Military ranks with P106

There are many cases where occupation (P106) is used with a military rank (Q56019) (like military officer (Q189290)). For this we have military rank (P410). Is it okay to migrate these values to military rank (P410)? What would be the replacement for occupation (P106) then? Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:50, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

  Support, you can replace it with military personnel (Q47064). Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 17:02, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
I use military officer (Q189290) for occupation (P106) and I believe it's sound practice. :-) The idea is to separate the occupation from the specific rank (especially given the fact that one's military rank (P410) changes over time, whereas the occupation as an officer does not.) That being said, consistency is paramount so I'll follow whichever consensus emerges from this discussion. Pichpich (talk) 17:17, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
People's careers in general tend to change a lot; it is true that most officers (in Canada anyway) don't switch to being non-commissioned members, but movement the other way is common. I think that P106 with the Q47064 value would be the best bet, and then using P410 for the rank makes sense. Ajraddatz (talk) 19:41, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
[2] shows that these statements have also been added by bots. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 21:21, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
I agree with Pichpich that the best option is to put military officer (Q189290) as occupation, given that military personnel (Q47064) is too broad (even soldier (Q4991371) is a subclass). Andreasm háblame / just talk to me 00:38, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
@Andreasmperu: But then we should add to military officer (Q189290) that it is also an occupation. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 10:43, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Done if that's all it takes! Pichpich (talk) 15:47, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
I agree that military officer (Q189290) is a occupation (P106). For military rank (P410) should have values like major (Q983927), lieutenant commander (Q837582) and squadron leader (Q11912077) with qualifiers like start time (P580). /ℇsquilo 08:42, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Semiprotection Q1046236 and userrights

I recently semi-protected Q1046236 because a notorious Ip user known as "astrovandal" deveoped an interest in this item. Yestarday, Gereon_K., a user in good standing with several thousand edits, complained on my talk page that they can not edit the item. They were in 2013 given the autopatrolled status, which at some point became obsolete, but somehow I do not see any indication that they are autoconfirmed. I can easily make them autoconfirmed and/or correct the item, just bringing it here since it can be a sign of a more general problem. Could somebody pls have a look?--Ymblanter (talk) 09:12, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Autopatrolled doesn't exists anymore. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 09:20, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
I know, my question is how a user who has over 1K edit, 2 years tenure and who was autopatrolled could be non-autoconfirmed.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:17, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
But Gereon K. is autoconfirmed. In Special:UserRights/Gereon_K. it states Implicit member of: Autoconfirmed users --Pasleim (talk) 10:22, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
They say on my talk page they can not edit the item. Smth is wrong here, but I do not understand what exactly is wrong.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:59, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
@Ymblanter: I also had problem with a page today (see below), and it was not even protected. And in recent time, I have seen a lot of complaints about Wikidata on svwp in similar matter. So you may ask them why where they not able to edit the page, because of userrights-problems or because of js-bugs? -- Innocent bystander (talk) 16:17, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that someone is not able to edit an item for an unknown reason. Purging the page (possibly more times) helps in 99% cases. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:41, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Tok!

Some tells me, I'm a Tok (Q2093690), but Wikidata today claims that I'm invalid. Can somebody else for me add sv:282P/(323137) 2003 BM80 to (323137) 2003 BM80 (Q15218423), since I am not valid enough? -- Innocent bystander (talk) 10:45, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Looks like I finaly fixed it myself. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 11:43, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
@Innocent bystander: Sure you weren't a Took clan (Q2362226)? Jon Harald Søby (talk) 11:53, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
@Jon Harald Søby: Well, I have the body of a Goblin, the hight of an Elf and the face of a Dwarf, so doing cosplay as a Halfling is not my first choise. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 14:40, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Patrollers?

Is there an active community of people going through and patrolling edits from new users? I've been trying to do my bit recently and it seems like I'm the only person paying the slightest bit of attention to Special:RecentChanges. I've seen crude vandalism last for a while on Wikidata, which is really concerning now that it is being used by the WMF for the mobile apps—vandalism on Wikidata has the potential to affect wikis in all languages simultaneously. How do we encourage a community of people to patrol for vandalism? We don't have the equivalent of bots like ClueBot NG on Wikidata. How do we stop Wikidata turning into a complete vandalism crapshoot? —Tom Morris (talk) 14:10, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

I sometimes patrol a whole month of new items created by anonymous users. But seems there are not a lot of people doing stuff like this, sadly. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 14:31, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
There sure are some users that patrol our recent changes. First of all that's user User:Haplology, but also User:Jared Preston, User:Pasleim, User:Rippitippi and some others are active here. I try to be from time to time, but then, like you, I still notice a lot of vandalism being many hours, days, even months old (just try to do some badword searches every now and then). The problem is that there are thousands of edits by non-confirmed users every day, and they are in all kinds of languages, and while the automatic edit summaries are useful to detect vandalism in many cases, they're often not enough. --YMS (talk) 14:34, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
My experience from recent days is to come once or twice a day to the unpatrolled recent changes, split them to registered and anonymous and check it. But it's true that the vandalism amount has increased rapidly (because of the app and propably linking from infoboxes in eswiki). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:00, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
+1 That's the best way in my experience too. It also helps a lot to scan for spelling errors (because vandalism often contains spelling mistakes) or words that don't show up in item's links or article page, although that last method is time-consuming for human & machine, and sometimes there is no article in the language. --Haplology (talk) 01:37, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
 
Screenshot Wikipedia App with wikidata vandalism
It's not really the app. Take this vandalism screenshot: There was a german wikimeeting in January and they stumbled on this "f#ck your mother" description in the Wikipedia app. Several experienced Wikipedians together couldn't figure out how to revert it or even where this crap came from. They weren't able to fix it, in the app, or on wikipedia. The mystery was solved later on the deWP village pump. It's wikidata vandalism. It's not coming from the app afaik, it's just displayed on the app. ^^
"wikidata linking from infoboxes in eswiki" is a good guess. And generally linking from Wikipedia on the leftside toolbox. A reader clicks on "Wikidata item" and bang he is on wikidata and confronted with an open text input field asking "Enter a description in English". And that is how vandalism is generated. (BTW that is also how interwiki-link vandalism on wikidata is generated... take a guess how that is fixed?)
For earlier discussion, see also Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2015/01#vandalism, Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2015/01#Wikipedia_app_and_Wikidata_vandalism, Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2015/02#Vandalism. --Atlasowa (talk) 17:31, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
A big problem is also language. I can't check every Arabic description with Google Translate every time, too much time consuming. Best way is to get good abuse filters to avoid the most of it. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 18:12, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
I have a "gTranslate" addon on Firefox which is quite handy. Just need to highlight a text and right click to choose "translate". I would like to get some function, so that I could only query for example changes to Finnish labels, descriptions and aliases at the Recent changes special page. --Stryn (talk) 19:07, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
Vandalism in Japanese at least is extremely rare, despite getting the fourth largest number of views per hour in the world, (see http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm) so some languages are more problematic than others. I can't read Chinese so well but so far those edits have been kosher too. Hopefully Arabic is not a problem either, but idk. --Haplology (talk) 01:37, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

@Tom Morris: You are not the only person paying attention to Special:RecentChanges. Have a look at this statistis. I'm also currently working on an oauth-application which should make patrolling easier. --Pasleim (talk) 20:49, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

It seems like we just had this conversation last week... and yet it doesn't seem like things have changed. Perhaps we need a new approach. --Rschen7754 05:32, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

I remember having a tool that lets you mark as patrolled without actually having to visit the diff (in the Norwegian Wikipedia). I'm trying User:Petr Matas/Mark as patrolled.js (since I saw User:Haplology use it), but it's not working for me. Any ideas? Jon Harald Søby (talk) 14:57, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that tool is very helpful. Many thanks to User:Petr Matas. To anyone who is interested in watching recent changes, I recommend using it in combination with the filter gadget (look for "Logs Filter" in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets). Search for helpful unpatrolled users-->copy their username/IP into the filter box-->mark all as patrolled. @Jon, I assume you have it on your custom JS page like mine? Are you using it on Special:RecentChanges? It only works on that page as far as I know. Also, you have to follow the link on that page (you can't open the link in another tab or window.) Other than that, check you browser's Javascript settings or purge your browser's cache I guess, or maybe try it on another browser. --Haplology (talk) 15:26, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
@Haplololgy: Yeah, it's in my Common.js (with a lot of other tools that do work), but there is no "Mark as patrolled" link in Recent changes. I figured it out now though – it doesn't work with the setting "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist", which is a shame since I'm so accustomed to it. But I'll try to do without it for now. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 15:40, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
I'll try to fix that, maybe on Sunday. Petr Matas 16:16, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
@Jon Harald Søby:   Fixed. Petr Matas 13:29, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Awesome, thanks a lot! :-) Jon Harald Søby (talk) 13:31, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
I do a bit of Special:NewPages patrol, but I likewise feel that not many other people do it. If fancy tools were built (I see something about an oauth app above) that might help get people involved. Ajraddatz (talk) 19:43, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Problems with IE

Hello! Just want to double check... I have issues editing wikidata from IE9. Edit links to In other languages and Statement sections don't show up at all... Was the system not opimized for all browsers? Thank you, --Teemeah (talk) 16:01, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Have you tried to purge the page (?action=purge)? And are you using a work pc or something? Using a old browser is not the best thing in the world. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 18:14, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

@Sjoerddebruin: I am using a work PC, and I have no other options but IE9. I know it sucks, but usually that's what browser compatibility options are for. Not everybody edits from Chrome and Firefox... Teemeah (talk) 13:24, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikispecies

Hi. I'm working creating and linking articles about species. However, I've notice that there is no way to link here to wikispecies. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks. --Ganímedes (talk) 00:11, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

As far as I know Wikispecies is not yet integrated into Wikidata. You may want to check this page.--Quico (talk) 08:11, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
Also you should know about hard prescribed structure of species items, don't you? Please consult at Wikidata:WikiProject Taxonomy. --Infovarius (talk) 13:08, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

single entity of population (Q18640785) or locality (Q3257686) ?

Where I live (and I guess in many other places) most people live in cities or villages but a small number of them, mainly in rural areas, live in small inhabited settlements that don't have their own administrative entity and belong to a municipality (Q15284). I am working on these but can't decide whether to use instance of (P31) single entity of population (Q18640785) or instance of (P31) locality (Q3257686). What do you think? Thanks in advance for your comments.--Quico (talk) 12:39, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

I am using village (Q532) or hamlet (Q5084) (depending on its size). --Jklamo (talk) 12:49, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
looks like there are some items that should be merged. Size is not the only thing that matters, its also about the administrative level. Zavelstein, now Bad Teinach-Zavelstein (Q503266) is hamlet (Q5084) depending on its size, but was a city with all privileges of a city based on administrative level til 1975.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 13:23, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
I'm from the northeastern US. Around here, "hamlet" (or for small areas in a developed area "neighborhood") are safe words to indicate a small inhabited settlement that does not have its own local government. Many states in the Northeast have villages which do have their own local government, so the Wikidata village (Q532) would not be the correct item to apply to an area with its own government, since Wikidata's version has no indication of being an instance of a municipality. But to add to the confusion, outside of government publications, "village" is often used to describe a hamlet. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:28, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
In Sweden in older days "village" was an "administrative entity" of a kind. It had no local government, but it was a well-defined division of parishes with clear borders. Today, that word has changed it's meaning, and can mean almost everything from a place with a few unpopulated houses to larger town. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 14:59, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps we need some other concept to classify. One concept based on administrative level and another based on population, like some maps do by choosing different sizes and colours for the dots. The trouble is, when administrative level and size of municipiality do not fit together as we use to see it.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 20:17, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Are single entity of population (Q18640785) and census-designated place in the United States (Q498162) comparable? --- Jura 20:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Well, they look comparable, when I look at the fr-article about single entity of population (Q18640785), but there is one main difference: The CDP is managed by United States Census Bureau, while the Spanish is managed by Instituto Nacional de Estadística de España. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 15:06, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

cannot link to english wikibooks

Hi everyone, I want to add a interwikilink for Q746106 to wikibooks:en:Speed Reading. Is this possible? How can I go it? All the best, --T.seppelt (talk) 08:59, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

It's possible from 25 February. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 09:13, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Thank you -- T.seppelt (talk) 10:01, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Huggle

Just for everyone's information, you should now be able to use Huggle on Wikidata. I'm not sure how useful it will be but suggestions for improvements for huggle regarding wikidata are welcome as of course wikidata is no ordinary wiki! ·addshore· talk to me! 13:46, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

@Liangent: Instead of Huggle, I'd love to try how to use Twinkle here. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 14:40, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
What is the point of either ? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 15:32, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
To make our vandalism patrolling better and more efficient? Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 15:35, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
The issue I can see with huggle is that vandalism is often not reverted in the sense of a rollback but instead undone as multiple edits will normally have been made after. ·addshore· talk to me! 15:40, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Property constraints as statements?

Hi there! I have been offline for some months.. Today I was checking what has been going on around here, and it seems that quite a lot :) Btw, what happened to the idea of moving the constraint templates into statements? Is there any ongoing discussion or is there something missing?--Micru (talk) 10:27, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

There is a group of students working on it, I thought. Probably somewhere in the next few months. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 10:37, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Right :) They should be publishing something over the next days. For now the constraint process still relies on templates until they provide their tools. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:40, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
See also Wikidata:Property proposal/Property metadata#Properties for other property constraints. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 21:22, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

A style guide.

Is there a style guide for the description line? I figure that the description should not be a complete sentence, but I was wondering if I should be capitalizing the first letter of the phrase and adding punctuation to the end of the line. Technochocolate (talk) 19:43, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

We have Help:Description. --Stryn (talk) 19:52, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

In other languages

I'm somehow restricted to certain languages in the "In other languages" part of each item. How do I edit labels in different languages? --Jobu0101 (talk) 23:01, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jobu0101: The languages shown are the ones you have set on your user page using {{#babel:}} (see my user page for an example). If you wish to occasionally edit other languages, you can use the uselang method (add ?uselang=sw to the URL to edit the Swahili label/description for that item), or you can use the gadget "labelLister", which will give you a tab at the top of the page where you can enter labels and descriptions in all various languages. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 23:28, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Why is labellister not activated by default? I´ve heard similar complaints. New users don´t know about babel and if you don´t know labellister, it´s allmost impossible to find or edit labels in other than a few languages. The language settings could also be treated better, because we have three different ways to handle languages. #1 is the language selector #2 is preferences, assistant languages #3 is babel on user page. I´d like to have only one page where you do set your language for gui, the fallback languages, the languages to show in section "in other languages" and babels automatically generated.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 14:15, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Template:Speedy delete (Q4847311) wiktionary

Hi. I'm sorry if this has been discussed before of if I'm asking in the wrong place altogether, but is there any particular reason wiktionary is not on Template:Speedy delete (Q4847311)? Nirmos (talk) 06:49, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

@Nirmos: That's because Wiktionary hasn't been migrated to Wikidata yet at all. Since they do interwiki links entirely differently than the rest of the projects (based solely on spelling, not on the actual meaning of words), it's a challenge to figure out how to make that work with Wikidata, so until further notice there is no way to add links to Wiktionary in Wikidata. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 07:46, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
@Jon Harald Søby, Nirmos: Men det låter som att den del av Wiktionary som inte ligger I ns-0, skulle kunna integreras med Wikidata? Men det är kanske ett halvgjort arbete att bara ta med delar av ett projekt. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 15:09, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Lydia Pintscher (WMDE), can we allow Wiktionary pages that are not in the main namespace to be integrated with Wikidata? Nirmos (talk) 12:02, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
I am not sure if it is technically feasible but I'd like to not do this as it would cause too much confusion (why are some pages linked this way and others not) especially given that Wiktionary support is still quite a while away. I wish I could support Wiktionary better already :( --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:23, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

A property for areas

Hi all, I've been looking for it but I haven't been able to find it. Isn't there a property for stating the area of a given geographical entity? I mean, United States' total area is 9,857,306 km2 but it's not possible to associate the figure to Q30. Is it intentional? Why? Many thanks --Discasto (talk) 09:42, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

We're waiting for the units datatype, then such information can be added. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 09:45, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks Sjoerd. To understand it better... when you say "waiting" what are you actually meaning? I mean, is it an ongoing discussion, waiting for a settlement, or a technical impossibility waiting to be fixed? I'm currently working in the organization of WLE in Spain and deciding how to create (or update) items for every natural space. We have a very comprehensive database with information about the natural spaces (Sites of Community Importance, in the EU jargon), and detected the following properties:
But we have also information about the area, maximum, minimum and average height, code (we'll ask for the creation of a new property). Just to give some context :-) Best regards --Discasto (talk) 10:03, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
It is held up on the technical side. Progress has been made over the past weeks but we're not quite there yet. We'll put more work into it over the next week to get it finished. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:32, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. When available, how will it be communicated? Will there be an announcement here? --Discasto (talk) 10:54, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes it will be here, in the weekly summary and on Wikidata's social media accounts. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:56, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Merge problems

I can't merge item Q399288 with Q1166844. Marias Who can help ? 92.74.61.88 10:45, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

  Done Jon Harald Søby (talk) 14:37, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata Items for German Wikisource Texts

Hello, I noticed today that User:GZWDer created empty items for thousands of individual texts from German Wikisource. For one of those I requested deletion, but now I want to ask you: Is there a consensus for this? As far as I know, main namespace pages from Wikimedia projects are eligible for Wikidata items in principle. But as for these texts from German Wikisource, we just don't have any use for Wikidata items in my opinion.

Shouldn't we just delete them all?

Curious for your opinion, Jonathan Groß (talk ) 20:14, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

The only thing in my mind right now is "What?". Why would someone want to Delete a Object with project link? --FischX (talk) 04:00, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
I think they should stay, as they certainly do fufill the notability criteria. George Edward C – Talk – Contributions 20:21, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
@Jonathan Groß: "don't have any use for Wikidata"? How do you mean? -- Innocent bystander (talk) 20:24, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

These items created by GZWDer serve no purpose other than stating that there is dewikisource page with that label. It doesn't give any further information. That's useless in my opinion. The only way to make these items useful would be adding some information to them, all of which can be drawn from dewikisource. They have categories and infoboxes there. Would someone here be willing to write a script for that? Jonathan Groß (talk) 20:41, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

There are many items like this, but none of them get deleted. I was working on a script to draw parameters from templates and set properties accordingly, but I ultimately lost interest. George Edward C – Talk – Contributions 20:52, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
author (P50) is somewhat easy to add but there're too many authors. Whereas if they have no items autolist will not work. I have already skipped all dewiki pages with interwiki links, or with "/" or ":" in titles.--GZWDer (talk) 03:06, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
@Jonathan Groß: What do you require for an item, to be of "any use for Wikidata"? I'm curious to know! -- Innocent bystander (talk) 11:12, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
I require more information than just a statement that there is a main namespace page on the wiki. For example, Q19238763 gives some useful information now, but when I first saw it, it was just a reference to a dewikisource page. Jonathan Groß (talk) 19:38, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, but that is how all pages start! Roma wasn't build in one day, and Wikidata will take even longer (I guess). -- Innocent bystander (talk) 19:49, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
there are also a lot of items with link to a fr wikisource text, without properties, for now, because it is a very long process to document those items, and wikisource contributors are not as numerous as wikipedia contributors here… I am now trying to complete those, and one sysop is also working on a tool to automatically retrieve info from the "header" of the text pages… please, just let time to wikisource contributors, to document those items :) --Hsarrazin (talk) 20:15, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
I will do that :) Thanks to you all, I've learned something. Jonathan Groß (talk) 09:07, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

What's happened with links to the Russian Wikipedia?

Hello. Nobody of Russian-speaking users are able to add or change a link to ruwp. For example, I can't move here the name of entry from 'Galathea' to 'Galathea (группа)', and I can't add 'Galathea (род)' to this item. Please, fix it. Greetings, --Adriano Morelli (talk) 09:11, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Needed to manually update the sites table entry for ruwiki... long story short: Should be fine again. Sorry for the disruption. - Hoo man (talk) 10:35, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Great, it works now. Thank you. :) --Adriano Morelli (talk) 10:58, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
I'll let Hoo know to also fix this one. Sorry. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:52, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
Also Russian Wikivoyage, the same problem--Ymblanter (talk) 13:57, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
voy:ru:Рука (same as voy:en:Ruka).--Ymblanter (talk) 13:58, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
Ok. Marius is looking into it after fixing another nasty bug right now. We were not told about the switch to https for those sites and couldn't adapt them in advance. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:59, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

  Fixed, should be all good again. - Hoo man (talk) 17:11, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Certainly works with voy:ru, thank you very much.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:23, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

interface layout - reduce height of "other languages"

Hello,

Do you think it would be possible to reduce the size (height) of each language block (for label and def.) ? each one takes is bigger than the main language layout :/ - which makes it very annoying to scroll over, even when using Babel for reduction of languages displayed. --Hsarrazin (talk) 10:12, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes. The new layout will let you collapse it completely for example. I hope we have a version for you to text in the next days. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:22, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
yipee !! --Hsarrazin (talk) 10:24, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Auto-signing talk page posts

Could we run en:User:SineBot (or equivalent) on this wiki, to automatically sign unsigned talk page posts? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:21, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

+1 to getting this done. ·addshore· talk to me! 15:39, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
I have posted on the enwiki ops talk page here ·addshore· talk to me! 17:47, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
+1 Pichpich (talk) 16:58, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Strong support - Let's hope we can get this set up soon. :) --George (Talk · Contribs · CentralAuth · Log) 09:55, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
  Yup  Hazard SJ  23:26, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

diplomatic mission (Q213283) and embassy (Q3917681)

I just moved a bunch of sitelinks from the first to the second based on their names; these two things are related, but not interchangeable. However, I don't understand all languages, so it would be nice if people could take a look and see whether their language's sitelink belongs in one or the other. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 02:12, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

There is also consulate (Q7843791), I guess. I do not think I expect these as comparable in all languages, or even within one language sometimes. If I remembered correctly, the Swedish embassy in South African Republic was named "legation", not "ambassad", since the Swedish government didn't fully recognized the apartheid regime in that time. There is also the difference between the building and the organization. Swedish "representation" is normally never a building for example, but "konsulat", and "ambassad" can all be applied to a building. I do not know if "beskickning" can be applied to a building. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 11:44, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikibooks mapping to Wikidata items - DEPLOYMENT IS TUESDAY

Please take a look at Wikidata:Wikibooks/Development, and give your feedback on how we should handle Wikibooks interwiki links. The deployment is this Tuesday, so we really need to get this in order very quickly! Rschen7754, sent by --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:18, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Merging Q10115695 into Q4989245 has failed

i.e. mk:Категорија:Страници што користат дуплирани аргументи во повикувања на шаблони, the Macedonian version of Category:Noindexed pages.

Error while "Merge with: Q4989245": internal_api_error_DBQueryError

--Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 00:20, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I just tried this and it went through fine! This was probably a one off issue! ·addshore· talk to me! 13:22, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Adding snacktype "unknown value" with AutoList2

After a query I tried to process the result of AutoList2 this way:

-P170:Q4233718 P170:Q4294967294

but Q4294967294 instead of "unknown value" is not accepted. Is there any way to add properties with "no value" or "unknown value"?--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 10:01, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

@Giftzwerg 88: Can you try with "somevalue"? E.g. P170:somevalue. It works in constraints, so it just miiight work in Autolist as well. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 16:43, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
I tried that one also, but didn´t work. The tools author Magnus didn´t answer to my request either for whatever reason.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 17:40, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Is it now safe to remove templates for badges from articles?

Per Wikidata:Status updates/2015 02 14 they are indeed being removed from large wikis. The question is if some additional imports have to be done. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:59, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

I wouldn't think waiting is necessary – after all, the imports should be done based on the badged articles home wikis, not their status on some external wiki. It wouldn't make sense to mark featured articles from the Vietnamese Wikipedia based on Link FA templates in the Norwegian Wikipedia, since the templates can often be out of date. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 16:36, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
I think it could be better that only admin can change them. I see is very simple make mistakes adding or removing badges when edit wikilink --Rippitippi (talk) 17:42, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Joseph Dana Webster/ civil war general/ chief of staff U.S.Grant and Sherman

His family history can be found at http://memory.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/2007/20070619056ge/20070619056ge.pdf this information is in library of congress under John Webster 1634

adding comment to get this archived at some point... --LydiaPintscher (talk) 09:56, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

A powerful new web directory. New page?

Hello Can you review this directory and tell me can it be added in web directories list on wikipedia and does it compile with terms of use? http://www.eurohttp.com

Website is coded in Perl and it is build from ground. It is a powerful utility for websmasters and allows you to search and get links from various ways and shows detailed description of each link. Really many possibilities.

This directory has feature ahead. It would be nice to add it to Wikipedia page. Editors, your words?

adding comment to get this archived at some point... --LydiaPintscher (talk) 09:56, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Introducing Wikidata Quality

Hey :)

​We are a team of students from Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam, Germany. For our bachelor project we're working together with the team of Wikidata to ensure their data quality. On this wiki page we introduce our projects in more detail. One of them deals with constraints, for which we need your input since we want to work on constraints as statements on properties and the final form of those still needs to be specified. So far, we hope you like our projects and we appreciate your input!

Cheers, the Wikidata Quality Team

Hi, could you please log in when you post something here? Why is this project hosted on MediaWiki.org if this is completely focused on Wikidata? That sure makes it easier for people here to keep an eye on it. I'd suggest Wikidata:WikiProject WikidataQuality. I'm happy to see you're working on improving quality. Multichill (talk) 18:52, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
Also for me is better if you host the project on WIkidata --ValterVB (talk) 19:01, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
My guess is that it is hosted on MediaWiki.org because it seems quite technically focused, e.g. they might create extensions and/or additions to Wikibase, which is best documented on MediaWiki.org. However, I agree that it would make more sense to host the project here, and then document whatever technical additions might come on MediaWiki.org.
Also: It looks like a very promising and exciting project, so I look forward to seeing what happens. :-) Jon Harald Søby (talk) 19:17, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
We'll make sure everything that is relevant for editors here will be posted here, on the mailinglist and in the weekly summary. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:05, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
I don´t understand Metadata properties and how they could be used for improving the Constraint Reports. I even don´t know which properies should be created. Maybe the properties on the discussion page for property proposal called: constraint, constraint status, known exception, etc? ). I hope those who understand this proposal will vote for the creation of the properties, because I would like to see an improvement to the current system. --Molarus 06:21, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes those are the properties :) --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:05, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Different interwikis for desktop and mobile view

A strange effect:

For disambig page w:ru:Воейково a wrong interwiki to the Chechen wiki removed. It is not in the record Q4114331, it is not at the page, but it is at the page in mobile view. ? --NeoLexx (talk) 16:59, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

There is a record of it at Q4114331, and the link was removed with this edit. Maybe a caching issue? Jared Preston (talk) 18:39, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
May be. And yes, I wanted to say "there is no (removed) Chechen interwiki link in Q4114331". --NeoLexx (talk) 19:06, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
@Hoo man: Can you have a look please? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:06, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Purging via the api with forcelinkupdate=1 fixed it. The root cause for this problem has been fixed on Thursday. - Hoo man (talk) 13:08, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #146

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Anonymous wrong edits

An anonymous user has multiplied by 10 Barcelona's population for 13 years , I guess it's a massive change which just didn't work fine. Is there any way to revert all changes at once, or should them be reverted one at a time? Thanks in advance.--Quico (talk) 09:46, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

  Done. For the future, you can either apply for a rollback flag, or select all the edits of this user and undo them in one edit.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:41, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

fort (Q1785071) and fortress (Q57831)

I think is the same argument or not? --Rippitippi (talk) 03:37, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Well, the articles I read tells me that for example Boden Fortress (Q1408858) is an instance of fortress (Q57831) made up by a group of fort (Q1785071). So, it does not look the same to me, but I refused my military service, so I'm not an expert. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 11:49, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
basically both are the same. However to make things complicated dewiki has both, Festung and Fort. The old term was Festung that was eventually replaced by Fort (the French equivalent) just to use the term Festung later again.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 17:53, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
When I read more of the related Swedish articles, it does not look like they are easy to compare between different languages. A modern Swedish fästning is a large structure, made up by several forts. The cold war Bodens fästning had 8 forts together with artillery and mobile units in the mountains in northern Sweden. In older time it's more comparable with a fort and can also mean a prison. But a Fort is not a prison, it's always a defense-structure. There is also the word Befästning, which more is related to the walls around a fort or a piece of artillery. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 18:54, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

suitable way to import encyclopedic content data2pedia

Sometimes there is suitable content (Talk:Q12608129) on talk pages. Is there a way to to import these content license compliant to Wikipedia? Thank you, Conny (talk) 07:12, 23 February 2015 (UTC).

All content on talk pages is licensed under CC-BY-SA - the same license as Wikipedia. So it should be the same as with moving content from most other Wikimedia-Projects. --Denny (talk) 17:59, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
The license applys to the wording of written texts and pictures, not to the content. Example:
  1. René Jacobs (born 30 October 1946) is a Belgian (Flemish) musician. He came to fame as a countertenor but in recent years has become renowned as a conductor of Baroque and early Classical opera. This text in its wording is from the English Wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license
  2. Name: René Jacobs; birthdate: 1946; nationality: Belgian; occupation: singer, conductor; voice type: countertenor; genre: baroque music, opera This is free content based on a Wikipedia article. You can reuse this information in any way you like. This information can not be protected by copyright laws and has CC0 1.0 Universell (CC0 1.0) license. By law there is no obligation to source your information, however you help other users to improve the item and to maintain quality of the data e. g. in case of disputes or in fighting vandalism if you provide sources.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 13:22, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Platypus, a speaking interface for Wikidata

I and some other students from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (Q10159) have created a query answering tool based on Wikidata. Its goal is to provide an improved version of Wiri with advanced natural language processing techniques. Thanks to Lydia there is a now a blog post on wikimedia.de blog to introduce it (a translation in German is also provided).

A side feature that may especially interest the Wikidata community is the power user's query syntax that allows to do easily queries on Wikidata content. It is currently powered by WikidataQuery but we should switch to our own query engine in a few days. Tpt (talk) 19:36, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Your Tool even works with OpenStreetmap! "Where is Hamburg?" Cool!! --Molarus 03:15, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Yes, we use OpenStreetMap to display geocoordinates that are in Wikidata. But we are also planning to use OpenStreeMap in order to display geo shapes instead of coordinates for big objects like countries. And even maybe to do nice things like opening hours of your closest supermarket. Tpt (talk) 08:12, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Interesting project. Any chance of making some of the language bits editable on-wiki? --Yair rand (talk) 10:30, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Interesting tool and project. Awesome work! --George (Talk · Contribs · CentralAuth · Log) 18:36, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Australian sportspeople

Something to do foar people who've got (more) time on their hands (than I have): Category:Australian sports participants (Q7039224) and Category:Australian sportspeople (Q17301360). Seems like the same category to me, but you can't simply merge them because there's an Italian item linked to each one. Ieneach fan 'e Esk (talk) 17:26, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

"sports participants" are people actually doing the sports, "sportspeople" are also managers, trainers, etc. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 17:30, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
Hmm. I don't think that's correct. A "sportsperson" (pl. "sportspeople") is someone actively playing a sport, not a sports official. Anyway, for sports officials there are separate categories. And "sports participants" is what I labeled the nameless category -- couldn't call it "sportspeople" (I tried) because that category already existed. So however you want to interpret the names, the difference is artificial. Ieneach fan 'e Esk (talk) 13:57, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Super Bowl humans

A bot added award received (P166)Super Bowl (Q32096) to a bunch of humans. This seems weird in my opinion, it's the team that wins it and not the individual humans. What to do? Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 08:35, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

(A "bunch" in this case appears to mean several thousand.) These statements are problematic for multiple reasons:
  1. Unless I'm mistaken, the Super Bowl isn't an award in the first place. It's a competition, and the relevant "prize" here would be Vince Lombardi Trophy (Q2526532), if I'm reading the articles correctly.
  2. If the game were to be used, there are more specific items that would fit better than the generic Super Bowl (Q32096), such as Super Bowl XLIX (Q1710023).
  3. As you mentioned, the prize is not awarded to each individual player, but the team as a whole.
I recommend mass-removing these statements by bot, preferably the bot that originally added them. Pinging @T.seppelt:, owner of User:KasparBot: Is your bot capable of this? --Yair rand (talk) 10:28, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Hello everyone, my bot is not able to remove these particular claims. I would recommend to use WiDar to remove all award received (P166)Super Bowl (Q32096)-claims. Anyway Super Bowl (Q32096) is a subclass of award (Q618779). Shall someone remove this claim? --T.seppelt (talk) 14:55, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
removed. Filceolaire (talk) 18:05, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Note: Filceolaire only deleted a statement on Super Bowl (Q32096), the claims are still there. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 18:30, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Started deletions. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 11:06, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

creation time

There is a long discussion in plwiki about switching Template:Infobox language (Q7217946) to use Wikidata. The last topic concerns support for constructed language (Q33215) (i.e. Esperanto (Q143)), and as far as creation time of the language is concerned there are proposed the following properties: creator (P170), point in time (P585), start time (P580), and end time (P582). However the point in time (P585) describes some point in time so it can be used when it was created/published, but creating any work needs a period of time, so I want to ask if using start time (P580) and end time (P582) as qualifiers inside creator (P170) is good (or the best) solution for the problem. Paweł Ziemian (talk) 22:28, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Is MusicBrainz a “serious and publicly available reference”?

The deletion of Q18901027 claims that MusicBrainz isn't enough to establish notability. Pretty much all things on MusicBrainz are "clearly identifiable conceptual or material entities", and I have previously been told that MusicBrainz is considered a "serious and publicly available reference" (it is used for authority control for music related matters in the Wikipedias too). These two things make it sound like entities on MusicBrainz fulfil notability criteria #2, but perhaps some "serious and publicly available references" are more "serious and publically available" than others? Or was the deletion a mistake and should be rolled back? (FWIW, Freebase was ingesting all of MusicBrainz, without discrimination, and the Wikidata project seem to find MusicBrainz serious enough to use for the WikidataQuality external validation prototype.) —Freso (talk) 11:11, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

  • I don't mind referencing to MusicBrainz being sufficient for notability. I always have thought that we should be more inclusive here since we are dealing with data, in case any of the projects here (or off of Wikimedia) want to use it. Ajraddatz (talk) 11:33, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
  • +1 for being inclusive! ·addshore· talk to me! 12:17, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
  • +1 from me too. --CatQuest, The Endavouring Cat (talk) 20:46, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
  • That item had enough data to be useful, also +1 for being inclusive. - Hoo man (talk) 12:28, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
  • Obvious +1 for being inclusive! Tpt (talk) 13:33, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
  • Please note that the MusicBrainz-entry of Q18901027 was created by himself. As you can see in the deletion request, I also wasn't sure if a entry on MusicBrainz is enough. But after I found out that it has been created by the described object himself, I don't think it's enough for this specific entry. Please note that MusicBrainz is also some kind of wiki, editable by everyone. Same for IMDb btw. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 14:00, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
    • Two questions:
      1. Does it matter who created an entry as long as it is correct and factual?
        • The MusicBrainz community (unlike the Wikipedias, I know) love when record labels and even artists themselves spend time and resources to get data into the MusicBrainz database: it just makes the data better for everyone and allows more "generic" editors access to the foremost experts on what is being entered. Keep in mind that one of the ways MusicBrainz differ from the Wikipedias is that it only stores facts. And these facts don't change regardless of whether the involved artist is the one entering them or it being someone who has never heard of them before - the involved artist will likely have access to more detailed facts though, and thus be able to enter those, adding to the overall depth (both quality and quantity wise) of the database. —Freso (talk) 14:20, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
      2. Does MusicBrainz being wiki like make it non-"serious and publically available"?
    • Additionally, I have been in close supervision of that artist as he has gradually entered more information about himself (which is also how I discovered that the WD datapoint had been deleted) and can verify that he belongs in the MB database (or I would have blocked his edits a while ago), and I am grateful that he is adding himself, so that I (or another editor) don't have to spend the time to do so (which would likely have been less thorough as well). —Freso (talk) 14:20, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
  • Even as a fan of inclusiveness on Wikidata, I am hesitant to agree that an artist's mere presence on MusicBrainz equals notability. Anyone can add their musical works to MusicBrainz, and for that site, that's GREAT!! But unless Wikidata really wants to duplicate every single fact on MusicBrainz (which to me is not a goal to worked toward) I do think other sources of notability would be necessary. I do not think MusicBrainz meets the requirements of number two on its own. The guideline says, "It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity. The entity must be notable, in the sense that it can be described using serious and publicly available references. If there is no item about you yet, you are probably not notable." Perhaps the guideline itself is unclear then. To me, MusicBrainz is a good reference, yes, but a local newspaper obituary is also a good reference. For a notable person, that obituary is usable — that does not mean that every person who has a local newspaper obituary is notable. Or even a census document — it might establish an important fact for a notable person, but surely Wikidata is not the place for every human who has ever been listed in a census. Sweet kate (talk) 20:25, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
(This is not to say a particular subject themselves isn't notable. This is just a call to go find other references too. Probably many of the persons referenced in MusicBrainz also have a presence in other serious and publicly available references. For instance, here is a story about this person in a newspaper. Or they meet the Wikidata guidelines via number 3: "It fulfills some structural need, for example: it is needed to make statements made in other items more useful." If they are in a notable band, they would be in statements for that item. Etc.) Sweet kate (talk) 20:33, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Merge problems

en:Category:Watches and de:Kategorie:Uhr (Gerät) 178.11.191.104 18:25, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

en:Category:Watch models and de:Kategorie:Uhrenmodell 178.11.191.104 18:30, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

en:Category:Individual clocks and de:Kategorie:Einzeluhr 178.11.191.104 18:36, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

  Done--Ymblanter (talk) 20:07, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Italian

Sorry, but it's not in the FAQ and I'm struggling to understand Wikidata. Why are these three languages in particular (and no others) at the top of every Q-page? Pengo (talk) 23:20, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

These are based on your current location. You can customize them by adding babel templates to your user page. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 23:23, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
This is the most ridiculous thing I've seen on a Wiki site for ages. Pengo (talk) 23:27, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Are there plans to add a way to edit other languages without having to first do some undocumented template nonsense on your user page? Or to allow the user to change their preferences without relying on this kludge? Pengo (talk) 23:35, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
This is phab:T62369.--GZWDer (talk) 05:43, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. That is good to see. For several years, the weird staticness of the box has made me assume they were arbitrarily chosen test fields to be shown while the user interface was developed beyond an alpha stage, but they've been like that so long that I had to wonder what was going on. Pengo (talk) 08:04, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
It's not undocumented by the way, it's the second question on the FAQ you've mentioned. Maybe the question can be adjusted (eg. How can I change the languages in the In a other language section?) Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 10:50, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. My FAQ question would be phrased "Where are the other languages in the In a other language section?" Pengo (talk) 22:01, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
When I removed my babel-template now (to see what it looked like) I notice that the set of languages has changed. I do not see Sapmi any longer, but I see Meänkieli (Q13357) together with Finnish and English. I do not really see the logic in that. How many around here speak Meänkieli? I would guess less than speak Kurmanji or Arabic. We do not have many speakers of Sapmi around here, it's extinct. But we have many locations with Sapmi names. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 07:46, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Notice: request for 'property creator' permission

I have made a request for 'property creator' permission for my account. Please comment at that location. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:35, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

What is the status on Freebase data migration to wikidata

I would like to know the status of the freebase data migration to wiki data, and the wiki data gonna have freebase MID reference??  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by 173.196.7.138 (talk • contribs).

Hi, the migration has it's own Wikiproject here. --Denny (talk) 16:04, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata submissions for Wikimania

Hey :)

Here are all the Wikidata related submissions for Wikimania: https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikidata It'd be awesome if you could go and vote for your favorite ones.

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:39, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

What is this item?

Category:Wikipedia categories (Q2945159) makes no sense to me. What is it meant to be? --Pi zero (talk) 02:34, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

English description: top category for project maintenance and management. There may be propably a conflict with Category:Contents (Q1281). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 11:45, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
@Matěj Suchánek: Indeed. I found a whole bunch of Category:Wikinews links there, which was certainly wrong in the case of English Wikinews and was probably wrong for all the others — Category:Wikinews is a topic category for news about Wikinews, and therefore is properly linked to Wikinews (Q964). Since I've moved those links, there is now room at Category:Wikipedia categories (Q2945159) if one wants to move Wikinews links to there from Category:Contents (Q1281).
Those two items do seem suggestive of a fundamental structural problem with using Wikidata to drive interwikis: The purupose of an interwiki is to provide a useful navigational link, not to make a philosophical statement about ontology, and consequently whenever a page on a sister project serves more than one purpose — which happens often — the simplistic use of Wikidata's links to generate interwikis does damage to the sister project by depriving readers of useful nagivational links. The latest example of this I'd encountered (prior to the above) was that of Wikinews Category:Siberia, which has to choose between two difference senses of "Siberia" and cannot have Wikidata-generated links to a mixture of the two even though it's likely that many Wikinews projects have a category for one or the other but not both. (I wouldn't be surprised if Russian Wikinews were the only one that has separate categories for both.) --Pi zero (talk) 12:45, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
This is what I call the "Bonnie and Clyde problem". Some WPs have separate articles on 'Bonnie Parker' and 'Clyde Barrow'. Other WPs have one article on 'Bonnie and Clyde'. There have been various proposals for fixing this mismatch between the requirements of Wikidata and the requirements for interwikilinks but nothing has happened yet. Filceolaire (talk) 10:04, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

branch office

How might one add branch offices under a corporation?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by 178.11.191.104 (talk • contribs).

Mostly one wouldn't. To get the details of a branch office one would have to follow the link to the corporation website and look for branch office details there. Filceolaire (talk) 10:51, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

All texts in italics in Swedish

I wonder why all the links in the left panel and the top panel are in italics, if I use Wikidata in Swedish language and go to some translation page in edit mode. For example Swedish here (the same page in English). Seems occurring only if you use Swedish language. --Stryn (talk) 14:45, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Does it look different on meta? -- Innocent bystander (talk) 16:59, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
You find italics also in "Summary", "Watch this page" etc, under the editbox. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 17:03, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
I think it looks the same in the html of the page. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 17:11, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
(I fixed the title.) Seems they are in italics also on Meta. I tried to look at the source code, and I found that on the line 64 </div></fieldset> this closing div is in red color (not sure what it means though) in FF. I looked the source code in Finnish, and there the closing div was not red. --Stryn (talk) 19:59, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
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